Brandon's Buzz

As the world continues snapping up Michael Jackson recordings of any stripe — a fact which stands as heartening evidence that people can still be compelled to purchase actual records given the right circumstance — there’s not much happening on the new release wall this week. Chalk it up to the July doldrums:

The “Idol” cabal is certainly having itself a kick-ass summer to here: Miss Kelly’s back with a spectacular album that has entirely eradicated the stench of the leaden effort which immediately precedes it in her discography; spunky li’l Jordan Sparks has blasted back to the foreground with her fabulous smash “Battlefield,” a brilliantly bombastic Ryan Tedder tune about which not nearly enough Buzz ink has been spilled (a situation that I’ll set about rectifying next week, when the full album drops); and my beloved Brooke White offers me the greatest birthday present fathomable next week with the release of her long-awaited post-”Idol” effort High Hopes and Heartbreak, which is teased by the bouncy sing-along track “Radio Radio.” And then there’s Chris and the boys from Daughtry, who have set top 40 radio ablaze all over again this summer with the fiercely melodic “No Surprise,” the terrific lead single from the band’s sophomore record Leave This Town. Even though he can be a tad too pompous for his own good, and his sideburns more often than not tend toward the bizarre, there’s no denying that Chris is one hell of an engaging performer, and because his debut was such a masterfully executed commercial triumph, there’s little reason to believe that album number two will deviate radically from such a winning formula. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (If you’re so inclined, pick Town up at Target, whose edition comes bundled with a bonus DVD containing the band’s six videos, including the new clip for “No Surprise.”)

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Not so much happening out there in musicland this week, so please forgive the short and sweet record store report. (And don’t forget: with new stuff on the horizon from Daughtry, Reba, my beloved Brooke White, and Sweet & Hoffs 2.0, summer ‘09 is far from over, kids, so enjoy this relative breather.)

• One of the great underrated American bands of the past
  decade receives a gorgeous career retrospective this week with
  Music from the North Country: The Jayhawks Anthology. (And, yes, their classic singles “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and
  “Save It for a Rainy Day” are most definitely front and center.)

 

• Hot on the heels of a big screen smash, which has spawned the
  surprise soundtrack hit “The Climb,” cute li’l Miley Cyrus is back already with Hannah Montana, Volume 3, the latest collection of songs from the Disney Channel’s cash cow.

 

• And finally, this week brings another visit from Jay Farrar
  and the brilliant boys of Son Volt, who drop their sixth album,
  American Central Dust. Methinks it’ll be quite hard to top their terrific 2006 effort The Search, which featured a spine-tingling cameo from the dynamite Shannon McNally, but if anyone’s up to the task, it’s the very gentlemen who gave us the scorching 1996 rock radio classic “Drown,” which remains one of the best songs in the history of ever. Count me in.

The economic news gets bleaker and bleaker, but lucky for us, the names get bigger and better in the music world, as a handful of the year’s most anticipated releases make their arrival in record stores across the land this week. I’m telling you, if this slate doesn’t jumpstart the holiday shopping season, nothing will.

Two compact discs and one digital video disc would seem to be adequate acreage in which to assemble The Definitive Rod Stewart, and, indeed, things go swimmingly on the audio side of this project: evenly split between his hedonistic years (the mid-to-late seventies, which yielded such classics as “Hot Legs,” “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” and “Tonight’s the Night”) and his more grown-up ones (late eighties, early nineties, which gave us a string of triumphs capped by the monumentally staggering cover of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train”), the two CDs very effectively cover a wide swath of Stewart’s legendary career. (For good measure, the good folks at Rhino Records who oversaw this collection even threw in Stewart’s shattering (and super-rare) cover of “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)” — another Waits classic, that — which, heretofore, has only been available in America as a b-side.

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Another jam-packed week is on tap, even if you don’t count the new country album from Jessica Simpson, which also drops on Tuesday.  (My official stance on that is as follows:  The Buzz carries no water for that vapid tramp.)  Don’t waste time reading this paragraph — there is much greatness that awaits you in the previews that follow.

Released without any fanfare in the summer of 1998, a beautifully haunting record called Dressed Up Like Nebraska quietly introduced the world to a bold new talent name of Josh Rouse.  Ten years and eight albums later, Rouse reflects on the last decade of his life with The Best of the Rykodisc Years, a double-disc, 32-track compilation with pulls together highlights (including, thankfully, Nebraska’s finest track, “Flair”) from that span of time.

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