Lingers

Staying with the musical theme chosen by Matty & DD, I am writing today about a Czech band called Lingers. I have known the founding members of Lingers, Arnošt and Tomáš, since before they started the band in 1993. Lingers are real musicians, all of them being classically trained, which is not unusual in the Czech Republic. Their lyrics, which are in English, are intelligent and poetic.

Lingers are playing in a small venue tonight in Prague and I will be there. They are also currently engaged in a competition on TV Óčko and I am not above soliciting votes for them. If you would like to see a very short excerpt of their appearance on TV Óčko, please go to http://www.hydeparkcz.cz/ and click on the bit where there are pictures of different singers. On the next screen you will see a list of the different bands in the competition; if you go to Lingers and click on the red strip where it says přehrát video ukázku (mpeg) you will get to a short video clip. If you go back to the front page, you can vote for Lingers in the bit on the right-hand side. Voting is open until sometime tomorrow evening (central european summer time).

Lingers are just starting to get recognition as artists. Upon the release of last year's Gallery, the Czech music press was generous in its praise, and MF Dnes, the country's most widely-read newspaper, called Gallery "the album of the year". The Prague Post wrote about them too; that article is in English and you can look at it at http://www.praguepost.com/P03/2004/Art/0617/featu5.php.

Lingers have their own website: http://www.lingers.cz/. You can listen to some of their music there. Just click on "music" (underneath the songlist, "texty" will take you to their lyrics). Unfortunately, beyond that, the website is all in Czech; I am going to talk to Arnošt this evening about getting it into English as well.

By the way, all of their songs are really different, so please do listen to more than one.

Thank you for your support.