Brandon's Buzz

Summer’s most highly anticipated record — at least for the Buzz’s money — arrives in stores this week, and if the first single is any indication, we’re about to drown in a cascade of fabulousness. Read on:

One of the finest female voices in the history of country music, the incredible and endlessly fascinating Tanya Tucker, makes a long-awaited comeback this week with My Turn, her first album in eight years. Turn finds Tucker — who has never sounded better, and that’s saying something! — turning the tables on the music men she has long admired by covering some of their best-known tunes. Among the highlights: a playful take on Charley Pride’s classic “Is Anybody Going to San Antone?” and a slightly mellow version of Merle Haggard’s “Ramblin’ Fever,” as well as what is quite possibly the best cover of Eddy Arnold’s “You Don’t Know Me” since Jann Arden’s devastating one twelve years ago.

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Would you believe The Fray still hasn’t left my CD player? Luckily, it’s another light one out there this week, because I still have a pile of discs to get through, and if anyone can get me to divert my attention away from Isaac and the boys for a spell, it’s the miraculous woman who gives us the week’s marquee release. Read on:

If you missed it in theaters last fall, make it a point to catch up with Bill Maher’s laugh-riot quasi-documentary Religulous when it arrives on home video this week. A hilariously scathing indictment not of God himself, but rather of the phalanx of fables and parables which have been concocted wholly by human beings in vain and often foolhardy attempts to explain and quantify Him, the film straddles, and with a fierce confidence which sometimes steps a toe or two over the edge, a tricky line between debunking myths and outright mocking them, and while the whole affair gets a little tiresome in the third act (which contains a visit to “Holy Land,” a religion-based theme park whose daily ministrations climax with — I kid you not — a full-scale reenactment of Jesus’ crucifixion), Maher scorches a wide swath of Earth (and admirably so) in a valiant stab at injecting some logic and reason into our collective faith.

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A and I walked into Starbucks yesterday in search of nothing more than a post-lunch slice of blueberry coffee cake.  Better believe I walked out of there brandishing significantly more than that.  While standing at the register waiting for the cute barista to serve up our sweets, I picked up and began to peruse the back cover of Hear Music’s latest masterfully assembled compilation, This is Us:  Songs from Where You Live, and damn near fainted from the sheer gorgeous majesty emanating from the disc.

Promising in the description that this record portrays “the wistfulness that lingers when home is far over the horizon” — a tall task, that — you’ll be demolished when you realize just how brilliantly (and with what kind of devastating surgical precision) it goes about accomplishing that exact goal:  Us starts out on a breathtaking high note, with Michael Penn and Aimee Mann’s — very much our generation’s John and Yoko, only criminally less famous — amazing 2002 cover of the Beatles’ “Two of Us” (is it heresy to say that I quite prefer their version to the Fab Four’s nondescript original?  As Sherry Ann will haply attest, I luvs me some Michael Penn, honey), and the tracklist really hits its stride in the disc’s second quarter, with a bam-bam-bam-bam shot of Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova (with the title track from their heart-wrenching, spectacular 2007 motion picture Once, which is already well on its way to becoming the music-centric film of its — and, perhaps, any other — time), Feist & The Constantines (teaming up on a radically downtempo take on the ’80s classic “Islands in the Stream” which, even though it’s not by half as much gloriously trashy fun as Barry Manilow and Reba McEntire’s recent remake, is just plain revelatory for all the emotion it manages to unearth in simply mellowing the groove), my beloved Josh Ritter (helping out Mark Geary on a sensational song called “Ghosts”), and the terrific troubadouress Gillian Welch (the melancholy masterpiece “Orphan Girl”).  I’m telling you, by the time you hit track number ten — She & Him’s astonishing acoustic cover of Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold On Me,” about which I’ve already waxed rhapsodic here — if you’re not ready to rush to the phone and tell your mommy how much you love and miss her, you’re a stronger man than I, guaran-damn-teed.  And it doesn’t even stop there:  sterling recent efforts from Shelby Lynne (“I Only Want to Be With You,” a highlight from her too-little-heard 2007 Dusty tribute Just a Little Lovin’), David Gray (“You’re the World to Me,” the radio single, which I initially found to be subpar but which has grown on me exponentially, from his Greatest Hits), and Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris (a track from their stellar collaboration All the Roadrunning which gives this collection its title), all light the way toward the record’s shattering conclusion, wherein that long-lost genius Jennifer Warnes — who has been desperately missed, at least in my house — reteams with her mentor Leonard Cohen for a soul-cleansing reading of his all-time classic “Joan of Arc,” an album climax so thoroughly worthy of the tumescent build-up that precedes it that you want to hit your stereo’s repeat button and let this record engulf you anew with its aural magic.

The musical equivalent of Mom’s mac and cheese, or her chicken soup, or her embrace that you’ve been craving in the six months since you last saw her, Us is a warm, comforting knockout, and a gentle but firm reminder that home is where you find it. Get thee to your nearest Starbucks immediately, and find it for yourself.

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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Despite a relatively tony cast — Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Cloris Leachman, Candice Bergen, Bette Midler, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Carrie Fisher would pretty much comprise any enterprising artist’s dream canvas, methinks — and a fair box office showing on opening weekend, Diane English’s new update of the classic ’30s screwball comedy The Women has been roundly reviled by critics, a great many of whom seem to hold English’s past triumphs — as the creator and producer of the television classic “Murphy Brown,” as scorching hot a political potato(e) as the medium has seen this side of Archie Bunker, she was once one of Hollyweird’s most elite power brokers — unjustifiably against her. And while I’ll refrain from debating the film’s merits and/or charms (except to say that I was at once amused and outraged at the numerous news reports — I read no fewer than five of ‘em — which expressed shock and awe at the fact that the movie attracted a sizable percentage of gay men to theaters nationwide), I’ll tell you without equivocation: the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is worth checking out.

Anchored by a pair of divine Annie Lennox tracks (“Womankind,” from last year’s disappointing Songs of Mass Destruction, and “Money Can’t Buy It,” one of Diva’s multiple classics), the record also features terrific work from Feist (“I Feel It All,” perhaps the strongest song off of her Grammy-nominated breakthrough The Reminder) and KT Tunstall (“Someday Soon,” from her underrated sophomore release, the slow-burning Drastic Fantastic) as well as tunes from up-and-comers Jessie Baylin and The Bird & the Bee (a band my friend Chip turned me onto earlier this summer).  To hear some critics tell the tale, the soundtrack is a damn sight better than the film it supports; having not seen the movie, I’ll just say that to even think about matching the quality of its music, it’s got a lot of ground to make up.

A Canadian bubblegum pop star in her teens, and a misunderstood (and, to a large extent, mischaracterized) angry young female (and, at that, one who singlehandedly touched off a deafening revolution for women in rock) in her twenties, the tenaciously divine Alanis Morissette has mellowed markedly as she navigates her thirties, though that fact may not be immediately evident upon first listen to Flavors of Entanglement, Morissette’s texturally dense eighth studio album. Inspired by her brutal breakup with actor Ryan Reynolds, Entanglement finds its author being lured into intriguing new sonic territory by producer Guy Sigsworth (co-writer of Seal’s 1991 classic debut “Crazy,” and best known for his striking work with the lovably psychotic Imogen Heap), who grafts rougher-hewn guitars and touches of electronica onto Morissette’s typically untidy prose.

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