Another Form of Relief

Betty By Alone are from Brazil. Their influences include REM, Teenage Fanclub and Guided By Voices. Beyond that though, I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them. Although they sing all of their songs in English, their website is entirely in Portugese, meaning it’s all gibberish to me. From what I can see though, they appear to have a blog, a detailed history of the band and details about their albums, so if you can read Portugese (less than 1% of you based on my stats), you can find out a ton more about them. Oh, and if I babelfished one part of the site correctly, they also seem to like file sharing and refer to the RIAA as the devil, which makes them ok by me.

MP3 Betty By Alone - Candle Lights
MP3 Betty By Alone - Jumpin’ Fish

I can certainly hear their influences in these songs. Not so much REM, but there is a clear Teenage Fanclub and Guided By Voices thing going on, particularly on Candle Lights. The lyrics have a certain charm to them, mostly because their command of English isn’t entirely perfect. It’s almost as if they wrote the songs in Portugese, put them through babelfish and then sang whatever it gave them. Which may not be the best way to go, but it gives the songs a certain quirk anyway. I don’t think they have released anything outside of Brazil, but given that Woxy gave them some love last year, hopefully some exposure will be coming their way.

Good News Everybody!

Following in the footsteps of the Family Guy resurrection, Billy West has confirmed on his forum that Futurama will be returning for at least 26 new episodes. There’s been talk of this for a while, although it initially seemed that DVD movies were the way they were going. Now though it seems that Fox have finally seen the light and will be producing entirely new episodes after all. Let’s just hope they don’t turn out anywhere near as shit as the new Family Guy run, which isn’t even a fraction as funny as it was during it’s original run. Still, if they just pick up pretty much exactly how they left off, it should be entirely awesome. Not that I’m getting too excited about it or anything.