Brandon's Buzz

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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“It was the four monstrous actors at the core of it.”

— former “Dawson’s Creek” showrunner Tom Kapinos, bluntly (and rather harshly!) answering a question about what made his time on the iconic WB show so difficult, during an Emmy screening panel for his current series, “Californication.”

For as meek and measly, as dull and dreary as January’s slate of music has been so far, the month sure is ending with a hell of a bang. It’s a full week on tap, kids. Live it up:

And now, a very special announcement: the first two seasons of that ridiculously brilliant classic early-’90s sitcom Blossom arrive on DVD this week. Starring the spectacularly spunky Mayim Bialik — who, I just got confirmation today, will be appearing on Brandon’s Buzz Radio next week to promote this very release — as an unusually perceptive pre-teen swimming upstream against both a screwy (yet oddly loving) family — musician parents, one who stuck around (the dad, played to perfection by the hilarious Ted Wass) and one who hightailed it to Gay Paree (the mom, the gloriously gorgeous Melissa Manchester); and a pair of brothers, one ditzy (Joey Lawrence, playing dumb to the hilt, honey) and one drunk (Michael Stoyanov, edgy, ditto) — and the onset of puberty, the show’s crackerjack ensemble also grew to include the terrific Jenna von Oy (as Blossom’s best friend Six — as in, the number of beers it took to conceive her, she helpfully reveals in the pilot) and the dashing David Lascher as Blossom’s steady boyfriend Vinnie. Back in the day, “Blossom” was the butt of a great many jokes because of its occasional lapses into preachy pretentiousness, but it’s quite worth the effort for a chance to watch this cast play nimbly off of each other. As blatant a precursor to the twin triumphs that were “Dawson’s Creek” and “Felicity” as can be found, it’s high damn time this show made it to DVD. Buy it at once.

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Another Tuesday, another much-anticipated DVD set taking precedence over the week’s less-than-stupendous music lineup. (September’s almost here, guys, I promise.) Take a gander, if you’re brave:

Hot on the heels of Lily Allen, Duffy, Adele, and that Grammy-winning wack job Amy Winehouse, the new invasion of sassy Bri’ish females continues in earnest with This is the Life, the spacey debut record from 21-year-old Scottish lass Amy MacDonald. She’s already drawing comparisons to Kirsty MacColl and Regina Spektor (let’s hope like hell Ms. MacDonald pulls stronger karma from the former, as the Buzz wouldn’t wish the latter’s incoherent insanity on anybody) and raves aplenty, although I have a sneaky li’l sneaky that the American marketplace has finally reached its saturation point on foreign-based kitsch, and that without a solid radio hit, Life may end up slipping through the cracks.

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