New Music

• Among the Living - Anthrax


• The Thrill Is Gone - B.B. King


• Girls on Film - Duran Duran


• The Harry Lime Theme - Gertrud Huber


• Blue Moon - The Marcels

The Anthrax tune is due to director Kevin Smith's iTunes Celebrity Playlist, which was too long for their format and regretfully rejected. So Kevin Smith published it on his own weblog. I'm not a big heavy metal fan, limiting myself mostly to bands which were popular when I was in high school (Black Sabbath, anyone?) but this is not too shabby.

B.B. King is just a favorite of mine, and this is a quintessential selection that I've always wanted to own.

'Girls on Film' was the opening credit music for Speed Grapher, a show Adam turned me onto, and one of the top ten anime of all time, as far as my own viewing goes. When they brought the series over to the US, they were unable to get the rights to the Duran Duran song, so I bought it instead.

'The Harrry Lime Theme' is from The Third Man, a post WWII film set in Allied-occupied Austria. I remember being struck both by the story and the music. This is the central theme, and it's quirky zither music made the surreal postwar Austria limbo that much more alive.

Another movie reference. The Marcels' version of 'Blue Moon' first made my aquaintance in An American Werewolf in London, one of John Landis' better films. Two friends are attacked on the Yorkshire moors by a beast that kills one and injures the other, David Kessler (played by David Naughton). After recovering, he moves in with his nurse, and one moonlit night, experiences the painful transformation to werewolf, all the while 'Blue Moon' plays.

So, pop culture aplenty in this batch of tunes.