Brandon's Buzz

Last week was full of fabulosity. This week: decidedly less so. Be careful out there in record store land this week:

• That wacky, brilliant troubadour Josh Rouse takes another dramatic left turn with his bilingual latest, El Turista.

 

• The magnificent Patty Larkin celebrates a quarter-century as a top-flight recording artist with her latest album, 25, which features exactly that many tracks and exactly that many guest stars — among them: Mary Chapin Carpenter, Suzanne Vega, Janis Ian, and the divine Shawn Colvin — and I’m bringing her to Brandon’s Buzz Radio later this month to talk about it.

 

• Country star Gary Allan returns with his latest effort,
  Get Off on the Pain.

 

• With Gnarls Barkley on an indefinite hiatus, supermaverick producer/artist Danger Mouse has teamed up with James Mercer (frontman for The Shins) to create Broken Bells, and their
  hotly-anticipated self-titled debut arrives this week.

 

• I was crazy about their propulsively brilliant last record — 2007’s underrated Baby 81 — and now, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club follows up with their latest, Beat the Devil’s Tattoo.

 

• Ultra-irritating cartoon band Gorillaz are up with their latest,
  Plastic Beach.

 

• If you have yet to take a chance on Train’s magnificent fifth album,
  Save Me, San Francisco, it’s on sale for the irresistible price of $7.99 at both Best Buy and Amazon.com through Sunday. So for God’s sake: forgo one grande latte this week and buy. this. album!

 

• Finally: don’t laugh, but season seven — and the first one which featured my beloved Nia Peeples — of my old TV favorite
  Walker, Texas Ranger arrives on DVD this week, as does the incredible Mo’Nique and her Academy Award-winning performance in Precious.

The Buzz’s record store report celebrates its one-year anniversary this week with some welcome new visits from some of this author’s all-time favorite artists. Can’t think of a better way to mark the occasion.

With painfully earnest vocal work from the terrific Emerson Hart, and with sensationally radio-ready angst-ridden fare like their 1997 crossover debut smash “If You Could Only See,” they seemed a fair bet for megastardom. Problem was, so did all the other bands — Third Eye Blind, Sister Hazel, The Wallflowers, Son Volt — with whom they emerged from the post-grunge haze of the late ’90s, and after three albums and a handful of well-received singles which nonetheless failed to capture the magic of their breakthrough, they called it quits, and this week, you can find the highlights of their discography streamlined into one disc with A Casual Affair: The Best of Tonic. Don’t miss the inexplicably ignored 1999 singles “You Wanted More” and “Mean to Me” to get a sense of the potential these guys certainly owned, and, as with last week’s Wallflowers best-of set, the Best Buy version of Casual comes bundled with a bonus DVD, containing five of Tonic’s music videos.

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After sleepwalking through the past several weeks, we’ve finally got a release slate we can really sink our teeth into. While we wait to see what gifts this week’s lineup of music has in store for us, allow me to throw out this question for discussion: am I the only one who thinks the new U2 record is mind-numbingly inane and dull? What the hell was Rolling Stone thinking giving that ridiculousness a five-star review?! (I would take a stab at tackling that second one, but I’m afraid I already know the answer and it would just be way too depressing to see it in cold print.)

After Eric Clapton (whose incredible, stripped-down versions of “Layla” and the devastating “Tears in Heaven” notched their album sales of ten million-plus and won their performer a wagonful of Grammys) and Mariah Carey (whose impromptu cover of The Jackson 5’s “I’ll Be There” became a radio supersmash) showed the network what a commercial goldmine it had on its hands in the early ’90s, a spare and intimate appearance on “MTV Unplugged” suddenly became a mandatory promotional tool — within a pair of years, Neil Young, Nirvana, 10,000 Maniacs, and Melissa Etheridge all had turned in landmark performances — and for many, a nifty li’l comeback vehicle. Take the case of Rod Stewart, who reunited with his former Faces partner Ronnie Wood for an acoustic set and unwittingly hurled his career back into orbit. Thanks to a startlingly fine cover of Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately,” upon which — to the surprise of more than a few — top 40 radio immediately leapt, the resulting live album, entitled Unplugged… and Seated, went on to move more than three million units stateside and produced two additional hit singles (a reworked version of his early classic “Reason to Believe” and a raucous cover of Sam Cooke’s “Having a Party”). Unplugged returns this week in a special expanded edition which contains two bonus tracks — including a radically reinvented take on his 1989 smash “Forever Young” — as well as the original television broadcast, which finally makes a belated debut on DVD. And trust your Uncle Brandon, here if nowhere else: if only for Stewart’s priceless rendition — which can now be enjoyed aurally and visually, natch! — of Tom Waits’ unspeakably magnificent “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda),” this is worth the purchase price. (And memo to MTV, Natalie, and/or whomever else may be in charge of this: I’m still waiting for the aforementioned 10,000 Maniacs episode from 1993 — the recording of which would damn straight be one of my five desert island discs — to make its way to DVD, and am willing to do whatever is necessary — up to and including pleading right here on the Buzz — to facilitate the correction of that foolishness.)

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So, we finally have a new president, which means we can finally get back to the important stuff: what we’ll be listening to when we realize that the cesspool of American politics will likely do to him exactly what it did to most of the rest of ‘em. Lucky for us, we’ll always have magnificent music on which to fall back.

Speaking of our new president, a compilation album which was commissioned Barack Obama’s campaign (and which, heretofore, was only available with a donation to the campaign’s website) has been granted a mass release.
Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement features previously released tracks from Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, and Stevie Wonder, among others, as well as a new track from John Legend (an impassioned cover of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”) and a new collaboration — their second — between Kanye West and Maroon 5’s lead singer Adam Levine.

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No offense to the girls who managed to stay afloat in a crowded field during the sun-scorched months — imports Duffy and Leona Lewis both managed to score critical and commercial bullseyes, and Cyndi Lauper, an old friend of ours from way back, came out of nowhere with what was my hands-down favorite album of the summer, the brazenly brilliant Bring Ya to the Brink (more on that in an upcoming now hear this post celebrating the season’s strongest offerings) — but it was, by and large, the guys who made the music of summer 2008 such a pleasant surprise.  Fall is on our doorsteps, but before we close the book on the season just passed, let’s take a glance back at the men (some young, others not so much) who gave us the works of art worth getting out of bed for.

She has never asked me to explain the origins and the depths of my seemingly nonsensical obsession with one Hilary Duff, so I have likewise refrained from forcing Sherry Ann to quantify her fixation with that supreme doofus Jason Mraz.  (Mocking it outright is markedly easier, besides.)  Best known for his inescapably goofy 2003 radio smash “The Remedy (I Won’t Worry),” Mraz and his often-cloying attempts at flippant cleverness have the most mystifying effect on Sherry Ann’s otherwise potent mind.  (However, as the proud owner of all of Duff’s records, up to and including all of the Lizzie McGuire soundtracks — film and television, honey — I understand better than most that we all have our vices.)

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A pair of deluxe re-releases — one of them absolutely deserved, and the other nothing more than a desperate attempt to boost a waning album’s relevance — highlight the latest report from the front lines. So without further ado, I give you this week’s music roster:

Said to be his strongest, most sonically satisfying effort since Odelay, the 1997 Grammy-winning classic that ensured he would be remembered as much more than a flukish one-hit wonder, Beck returns this week with Modern Guilt, a sleek, tight ten track collaboration with Danger Mouse (otherwise known as the crazy (-ier?) half of Gnarls Barkley). The advance reviews on Guilt have been downright orgasmic; only time will tell if they have any basis in reality.

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A certain mismatch on paper, yet a striking triumph in practice, modern troubadour M. Ward (best known for his work with Beth Orton, Norah Jones, and Bright Eyes) and rising actress Zooey Deschanel (whose biggest claim to fame is almost certainly her bitterly raw turn opposite Paul Schneider in 2002’s gut-wrenching love story All the Real Girls, and who is still slated to portray the iconic Janis Joplin in Penelope Spheeris’ oft-delayed biopic) have joined forces to create the duo She & Him. Having first collaborated on an end-credits tune for the 2007 independent film The Go-Getter, Ward and Deschanel enjoyed the experience so much that they decided to tackle a full-length project, and She & Him, Volume 1 was born.

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