Brandon's Buzz

It’s the first night of a brand new year (and a new decade!), and I lay on the couch (which A lovingly calls “my throne”) watching my beloved watch his “Glee” DVDs and ruminating on the year just ended. Musically speaking, the aughts produced far stronger slates than what was offered up in 2009, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that any of what follows won’t stand proudly alongside any previous year’s diamonds.

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Thanksgiving week is an unusually muted affair this year: this is typically the “official” kickoff of the holiday shopping season, and so the record companies generally wait until this week to unleash their biggest and most interesting firepower. But, because I’m decidedly not a Glambert, and because I find the year’s hottest British import just a step or two above a kitschy novelty, color me entirely underwhelmed by the latest slate of new releases. Dive in with caution:

• The decade’s most irritating strumpet Shakira is back with her latest, She Wolf.

 

• That human lightning rod Lady GaGa is back in action with
  The Fame Monster, an eight-song adjunct to her mega-selling debut.

 

• Urrybody’s favorite vegan Moby is back with a deluxe edition of his terrific album from last spring, Wait for Me.

 

• The pride of Barbados, the incredible Rihanna, is up with her fourth album, Rated R.

 

• The legendary Tom Waits returns with Glitter and Doom Live,
  a chronicle of his most recent tour.

 

• Anybody out there have any idea how that doofus Jimmy Wayne conned Daryl Hall and John Oates into helping him cover their classic Sara Smile, the title track from Wayne’s latest CD?

 

• Beyonce presents I Am…Yours: An Intimate Performance
  at Wynn Las Vegas, a fairly self-explanatory three-disc live effort which finds her covering 2Pac’s “California Love” and Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know.” (I’m really not kidding about that, Sherry Ann!)

 

• Her global coming out party is one of the most-viewed videoclips in YouTube history; let’s see if the much-heralded Susan Boyle can turn that recognition into record sales with her debut release,
  I Dreamed a Dream.

 

• Regular readers of the Buzz know that I had utterly no use for the ridiculous Adam Lambert and his screechy theatrics on last season’s “American Idol.” Still, if you’re kinda curious to hear what he sounds like on record, he offers up himself For Your Entertainment. Go with God,
  all you Glamberts.

 

• And last but absolutely not least: it’s Thanksgiving week in Austin, Texas, which means the return of that beloved annual tradition known as KGSR Broadcasts. This year’s double-disc edition (Vol. 17, if you’re keeping count) includes exclusive acoustic recordings from The Avett Brothers, Pete Yorn, Ben Harper, Tift Merritt, Ryan Adams, Raul Malo, and the incomparable Tori Amos.

Forgive me for the late record store report this week: I’ve been swamped the past few days preparing for my blockbuster interview with the great Pam Long. (If you’re at all interested in the inner workings of a soap opera, from someone who’s excelled at mastering them, you should listen to this.) At any rate, it’s rather a hodgepodge of different stuff on the new release wall this week. Dig in:

The latest British import to dazzle us with a gregarious blast of giddy pop: Gary Baker, coming to be better known as Gary Go, who releases the physical version of his debut record this week. (The album has been available for the past month at iTunes, whose version includes bonus covers of The Cars’ 1984 classic “Drive” and a mellow take on Lady GaGa’s brilliant “Just Dance.”) The lead single “Wonderful” is an absolutely terrific, magnificently melodic counterpoint to some of the heavier tunes —
The Fray, Kelly Clarkson, Mariah Carey, fine songs all, but not exactly party-starters — populating top 40 radio right now. Give this a shot.

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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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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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