Brandon's Buzz

Weeks and weeks of slow-to-nonexistent release slates have led to this fresh hell: August’s final Tuesday is so jam-packed with new stuff that I’ll be typing about it from now until Christmas. But I’m not complaining, mind you: you have no idea how great it will be to walk into the record store and actually be greeted by a new release wall which is literally popping with exciting material begging for my attention.

(Incidentally, this is the Buzz’s 300th post, hard as that is to believe. Thanks to all my readers who continue to follow me on this crazy ride!)

Her annoying debut single “The Way I Am” — and the spare, folk-y album, Girls and Boys, on which it appeared — became a word-of-mouth sensation after saturating the whole of television a couple of years ago, popping up on such series as “Grey’s Anatomy” and “One Tree Hill” as well as in an extensive advertising campaign for Old Navy. A collection of b-sides and live recordings followed last year, and now, indie queen
Ingrid Michaelson has returned with her true sophomore project, Everybody. This gal’s tinny voice irks me no end, but she clearly has her fans, and they will probably turn out en masse to snap this up. Mazel tov, y’all.

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This coming Tuesday is my thirty-third birthday, and outside of having a nice dinner (and perhaps a soupcon of post-meal canoodling) with A, I intend to spend it doing my favorite activity on this planet: music shopping. Live it up, y’all — there’s some terrific stuff hitting stores this week:

Admire this gal’s gumption if nothing else: Brooke White, the angelic young lady who eternally captured the hearts of most of us “Idol” freaks with her ethereal, ebullient musical stylings during season seven — YouTube her astonishing take on “I Am… I Said” during Neil Diamond week from last year, and just try to convince me you don’t ache for her with every fiber of your existence — has chosen to include on
High Hopes and Heartbreak, her hotly-anticipated post-”Idol” debut, a sweetly mellow (and utterly fascinating) cover of Kings of Leon’s transcendent epic smash “Use Somebody,” a decision that has Sherry Ann utterly aghast. (And she doesn’t even like KOL that much!) As a well-documented fan of that album (and of that song), I wouldn’t normally advocate this kind of thing, but I think the fact that White — whose easy, effortless lilt is about a hundred million miles away from Caleb Followill’s pained (if undeniably compelling) yowl — can put her own spin on an instantly iconic rock tune and hold her own doing so proves that a truly great song can withstand whatever the hell you throw at it. The Buzz loves ya, Brooke baby.

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I’m currently working (I promise!) on a Madonna playlist (for which A has been waiting patiently, as he requested it many months ago), as well as one inspired by Rick Dees’ legendary Weekly Top 40 program (archived episodes of which I’m thrilled to tell you are played on Sunday afternoons — commercial free! — on XM’s ’90s channel), but when I ran across the shimmering new single from one of the planet’s all-time great people — that sparkling newlywed Mandy Moore — on iTunes last week, I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to reaffirm my profound devotion to her boundless brilliance.

Out in front of the May 26 street date for Amanda Leigh, Moore’s much-anticipated sixth studio record, the terrific romp of a lead single “I Could Break Your Heart Any Day of the Week” stands as an invigorating blast of pop nirvana and proves for all the world that Moore is an artist to be reckoned with.  (Any doubts that remained about that very fact in the wake of the aural miracles Moore set free on 2007’s grand, wondrous Wild Hope, “Heart” washes them clean downstream.)

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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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Conceived as a benefit project with one hundred percent of the proceeds supporting the charity — an honest-to-God four-thousand-acre farm area near Santa Fe, New Mexico which was conceived specifically to give cancer-stricken children something substantive on which to focus their energies and interests — named in the record’s title, The Imus Ranch Record finds a bevy of acclaimed country music stars wrapping their golden voices around tunes that were personally selected for them by the charity’s organizer, Mr. Don Imus, himself.  The lineup of talent is top-shelf — Vince Gill, Bekka Bramlett (Bonnie’s daughter, and still searching for her ticket to the big time), former Maverick Raul Malo, Dwight Yoakam, and my eternal hero John Hiatt, to name just a few — and the results are often fascinating (Patty Loveless presents a twangy take — one you gotta hear to believe — on Fleetwood Mac’s overlooked classic “Silver Springs,” WIllie Nelson offers a sweetly unique spin on the old R&B standard “What a Diff’rence a Day Makes,” and Lucinda Williams — whose latest album, Sweet Honey, is due October 14 — lays down a tender reading of Willie’s classic “Mammas, Don’t Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”).

Whatever you may think of Imus and his exploitative, self-aggrandizing stances, sometimes you gotta measure a man’s actions against his words.  The man has just displayed killer taste in music, and for as good and worthy a cause as this, that’s worth something.

Sorry for the brief delay in this week’s record store report — Sherry Ann has been so antsy anticipating this, it’s hard to ponder how she survived the pre-Buzz days — but here we go, with yet another brilliance-packed week before us. Buckle up, kids: we’ve got fourteen albums to discuss.

Solid proof that you shouldn’t judge books by covers:  in the same week in which word has broken that Rob Thomas’ second solo album is due next spring, Matchbox Twenty’s guitarist (and former drummer) Paul Doucette — who, throughout his band’s entire history, has never failed to represent himself as an irritatingly sarcastic horse’s ass — scores a home run as the leader of a fascinating new side project,
The Break and Repair Method.  An album of pleasant melody and stunning depth, Milk the Bee finds Doucette manning both the piano (and adeptly, at that) and the microphone (and while his vocal prowess is certainly no match for Thomas’, Doucette’s timbre proves to be surprisingly rich), creating a ten-track set whose sensibilities land somewhere in between Wilco’s and Keane’s on the yardstick of pop.  (Even if you ultimately choose to let the album as a whole slip by you, be at least sure to check out track number five, “Calling All Electrical Prints,” the kind of sweet, haunting love song Jeff Tweedy only wishes he could write.)

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In a smashingly brilliant follow up to last year’s monumental ten-disc Classic Soft Rock collection — the infomercial promoting which was hosted by Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock (those peerless bastions of ’80s schmaltz who were better recognized by the masses as Air Supply) and was one of the finest, most compelling half-hours of television I have ever witnessed — the fabulous folks at Time-Life have truly outdone themselves with Ultimate Rock Ballads, a new eight-album assemblage of music which pulls together 133 of the most essential percussive dirges from the past four decades into one gloriously cheesy listening experience.

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Upon reading the Buzz’s inaugural post, A’s first question: “Yeah… but when are you gonna tell us about you?”

So, me.

NAME: Brandon (Like you couldn’t guess that from this blog’s title!)

AGE: 31

DATE OF BIRTH: July 21, 1976

PLACE OF BIRTH: Ochiltree Memorial Hospital, Perryton, Texas

FAVORITE RECORD STORE: The Record Rack, Amarillo, Texas

SECOND-FAVORITE RECORD STORE: Waterloo Records, Austin, Texas

THIRD-FAVORITE RECORD STORE:
Amoeba Records, Hollywood, Calla-forny

FOURTH-FAVORITE RECORD STORE: Cheapo’s, Austin, Texas

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