First Look – The Fire By The Roots
July 26, 2010
Just last week, I wrote about The Roots and John Legend teaming up for a new album called Wake Up Everybody. I also embedded a song from The Roots new album How I Got Over called The Fire, which features John Legend.
Now, that song has a video. Questlove tweeted out this message earlier today:
if ever i needed the power of 1.3 million RTs and you claim you love The Roots its NOW http://youtu.be/n94URvpQOAc #HIGO (WATCH THE VIDEO!)
How about I do him one better? Since The Roots’ new album is the leader in the clubhouse for my favorite album of 2010, I’ll embed the video below.
Big in France: “Allez! Ola! Olé!” by Jessy Matador (On a Boat)
July 19, 2010
So, in a previous “Big In…” episode, I posted a video by Germany’s currently reigning Idol-equivalent champion Mehrzad Marashi and the same show’s most successful alumnus Mark Medlock, doing a pretty horrible dance song together… on a boat. Not to be outdone is one Jessy Matador, the 27-year-old Zairian-French singer-and-dancer who represented France in this year’s Eurovision song competition with “Allez! Ola! Olé!” and gave the country its best showing in years. (France last won the competition in 1977. The last time it placed as a runner-up was in 1991.) The song may only have placed 12th in the Eurovision competition but it’s currently shaking its ass at the top of the French pop chart, and it’s formed a gigantic conga line all over Europe going Top 20 in Germany, and Top 10 in Belgium, Norway (who as 2009’s Eurovision winners hosted this year’s competition) and Finland (suck on that, Dark Metal). It even nicked the U.S. club charts.
And why not? Its infectious Afro-Carribean beats feel both instantly familiar and alluringly exotic – it’s a song in search of a Bacardi ad campaign, basically. When Jessy Matador calls out “Tout le monde!”, he means, “Everybody!”. But the literal translation of the French is “All the world!” and that applies here too. The song’s got a chorus that blithely defies language barriers by defying language itself. Allez Ola Ole? A two-year-old from Mongolia could sing along to it! The first time I heard this, I just thought it was a goofy song (the video doesn’t help that impression – see about 3:08 in the video for the dorkiest temper tantrum ever) that I figured I’d forget before I had time to close the internet browser. But its infuriatingly simple hooks have proven as relentless as Jaws, and I’ll be damned if I’ve gone a day the last couple weeks without going back to it at least once before heading out on my morning commute.
Awesome Song Alert! “Credible Threats” by The One A.M. Radio
July 16, 2010
According to the lyrics of his latest song, Hrishikesh Hirway, the main man behind indie pop band The One A.M. Radio, isn’t getting much sleep these days. But the chipperness (and consequent awesomeness) of his music has apparently increased in direct proportion to his insomnia. The group’s latest single “Credible Threats” is a modestly upbeat little ditty with adorably wordy verses and a playful, chutes and ladders melody, backed by pretty, ripply guitar parts and anchored by a buzzy retro synth drone. The cumulative effect is vintage Belle & Sebastian as filtered through Devo, the fatalism and urgency of the lyric just barely masked by Hirway’s softly witty, matter-of-fact, slightly detached, but ultimately vulnerable delivery. With its dorky bum-ba-dum breakdown and krautrocky instrumental coda (replete with singalong “oohs” over flying saucer synths), “Credible Threats” is just a funny sounding (but not necessarily funny funny) song about a guy who stays up at night cataloguing all the ways an unspecified “they” say he might die. That Hirway’s an emphatically mild-mannered American living in an hysterically angry America, with a “funny” name and what Sheriff Arpaio might deem a “terrorist complexion”, or at least “illegal” colored skin only underlines his probably-not-for-nothing, paranoia-tinged anxiety. I mean, here’s a guy who’s been watching himself some serious news lately. And then there’s this great couplet at the bridge:
Tom Brokaw’s talking about a dirty bomb
I got another call from my poor Mom.
The song comes with this cute little video by director Andrew Huang. (Dig that choreography!) And James Cameron will be thrilled to know that Huang also did a 3-D version of the video which you can watch here. OR: Better yet, why not get yourself a copy of the 7″ single of the song directly from the band? (I just ordered mine.) In addition to the supercool colored vinyl, you’ll get downloads of the three mp3 tracks as well as the 3-D video, along with your very own set of 3-D glasses with which to watch it. All that for a mere $5.00 ($7.50 with shipping). But it’s only available in a limited edition of 500. So if you like it, you should put a credit card number on it. Like now.
Here’s the 2-D version:
Separated at Birth? Recent Singles by Alicia Keys and OneRepublic
July 14, 2010
Both Alicia Keys and singer-songwriter Ryan Tedder of the band OneRepublic have faced accusations that, well, if their songs were toilet paper, they could be labeled as containing at least 35% post-consumer recycled materials. This spring, Kelly Clarkson called Tedder out on the more-than-passing-resemblance between her 2009 hit single “Already Gone” and “Halo” by Beyonce, both Tedder originals. Meanwhile, our good friend Money Mike has noted here and elsewhere the Force MD’s impression Keys pulls off on “That’s How Strong My Love Is”, a highlight of her latest (and best yet) record The Element of Freedom. But in the case of a couple of recent singles, it seems that Tedder and Keys have independently arrived at roughly the same song, roughly simultaneously. Though Keys’s song was released and charted modestly as a single last year while OneRepublic’s is only just now starting to scale European charts and isn’t yet receiving any U.S. airplay, the albums the songs are taken from appeared within weeks of each other last fall. Neither artist could fairly accuse the other of even accidental plagiarism. Both are great songs, but it’s hard for me, when I’m singing along with one, not to sing the words and melodies of the other over it. I’d love to hear Alicia Keys co-fronting OneRepublic with Ryan Tedder on a mash-up of these songs.
Alicia Keys “Doesn’t Mean Anything”
OneRepublic “Marchin’ On”
Awesome Song Alert! Titus Andronicus “A More Perfect Union”
July 13, 2010
This is a song Glenn Beck stole from Sam Adams. Titus Andronicus is stealing it back. It’s a seven minute indie-rock epic, named for a clause from the Preamble to the Constitution. It opens with an excerpt from Abraham Lincoln’s 1838 Lyceum Address. It ends with a quote from prominent 19th Century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Along the way, it (literally) shouts out punk rock transliterations of Bruce Springsteen, Billy Bragg (a folk singer who, unlike most recently polled Americans, can speak with some authority on what is and what is not socialism), and “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, all while sounding like Bright Eyes singer Conor Oberst trying his damnedest to front a volume-uncompromised Thin Lizzy, circa ’76 (Seventeen-76, that is.). I had no idea what I was watching when I, half-sleeping, caught my first glimpse – the last thirty seconds or so – of the video for this song on TV a couple months ago, but it kept me awake that night, the same way watching Spielberg’s remake of War of the Worlds did.
“A More Perfect Union” is the lead single from the New Jersey quintet’s sophomore album The Monitor, and it comes on with the sort of triumphal mob rage that Lincoln’s Lyceum Address presciently decried and warned against – the 28-year-old Lincoln believing more than anything that the Union’s demise would come not at the hands of some foreign conqueror (or al-Qaida), but by the pitchforks and nooses of its own rioting hordes (Fox News?) – the same triumphal mob rage that seems to fuel the current Tea Party movement, blindly and nonspecifically angry, fairly puking on its own broad hubris, wrapping itself up in the spirit of the American Revolution, creating itself in the time-and-history-and-politics-distorted image of the Founders. It’s a punk rock opera built out of slogans – “Rally around the flag!” – and proud nationalistic proclamations – “Will I not yell like hell for the glory of the Newark Bears!”. In couplets that Woody Guthrie could sue over, they sing (?) the praises of “brutal Somerville summers” and “cruel New England winters”; of interstate highways, the Garden State Parkway, and the lights over Fenway. You could imagine Sarah Palin as a compulsively literate New Jersey loyalist (I think I just discovered the formula for Sarah Palin anti-matter!); or maybe Springsteen as a fervent, third generation punk rocker on the campaign trail for Van Buren ‘48. Either way, this song is wicked awesome.
Sadly, the video edits the song down to a more manageable length, but it’s well worth hearing in all its unruly 7 minute glory. Listen here:
First Impressions: Sons of Sylvia
July 9, 2010
Hey! Remember this show? Remember the band who won it? Maybe not. It was three years ago, after all, and unlike the American Idol which all but guarantees an annual outlet for its past winners and finalists to remind their fickle-by-design audience that they still exist, the Next Great American Band has not since returned to the airwaves. (I’m actually still holding out hope for Season 2 of Bands on the Run! Flickerstick Rulz!!!)
Moreover, where Idol winners often have an album assembled and rushed out to the market in time for Christmas shopping, Next Great American Band winners The Clark Brothers seemed to drop off the face of the earth, leaving the few of us who watched the show and fell in love -err mild infatuation with the Appalachian trio’s thrilling (for prime time) acoustic conflagrations of bluegrass, pop, and classic rock to wonder, y’know, wha’happen?
The Clark Brothers “Gimme Shelter”
Sometime between then and now, the Clark Brothers – Adam, Ashley, and Austin – were signed to a major label, and then got dropped by the label in a bit of corporate re-shuffling. At which point, they changed their name to Sons of Sylvia, signed with 19 Entertainment and Interscope, and showed up on a duet with Carrie Underwood called “What Can I Say”. Now, the band is on tour with Underwood in support of their long delayed debut album Revelation.
Carrie Underwood with Sons of Sylvia “What Can I Say”
Though the Sons of Sylvia had previously, along with three more of their brothers, recorded and even charted a Top 20 Country hit 10 years ago as the Clark Family Experience; and though the instruments they play (fiddle, mandolin, slide guitar) look and sound a little, y’know, bluegrassy; and though they are touring with Carrie Underwood, it becomes clear listening to Revelation that Sons of Sylvia are no more a country music band at this point than OneRepublic, whose lead singer-songwriter (and one of 19 Entertainment’s favorite go-to hit-writers) Ryan Tedder co-wrote and produced the group’s debut single “Love Left to Lose”. As with many of Tedder’s other hits, the song boasts a big, open-air sound with a full-throated campfire folk sing-along of a chorus, making it an immediate winner when you hear it on the radio.
The band carries that bigness with them throughout Revelation, almost to the point where it becomes a little too much of a pretty good thing, both in the record’s anthemic sound, but also in lyrics (see the title track) that seem to be reaching for the spiritual profundity of Bono, circa 1984. The album opens with “John Wayne”, a gorgeous statement of devotion that gets oversold by Ashley’s trying-too-hard shouty high vocals on the chorus, and ends with a strange assemblage of sounds (is there a song in this?) called “The War Within”.
There’s no question these guys are talented, and that they’re passionate music-makers. But the fire and brimstone they brought to that cover of “Gimme Shelter” on TV a couple years ago seems to have been compromised in the band’s quest to come up with a great pop/rock record. I’m not one of those people who believes that the words “greatness” and “pop/rock” are mutually exclusive; I think what Sons of Sylvia have attempted with Revelation is admirable, promising, and totally listenable. (I mean, seriously: pop music with actual stringed instruments, people! How awesome is that in 2010?) But listening to Revelation is like watching someone trying to start a fire by rubbing sticks together, generating occasionally thrilling puffs of smoke, but never quite acheiving something we might be able roast marshmallows over.
Sons of Sylvia “Love Left To Lose”
Boys Will Be Boys, and Men… Will Be Boys in Three Awesome New Videos
July 6, 2010
Three terrific new videos by just-barely-under-the-radar artists center around men doing what men do best: being boys. Approaching the similar subject matter from three distinct points of view, from the simply fun and nostalgic, to the tragic-comic-pathetic, to the reflective and hopeful, they’re all individually great in their own right. But taken together, it seems that Philadelphia alt-hip-hop duo Chiddy Bang, indie blues duo The Black Keys, and slam poet Sage Francis have inadvertently created a coming of age suite that John Hughes would have loved.
Already an international Top 10 hit, Chiddy Bang’s debut single “The Opposite of Adults” (built around a sample of MGMT’s “Kids”) celebrates the carefree life of a kid – basketball, skateboarding, ogling girls at the playground – with rapper Chiddy (Chidera Anamege) promising (with apologies to Mommy) never to grow up. The video attaches cardboard cut-out looking adult faces to live action adolescent bodies as the duo relives all the various awesomenesses of their childhoods. Such as opening a box of cereal to find the prize (A Chiddy Bang 7″? Swwwweeet!).
Chiddy Bang “The Opposite of Adults”
The song may not be explicitly about childhood, but the video to the Black Keys’s latest single, the Danger Mouse produced “Tighten Up” from their latest album Brothers, has to be one of the greatest videos about a lust triangle among the monkey bars. Singer Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney sit on a park bench watching as their sons (who, we learn in a hilarious exchange of dialogue before the song starts, may not be the best of pals anyway) compete for the attentions of an elementary school hottie. But their efforts to be the responsible, intervening grown-ups go horribly, horribly wrong.
The Black Keys “Tighten Up”
“It was the best of times. It was the end of times.” In this incredible new video from his latest album Li(f)e, Sage Francis sits among an array of chairs suggestive of a school classroom – only with a wooden coffin where the teacher’s desk might be. Taking a look inside, Francis finds a trove of snapshots and artifacts, and reflects variously on religion, media, and technology before drifting back to memories of his adolescence. His first crush. Discovering his passion for words. Discovering hip-hop. Contemplating suicide, and contemplating the things he wants from life. Contemplating the apocalyptic paranoia that is being a teenager, and contemplating the wisdom he’ll pass down to his children’s children if he’s lucky enough to live long enough to meet them.
As the classroom chairs around him fill up, he’s both teacher and student in what Prince once called “this thing called life”. His verses are loaded with richly specific details – like the love note written in code and wrapped up in ten layers of Scotch tape, but deposited in the wrong locker – and poignantly self-deprecating punchlines. The video has a familial intimacy to it that culminates in a sweet little moment between Sage Francis and the kid who plays the young Sage Francis. It’s the kind of song and video that makes me want to write a deeply personal thank you note to the artist. (Thank you, Sage Francis.)
Sage Francis “The Best of Times”
“Say No To Love” by The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: More Adorable Than Surprised Kitty?
June 30, 2010
With their self-titled debut last year, New York’s The Pains of Being Pure at Heart established themselves not only as one of the cleverest American indie pop bands to come around since Velocity Girl in the 1990s, but also, unquestionably, the cutest – in both sound and appearance. It was a noisy record, but the noise wasn’t abrasive so much as warm and fuzzy, and when you could hear the lyrics, they were full of puns (“Young Adult Friction”), alt-pop-cultural references, and coy tales of teenage ribaldry. Now, after releasing a more studio-polished EP (Higher Than the Stars) last fall, the band has returned with a new 7″ single (on “sea foam green” vinyl, even!) called “Say No To Love” b/w “Lost Saint”, both sides of which sport a jangly, retro-flavored melancholy that recalls 90s alterna-faves like the Lightning Seeds, the Cranberries, and Ivy. The band’s also put out a video for “Say No To Love” that delivers a 10,000 kiloton bomb of adorable on the viewer. Nibble on this, Suprised Kitty!
Paul’s Sunday Brunch Buffet: The Summer of ‘90 Edition
June 27, 2010
There are a lot of songs that reminisce fondly about a simpler time, when we were younger and nothing sucked quite as bad as everything sucks now. But twenty years ago, in the Summer of 1990, I was 17, my family was on the verge of homelessness, and I blamed myself for it. You see, a couple years earlier, my dad lost his job at a Chrysler (formerly American Motors) plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I’d gotten my first job, bagging and carrying out groceries at a local SuperValu, making $3.35 an hour plus the occasional tip. Aside from those tips – maybe five dollars in a six hour shift – I didn’t spend a penny of what I made. I deposited every check in the bank.
Now, these weren’t big checks, but after a year, I’d accumulated a sum that would have been enviable to most of peers. It was around that time that I started helping my parents make the house payment. Eventually I quit the grocery store job, due to a dispute with my boss about a time-off request (I’d asked for, and was denied, a Saturday off to go see a Chicago concert – which, just my luck, got postponed), and landed a snazzy new gig washing dishes at an eatery called the Edelweiss in the heart of downtown Paddock Lake. Needless to say, I didn’t make many tips there, so I started using parts of my paychecks for spending money, and the portions I devoted to savings got smaller and smaller. And as I watched the balance on my savings shrink by mortgage payments, my motivation to save shrunk even more. To the point where I didn’t save at all. But my CD collection was growing fast.
Inside B-Side Records. It looked like this in 1990. It still looks like this in 2010.
I had a girlfriend back then. (Yes, I had a girlfriend back then.) And occasionally, we would take a day trip up to Madison (Mecca, as far as I was concerned), where the whole object would be just to blow all the money in our pockets, presumably on CDs, books, and, oh yes, fine Italian dining. One such day was July 11 of 1990. That also happened to be the day our house, which had earlier been foreclosed upon – the house I’d spent all my savings futilely trying to save – went up for auction. It was actually a great day, and I still remember a lot of the CDs I bought that day on Madison’s glorious State Street, which, at the time, boasted at least four or five record stores – chief among them being B-Side Records (one of the few survivors still open today), no more than a slit in a brick wall, but filled to brimming with the weirdest and wonderfullest music selection I’d ever seen and the weirdest and wonderfullest collection of people browsing those CDs practically ass-cheek-to-ass-cheek.
I had a mental list of songs and bands I’d seen on MTV’s 120 Minutes or read about in Ira Robbins’ Trouser Press Record Guides, and I was determined to find them. I think I spent close to two hundred dollars that day. It makes me light-headed even now to think about how it was to feel free enough to blow all that cash so quickly and recklessly, and on CDs I knew I’d never in a million years find at any record store closer to home – CD’s nobody else at my school even dreamed existed. CD’s like a Front 242’s album Official Version on Wax Trax Records, or a Japanese import version of the John Foxx-era Ultravox compilation Three Into One. I’d recently become an Ultravox fan, after seeing Midge Ure play an opening set for Howard Jones. I knew that Ultravox had recorded three albums together with a different lead singer before Midge Ure joined the group in 1980, and that they were supposed to be really great (I can confirm this today), but I’d never actually heard them. (And in those days, you couldn’t just find them on YouTube.)
The CD I once spent 30 dollars on. Worth every damn penny.
By then, I’d left Edelweiss and was working in the same bar’s pizza kitchen. I sat down next to my Dad. He said, “So you spent your wad, huh?” I felt too ashamed to answer and soon left to walk home. The week after Labor Day, the first week of my high school senior year, we were evicted from our house, and we’d spend most of the next year squatting – first in my boss’s basement, and then in the summer cottage of a family friend. It was, to my mind, the end of the world. I took a lot of comfort in my CD collection. At the time, I had about 250 CDs which doesn’t seem like that many now that I’m pushing the 4,000 mark, but at the time it was an obscene number of CDs. As much as I enjoyed them still, I felt guilty that I’d spent money on them at a time when we were losing our house. Sure, all would be well again soon enough, but the following winter was the longest, coldest and loneliest of my life. When I remember that time, one of the prominent songs in my memory’s soundtrack is “Just for a Moment” by Ultravox, sung by John Foxx. Listening to the music the machines make, I let my heart break just for a moment…
Another treasure I took home from B-Side’s import case that day was by the British band Felt. All I’d heard of Felt to that day was a single song called “Primitive Painters”. They’d played it on 120 Minutes once – only once that I’d ever seen, but I loved it instantly. In the captions at the end of the video, it named the album from which the song came as Gold Mine Trash and I spent months and months trying to special order that CD, all to no avail. But what I found at B-Side that day was even better: a two-fer CD of the band’s 1984 and 1985 albums Ignite the Seven Cannons and The Strange Idols Pattern and Other Short Stories, which included “Primitive Painters”. (I later learned that Gold Mine Trash was a U.S. only compilation – and was the band’s only U.S. release.)
Felt's 'Ignite the Seven Cannons'
One of my favorite albums of that time, and one that has continued to speak to me in new ways in the 20 years since it came out is Australian band Midnight Oil’s Blue Sky Mining. After they shot to international stardom with their 1988 hit “Beds Are Burning”, Midnight Oil made a very Australia-centric album. Blue Sky Mining may not have impacted the U.S. charts all that much, but it remains one of my own two or three personal favorite records ever. I remember one day, during this last summer in our house, sitting out on the front porch listening to Blue Sky Mining turned up full blast from the livingroom stereo. At the end of a song called “Mountains of Burma”, singer Peter Garrett lets loose with these crazy wails: another essential part of the soundtrack of that summer. On our trip to Madison, I picked up Midnight Oil’s then most recent CD single “Forgotten Years”, a song about not forgetting what was fought for, nor the people who did the fighting.
I did get some happy upbeat music that day too. For instance, I found a copy of Daryl Hall’s 1986 solo album 3 Hearts in a Happy Ending Machine, which featured his terrific hit single “Dreamtime”, a personal favorite of mine. Incidentally, I just found the same album on vinyl last week, and I’ve been spending some quality time getting re-acquainted with it. But one of the albums I bought that I’d spend a lot of quality time with for the next several years was the self-titled one and only album by the Memphis art-pop quintet Human Radio, who had a small hit with a song called “Me & Elvis” before they broke up. Sad, really, because the rest of the album is full of really clever pop along the lines of Todd Rundgren or 10cc, with great melodies and lyrics that lampooned yuppie aspiration and tweaked the sensitivities of the trendy socially conscious and the fashionably environmentalist. 20 years later, it sounds like a time capsule of 1990.
Here’s a song that should have been a bigger hit and never fails to make me feel good listening to it. Ian Hunter and Mick Ronson were glam rock refugees at a time when glam had been co-opted by legions of tacky hair metal bands. Hunter, who was already in his 50s in 1990, had been the lead singer of Mott the Hoople in the 70s, and guitarist Mick Ronson had been one of David Bowie’s Spiders from Mars and would soon go on to produce one of Morrissey’s best albums Your Arsenal (1992) before dying from liver cancer in 1993 at the age of 46. The two had been playing together on and off for a decade or so, but in 1990, they released a really good rock and roll record called Y U I Orta, anchored by Hunter’s tribute to the music he grew up loving: “American Music”. I hear the sons of Memphis. I hear the brothers of Harlem. I hear the Nashville cats and the ragtime mamas out of New Orleans…
After six years playing culturally literate guitar pop with his band the Commotions, Lloyd Cole issued his self-titled solo debut in 1990, with the aid of drummer/producer Fred Maher (formerly of Scritti Politti), and guitarists Robert Quine and Matthew Sweet. This may have been the first CD I ever bought used, and I’ve put some serious miles on it. Its big single was a gloomy epic of moral decay in the big city called “Downtown”, but its opening number was this lightly swinging Chris Isaak-ish country crooner ballad – “Don’t Look Back”. I used to wake up early, I used to try to believe, but life seems never-ending when you’re young.
And just to show that it wasn’t all gloom and doom. One of my most treasured trophies of that big shopping day in Madison was the album Submarine Bells by New Zealand indie rock forefathers The Chills. This was the lead single and opening song of that album – a record that only gets more gorgeous with age. It’s a heavenly pop hit for those that still want it.
The Chills “Heavenly Pop Hit”
Why I Love the World Cup (Hint: It’s Not the Futbol)
June 26, 2010
Seriously. This is the only reason I care about the World Cup: A German a capella World Cup-themed parody of Eddy Grant’s 1989 anti-Apartheid protest song “Gimme Hope Joanna”, accompanied by South Park-esque animation. Thank you, Basta. A thousand times, thank you.
Here’s Eddy Grant’s original:
