Brandon's Buzz

A pair of hotly anticipated comeback efforts, and another suffocating attack of acute Taylor-Swift-itis, punctuate this week’s new releases. Jump with care:

An out and proud lesbian with a gorgeously husky voice that is deeper than most men’s makes for the least likely pop star in modern music history. And yet that Canadian spitfire k.d. lang has defied all the odds, having put together a career replete with both critical and commercial success, and this week, to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of her recording debut, lang stops to reflect with the new double-disc set Recollection. Pretty much everything that needs to be here is — the radio hits “Constant Craving” and “Miss Chatelaine”; her smashing duets with Roy Orbison (“Crying”) and Tony Bennett (“Moonglow”); and her triumphant covers of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” Joni Mitchell’s “Help Me,” and Chris Isaak’s “Western Stars” — and for the truly devoted, there’s also a deluxe four-disc set which contains a bonus CD of live performances and DVD with music videos.

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Typically, after November’s music slate builds to a budget-busting, orgasmic wall-of-sound crescendo, the December doldrums set in. 2009 is no exception, with only one major release worth getting any degree of excited over. Happy shopping, y’all:

With over 70 million albums sold, she has taken a great deal of the entire world under her Irish new-age-y spell, and now she pauses to take the measure of two decades of music with her brand new collection, The Very Best of Enya, which pulls together all her classic singles — from her massive 1988 breakthrough “Orinocco Flow” and her 1996 classic “Anywhere Is,” right up through last year’s “Trains and Winter Rains” — into one breathtaking 22-track set. I haven’t picked this up yet, so I can’t tell you which version of her left-field 2001 smash “Only Time” — the horrid original version, or the crackling remix, which became a runaway behemoth at top 40 radio in the immediate wake of 9/11 — appears here, but I pray it’s the latter, since, to my knowledge, that version has never been made commercially available. But because I’m thrilled to see my favorite-ever Enya tune — 2002’s glorious “Wild Child” — in the mix, odds are I’ll forgive her either way.

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Thanksgiving week is an unusually muted affair this year: this is typically the “official” kickoff of the holiday shopping season, and so the record companies generally wait until this week to unleash their biggest and most interesting firepower. But, because I’m decidedly not a Glambert, and because I find the year’s hottest British import just a step or two above a kitschy novelty, color me entirely underwhelmed by the latest slate of new releases. Dive in with caution:

• The decade’s most irritating strumpet Shakira is back with her latest, She Wolf.

 

• That human lightning rod Lady GaGa is back in action with
  The Fame Monster, an eight-song adjunct to her mega-selling debut.

 

• Urrybody’s favorite vegan Moby is back with a deluxe edition of his terrific album from last spring, Wait for Me.

 

• The pride of Barbados, the incredible Rihanna, is up with her fourth album, Rated R.

 

• The legendary Tom Waits returns with Glitter and Doom Live,
  a chronicle of his most recent tour.

 

• Anybody out there have any idea how that doofus Jimmy Wayne conned Daryl Hall and John Oates into helping him cover their classic Sara Smile, the title track from Wayne’s latest CD?

 

• Beyonce presents I Am…Yours: An Intimate Performance
  at Wynn Las Vegas, a fairly self-explanatory three-disc live effort which finds her covering 2Pac’s “California Love” and Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” (I’m really not kidding about that, Sherry Ann!)

 

• Her global coming out party is one of the most-viewed videoclips in YouTube history; let’s see if the much-heralded Susan Boyle can turn that recognition into record sales with her debut release,
  I Dreamed a Dream.

 

• Regular readers of the Buzz know that I had utterly no use for the ridiculous Adam Lambert and his screechy theatrics on last season’s “American Idol.” Still, if you’re kinda curious to hear what he sounds like on record, he offers up himself For Your Entertainment. Go with God,
  all you Glamberts.

 

• And last but absolutely not least: it’s Thanksgiving week in Austin, Texas, which means the return of that beloved annual tradition known as KGSR Broadcasts. This year’s double-disc edition (Vol. 17, if you’re keeping count) includes exclusive acoustic recordings from The Avett Brothers, Pete Yorn, Ben Harper, Tift Merritt, Ryan Adams, Raul Malo, and the incomparable Tori Amos.

The holiday shopping season leaps toward full swing this week, which means the big guns are starting to roll out onto the battlefield. Take a look:

I somehow missed this when it was released a month ago in conjunction with the full-series DVD set, so imagine my surprise to go CD shopping yesterday afternoon and happen across a copy of The Best of Ally McBeal: The Songs of
Vonda Shepard, a solidly assembled compendium of musical highlights from the five-season run of Fox’s iconic dramedy (plus a previously unreleased track, “Something About You”). Included here: Shepard’s riveting duets with Indigo Girl Emily Saliers (“Baby Don’t You Break My Heart Slow”) and Robert Downey, Jr. (“Chances Are”), as well as those old chestnuts “Maryland” and “The Wildest Times of the World” and “Hooked on a Feeling,” and, of course, Ally’s rip-roarin’ theme song “Searchin’ My Soul,” which still makes you wanna get up and shake your ass some twelve years later. The Buzz still loves ya, gal.

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6:48 pm:   At long last, the finale is here! 12 minutes and counting!

6:49 pm:  Anybody out there willing to take a chance and call this race right now?  ‘Cause I tell you what, I really have no clue who’s gonna win.  Who knew Banshee Boy and Choirboy would end up being so evenly matched as the last ones standing?

6:51 pm: A’s take:  “Adam has a bigger persona, but that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily better.”  Well said, honey!

6:53 pm: So, I’ve heard that, among others, the celebrity guests tonight include my beloved Cyndi Lauper, Queen Latifah, and Lionel Richie.  But will anyone be able to top the surprise appearances by Ryan Tedder and my all-time fave George Michael on last year’s finale?

6:55 pm: A is stunned to learn that Kris is a choirboy!  I need to teach that boy how to read Entertainment Weekly!

6:58 pm: Anyone enjoy “Glee” as much as I did last night?  That show was infinitely more fun than “Idol,” as it turned out.  I should have live-blogged that!

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6:37 pm (NOTE: all times central): No agricultural emergencies delaying my progress this year. We’re actually startin’ early!

6:39 pm:  Last year’s “Idol” live blog was the first thing that really put Brandon’s Buzz on the map in terms of garnering some attention from the online world, so I’m very excited about tonight!

6:44 pm: Assuming that Adam was always a slam dunk to make the finale (and Paula predicted it twelve full weeks ago, so there you have it), I still think an Adam / Alison faceoff would have provided the most bang for our entertainment buck.  But I still think we’re in for a riveting evening of music, madness, and mascara tonight.

6:46 pm:  Let’s set up the cast of characters.  In one corner, we have Adam Lambert.

6:47 pm:  Because Adam screeches, shrieks, screams, wails, and just generally irritates the piss out of me, he will be known tonight as Banshee Boy.

6:48 pm: Adam is a glam rocker following the obvious David Bowie template — at least visually — but when he opens his mouth, he sounds like the love child that Robert Plant and Siouxsie Sioux might have created in an ill-fated night of passion.  (You might think I mean that as a compliment, since I rather like and admire both of those people, but I really don’t.)

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An Adam / Allison finale would have been more sonically fascinating, I think. (I continue to believe Allison was the vocalist with the purest raw talent that the show uncovered this season, and it was a crying shame that Uncanny Karaoke managed to outlast her last week.) But I also think this impending Adam / Kris showdown has the potential to be very interesting, and the great thing about it is, Kris, with that knockout reinvention of Kanye West’s “Heartless” last night — talk about saving your hole card for when you most needed it! — beat listless ol’ Danny fair and square. Let the games begin, boys.

Regular readers of this blog may or may not know that once upon a time, I was writing a novel.  (I say was because, even though I often refer back to it in my mind’s eye — twenty or thirty times a day, easy — and have come to quite enjoy torturing myself by toying with the notion of revisiting it in a serious way — an idea that I’ll one day make a concrete reality — I haven’t set finger one upon it in years.)  The book is about a hundred different things — and is driven by and populated with every bit as byzantine a constellation of backstories and bystanders as you’d reasonably expect from an author who is also a soap fan of nearly three decades — but, primarily, the book is about a guy.  Jeremy.  Early 30s.  Recovering alcoholic.  Hasn’t spoken to his brother in a decade over a ridiculously lopsided family inheritance which failed to break in his favor.  Doesn’t know how to admit it, but is still madly, hopelessly, irrevocably in love with the very first object — a flaxen-haired, brutally forthright gem of a gal — of his intensely loyal affection.

It may not make a hell of a lot of sense here in the boiled-down synopsis (and, truth be told, it may not make much more sense in the actual book), but Jeremy was once a successful trial lawyer in Boston, and is now a warbling piano player in a smoky Florida nightclub.  (It’s a long road from there to here, that seemingly wonky transition, and the minutiae therein aren’t terribly relevant to the particular yarn I’m spinning for you now, so let’s just go with this:  as increasingly detached as the repetitive tedium of his daily existence as an attorney made him feel, that’s how increasingly fulfilled Jeremy is by the fresh thrill of plugging his mind and heart and hands into the concrete joy of creation, and of imagination, as a piano man.)

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