And this one’s a bit different…


And an acoustic version of a tune from the 1st album:

• Get Ready to ROCK: an introspective space cowboy version of Nick Drake perhaps, who probably took a puff and then started recording his jumbled thoughts…. And jumbled and eclectic as they may be, there is undoubtedly an inner strand to the ccalam’s narrative…. one part the work of a meandering colourful wordsmith and another part a synth driven musical melange.
• Dukester (you might need to scroll down a bit as they put the newest reviews at the top): like an lone troubadour whose then been remixed by NIN or Depeche Mode, except its him doing it all with his own vision. Sometimes he’s on acoustic, sometimes its goddamn electric. Singing whats on his mind. The tunes and the sound are there. Truly. On radio he’d be a star.

the song opens with a very simple sounding guitar before a second one follows and the vocals again take a Buckley-esque feel …. The lyrics are again wonderfully crafted together to create a song with a real head nodding feel to it, and this is possibly the AAA song from the album. The song just again has some sort of wonderful charm which keeps hooked from start to end, and makes you want to stick the track on repeat.

The second is in August’s Sound on Sound (“The World’s Best Recording Magazine” with a circulation of around 40,000 copies!). It starts off like this:

C Calam has produced a beautifully packaged debut album, and you get the impression that an equal amount of hard work has been expended on the music. That work has paid off in many areas, most notably the synth programming, which yields dense arrangements brimming with imaginative sounds and textures.

Before plunging into the details of the mixing (well, it is a recording magazine). You can read the whole thing online here.

PS: The same reviewer said this about the next CD he reviewed: “There’s a throwing-the-dummy-out-of-the-pram quality to [the] music that begins to grate fairly quickly, and the lyrics offer empty, angst-rock cliche rather than telling detail or fresh observation”. So I think I got off pretty lightly with just a bit of critisism of the mix!

Here is a rough translation into English:

Worth buying even if you don’t want to listen to it, don’t you think?

In fact they have been here for a week, here’s them in the hall:

Exciting, eh?

Now I have to wait a few weeks for them to be made. The tracks are also on their way to iTunes, but that takes even longer than getting physical CDs made.

He also improved the sound, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to manage to get my new version to sound as good as the editted version he did…the guy’s a genius.

So I set it up – there’s a £5 upfront payment, but after that you only pay
for the clicks, so that didn’t seem so bad.

Well I picked some slightly popular people and some pretty obsure ones as keywords
and for some reason £0.06 was the lowest I could go on any of them. I also
wrote a dumb ad: “ccalam – new album” and set it goingi on Saturday night.

By the next day there had been 150 impressions or so and no clicks. Some
of the more popular keywords went inactive – because no one was clicking
Google had decided my ads were not high enough quality and so would need
more money per click in order to go on showing them for those keywords. Fair
enough – I put the per click I was prepared to pay up to £0.11 and £0.17
as google suggested.

I also changed the ad to add a ‘call to action’ (another google suggestion),
so now it was “listen to ccalam”.

Later in the day I got a click! One whole click. But the person didn’t listen
- so much for calls to action. By then all the keywords were up to £0.17 – even
the ones that were very obscure (ie only 1 impression in the whole day) which
suprised me.

Over sunday night I had 3,555 impressions and one more click (again no listening),
but by the morining all the keywords were inactive – and needed £0.55 per click
to activate.

Looks like this strategy isn’t going to work – at least it only
cost me £5.34 to find out.