Brandon's Buzz

October roars to a close with a huge list of necessary tuneage, including a must-own new album from one of the best bands going. Dig in:

The year’s most hotly-anticipated theatrical event lands this week when This Is It — a film culled from over one hundred hours of footage of Michael Jackson’s final days, footage recorded during rehearsals for what were to be Jackson’s farewell concerts — debuts on three thousand screens today. To accompany the film, which is expected to be an epic, record-shattering blockbuster, comes an identically-titled 2-CD soundtrack, which contains a collection of Michael’s best-loved classics, as well as the Paul Anka-penned title track, which was discovered in a box of tapes in one of Jackson’s vaults this past summer following his passing.

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Sherry Ann and I have this thing between us that we lovingly call “The Whitney Houston Rule,” which came to exist in the winter of 1998 when Miss Whitney became positively livid with the Recording Academy — not because they failed to nominate her soundtrack for The Preacher’s Wife for any major Grammys, but because they nominated her in what she perceived to be the wrong categories.  See, Whitney considered Wife to be the gospel album she had long dreamed of making, and while it was indeed top-heavy with selections from the God-is-love songbook, it also contained a handful of viable radio singles, enough to keep the boys at Hot 97 happy, and so the Academy deemed that the album was only eligible for the R&B categories, a decision which so enraged Whitney that she proceeded to embark on a nationwide press tour announcing her immense dissatisfaction over the news and proclaiming that she would not be showing up to that year’s ceremony to accept any awards she might win.  (The single funniest moment of this madness was when she appeared on “Entertainment Tonight” and slapped a deluxe diva diatribe — “I’m sick of work bein’ done and people not recognizin’ it!!” — upside poor Bob Goen’s head.  To this day, over a decade later, whenever either Sherry Ann or myself wish to give voice to something which frustrates or annoys us, we always preface it by cooing, Whitney-style, “No, Bob…”; and, to this day, the audio of Whitney’s hilarious hissyfit can be found on my iPod, where it continues to stay in pretty heavy rotation.)

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• If you’ve yet to give the Amazon mp3 store its proper due, you’ll never find (or need) a more palpably urgent motive than this to head on over there and check it out: just ahead of the release of my spectacular
  Tori Amos‘ tenth studio set Abnormally Attracted to Sin (due on Tuesday), Amazon has posted a free download of one of its album tracks, the devastatingly gorgeous “Maybe California.” A harrowing narrative about one mother trying desperately to stop another from committing suicide, “California,” in a stunningly beautiful four minute tour-de-force, renews my hope that Sin will stand as a remarkable return to form for Amos, whose last record — 2007’s horrifically muddled American Doll Posse — found her drowning under the weight of her own pretentious ambitions. Having not been impressed by Sin’s first official single, the middling “Welcome to England,” I was fighting fears that we were in for more of the same, but I’m officially afraid no mo’. Welcome back, baby.

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“I always say, ‘If I see somethin’ saggin’, draggin’, and baggin’, I’ll git it nipped, tucked, and sucked.”

— legendary performer (and notorious cosmetic surgery fiend) Dolly Parton, discussing her credo with Larry King.

I’m still positively reeling over CBS’ announcement today that they are yanking “Guiding Light” off the air after 72 continuous years, and I’ll have my thoughts on that news just as soon as I’ve fully gathered them. In the meantime, there’s another full slate of new releases to close out the month of March in high style, kids. Waste no time digging in:

I’m not sure whose ridiculous idea this was: that fabulous trumpeter extraordinaire Chris Botti schedules a two-night stand last fall at the world-famous Boston Symphony Hall, invites a who’s-who of his all-star pals — among them Sting, Josh Groban, and Aerosmith’s fearless leader Steven Tyler — to play along, and fails to include his gorgeous muse Paula Cole, with whom he has created so much terrific, passionately brilliant music over the past four years? (Worse yet, he invites that pitiful fourth-rate “American Idol” runner-up Katharine McPhee to take her place! Is he kidding me with this?!) I’m trying to hard not to pass judgment on Live in Boston before I’ve even heard a note of it, but what an unspeakable outrage is the setlist of this concert recording on the face of it! Color me physically offended by this blatant foolishness!

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Just so you know, this is how you celebrate the spirit of the season: the marvelous Kristine Weitz — better known to her legion of fans (the vast majority of whom happen to be gay, natch) as Kristine W, the Streisand of the thumpa-thumpa set — has just released Hey Mr. Christmas, her very first set of holiday-inspired music, and it’s so fabulously tacky — the record’s front cover depicts the wondrously becleavaged Mizz W thrusting her glorious chest westward as though she’s perched atop the mast of a luxury liner and pointing the ship toward safe harbor, and the back cover finds her held in the sway of a gorgeously sculpted bicep — and irresistible, you really gotta hear it to believe it.

Featuring — I swear I’m not making this up! — hilariously bold techno-centric covers of “Mary Did You Know, “O Holy Night,” and the underrated Dolly Parton chestnut “Hard Candy Christmas” (originally from The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas), which, though it ultimately has scant little to do with the season itself — much like its spiritual cousin, Joni Mitchell’s “River” — has become the token heartbreaker on a number of Christmas-themed musical projects, Mr. Christmas also includes a pair of new holiday tracks, as well as a moving acoustic reading of one of W’s biggest club hits, “The Wonder of It All,” the new version of which contains virtuosic piano accompaniment from the incredible Jim Brickman. Trust me here if nowhere else: as brilliantly trashy guilty pleasures go, this one’s an instant classic — W’s off-the-freakin’-wall take on “Hard Candy” alone, which is so bizarrely enjoyable you’ll be tapping your feet by the time the first verse has passed, is worth the price of admission — the kind from which you can derive serene pleasure not just in the twilight of December, but all year long.

A major computer malfunction has kept the Buzz inactive for the past few days, but we’re back and better than ever, just in time for this week’s record store report. It’s another slow one out there, kids, but there are some gems hidden in the rough.

Continuing in their ongoing quest to sucker us into purchasing the exact same material — these guys have as many live albums as they do studio ones! — as often as they possibly can, those crafty fools of Maroon 5 unleash their latest project Call and Response this week. A collection of remixes, Response features radically reworked versions of the band’s massive radio hits and well-loved album tracks, and while Sherry Ann will testify that I’m all for a tasteful remix, I’m just not quite sure the world needs to be able to dance to “She Will Be Loved” (as masterfully heart-wrenching a ballad as has been recorded this decade) or “Better That We Break” or “Goodnight Goodnight.” (Does that make me crazy?) We’ll see.

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A number of this week’s high-profile releases are dropping a day early to get a jump on the pre-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy, and though there are still a handful of A-listers in the pipeline — Miss Britney next week, and Fall Out Boy on December 16, most notably — what follows represents the meat and potatoes of ’08’s holiday slate of music. Eat up, kids.

His last American album — the unfairly ignored The Lead and How to Swing It, which featured a knockout guest appearance, done as a favor to her record label, by one Tori Amos — was released fourteen years ago, and while 1999’s Reload was an overseas blockbuster, he’s been off the radar for most of the last decade. But that all changes this week, as ’60s icon Tom Jones, the man whose slick swagger practically invented the term “blue-eyed soul,” returns with his much-hyped comeback effort, 24 Hours. Emboldened both by the back-to-basics return to form of Neil Diamond, and by the retro-soul explosion touched off by Amy Winehouse, Jones looks to find the sailing fairly smooth. All he’s gotta do now is deliver a great album.

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Third records abound this week, as several key newcomers from the past few years all converge upon the second week of October attempting to grab hold of our attention and respect. I fully expect no fewer than one of these records to stand among the entire year’s best; let’s see how the rest of them stack up in kind.

Following the (for them, anyway) breakneck triumph that was Viva La Vida — it only took those silly fools of Coldplay four tries to make a (more or less) cohesive album! — all eyes fall this week to fellow British band Keane to see how they’ll respond.  Their first album, 2004’s Hopes and Fears, went platinum on the blazing strength of its two terrific singles, “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Everybody’s Changing”; 2006’s follow-up disc Under the Iron Sea stumbled a bit despite its blistering rock radio smash “Is It Any Wonder?,” which almost made me believe I’d side with Keane’s lead singer Tom Chaplin over that doofus Chris Martin in a karaoke duel.  Coming off of Chaplin’s shockingly pitch-perfect remake of “Under Pressure” (on which he literally seems to be channeling David Bowie!) for an EP late last year comes Keane’s third record, Perfect Symmetry.  The set’s leadoff single, the hard-driving “Spiralling,” holds a much grittier sound — perhaps even menacing — than anything we’ve heard from these guys heretofore, which is mighty fine by me, particularly considering their rivals in Coldplay have essentially been writing the same frickin’ song for ten years or better.  Watch out for this one; it could well be the sleeper of the fall.

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He was studying in the New York City police academy, aiming to follow in his father’s footsteps as a Brooklyn beat cop. But his killer voice, his love of music, and his dream to be a part of that world carried him out west. A string of smashing club gigs in the Bay Area brought him to the attention of Columbia Records, which — thanks to the bracing success being enjoyed by a young Jersey Everyman called Bruce Springsteen — was at the forefront of the burgeoning regular Joe movement that was spreading like wildfire across the rock music landscape, which had struggled for a time to stay relevant in the wake of the disco explosion of the late ’70s. A strong debut album and a simple name change — Edward James Mahoney became one Eddie Money — and the rest was history.

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After what seems like years, the dreadful month of August is finally crawling to an end, and taking with it the abominably dull music lineup which has bogged us down since late July.  And now that we can turn our attention toward fall and its transformative glory, we can begin to anticipate with breathless, open-mouthed vigor the terrific tuneage laying in wait for us.

The item I was most looking forward to this season was The Annie Lennox Collection, a first-ever solo best-of set from one of the most fiercely divine artists we have.  But after word broke last week that Lennox required emergency spinal surgery, Collection was pushed back to spring 2009 so that its creator could have ample recovery time.

Fear not, however:  Ms. Lennox, as monumentally necessary as she may be in our lives, wasn’t slated to be the only game in town this fall.  New works from Pink, James Taylor, Rachael Yamagata, Whitney Houston, Sarah McLachlan, and many others are in the pipeline, as are the following five records, which — now that Lennox has been taken off the table — I’ll confess I am most excited about.

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