Muruch

Welcome to Muruch’s new home: Muruch.com!

A huge amount of thanks and cheers to Matthew of Song, By Toad for all of the hard work he did in transferring Muruch to its own domain and especially for providing hosting for the blog. He’s also working on a redesign to replace this temporary template. He is a saint, no matter what he says!

Please update your bookmarks, blogrolls, and any other links to the old blog. If you need the new links to individual reviews, please just email or comment and I’ll provide them – or you can use the search box to the right.

I have already changed the blog’s rss feed in Feedreader, which should automatically update Hype Machine, Elbo.ws, Bloglines, Livejournal, and Google Reader. If you read Muruch at any of these websites or subscribe through email, you don’t need to do anything. However, if you are subscribed to Muruch’s feed through any other feed reader application or website, please make sure it is using the correct feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/muruch).

Please help promote the new address by posting about Muruch (http://www.muruch.com) everywhere you can. After four months of sporadic posting thanks to my battle with Blogger over deleted posts and getting this site ready, the traffic for Muruch has been cut in half. Not only do I simply love sharing music with people, but to be honest I desperately need the little ad revenue I make (from text link ads on the sidebar) and that is dependent on the number of visitors the blog receives.

I wanted the first mp3 posted on Muruch.com to be something special. Allison Crowe is the perfect artist to kick things off, since I’ve posted about her so many times over the past three years and her very friendly manager Adrian has promoted Muruch almost as much as the artist he represents. Also, versions of “Hallelujah” by Alexandra Burke of X Factor and Jeff Buckley have recently taken the #1 and #2 spots on the UK music charts. So the most appropriate song for Muruch.com’s first mp3 seems to be “Hallleujah” by Allison Crowe, from her Tidings album.

In my first post about Allison Crowe on December 20, 2005, I wrote: “I’m especially impressed with her cover of “Hallelujah”. It’s a very tough song for artists to cover. Most modern artists don’t seem to grasp that. There are tons of mediocre covers of the tune floating about. I love Damien Rice and I didn’t even like his cover of it. For me, there are only two truly great versions of the song. Leonard Cohen and Jeff Buckley. Buckley especially just blew the song to pieces and every artist after him has tried and failed to put it back together. Until now. Allison Crowe manages to pump “Hallelujah” full of all the soaring vocals and raw emotion that it requires. And the result is a big beautiful lump in the throat.”

Allison Crowe – Hallelujah (mp3 removed) *

*mp3 posted with permission of Allison Crowe, the copyright holder of the recording

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