Kalliopi

After an extended hiatus, I bring you some fun pop music from Athens, Greece courtesy of Kalliopi. When I started playing her mini-album Around the World in iTunes, my first thought was, “This stuff is really catchy, but the sound quality is horrible.” Turns out my equalizer settings had been switched to something really strange, so I mixed things up, started fresh, and everything sounded perfectly fine.

All in all, Kalliopi’s music follows a pretty standard pop-rock formula, but as I’ve said before, anything that follows a formula is fine so long as the right formula is followed. Kalliopi’s music sounds like something that you might hear on a top 40 station, so it has that contemporary pop feel to it, but it isn’t simplistic or stupid. This isn’t “Sk8terboi” (did I spell that incorrectly enough?). So it’s got the entertainment value of a typical radio song, but it doesn’t kill your brain cells when you listen to it. I think the dead brain cells mostly come from the fact that mainstream radio force feeds you the same stuff over an over again.

Although, the three tunes you find in Around the World do have a semi-addictive quality to them. These are the kinds of songs you will find yourself randomly humming bits and pieces of throughout your day. You’ll be riding on the subway or the bus, then you’ll start lightly tapping your foot and gently singing the chorus of “Naked” to yourself until you realize that people are looking at your mostly self-contained concert. If you’re at all like me, you just kick it up notch and go into full musical number mode at that point and really project your voice like Pavarotti with your chest puffed out and your arms extended behind you.

I guess the only other thing I have to say about Kalliopi is that even though she is from Greece, her lyrics are in English, so don’t worry about any language barriers. Also, make sure you check out < "http://www.myspace.com/kalliopimusic">her MySpace page, because there are alternate versions of her songs there than what you might find on her album. There is certainly a very different take on “Naked” there.

Purchase Around the World by Kalliopi at CD Baby, Amazon, or iTunes

Kalliopi – Naked

Also make sure to check out Kalliopi’s Facebook page. Oh, and after all of that stuff I said about the radio, you can actually find her on some stations. Look at her site to figure out where.