Brandon's Buzz

The holiday shopping season leaps toward full swing this week, which means the big guns are starting to roll out onto the battlefield. Take a look:

I somehow missed this when it was released a month ago in conjunction with the full-series DVD set, so imagine my surprise to go CD shopping yesterday afternoon and happen across a copy of The Best of Ally McBeal: The Songs of
Vonda Shepard, a solidly assembled compendium of musical highlights from the five-season run of Fox’s iconic dramedy (plus a previously unreleased track, “Something About You”). Included here: Shepard’s riveting duets with Indigo Girl Emily Saliers (“Baby Don’t You Break My Heart Slow”) and Robert Downey, Jr. (“Chances Are”), as well as those old chestnuts “Maryland” and “The Wildest Times of the World” and “Hooked on a Feeling,” and, of course, Ally’s rip-roarin’ theme song “Searchin’ My Soul,” which still makes you wanna get up and shake your ass some twelve years later. The Buzz still loves ya, gal.

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Another pretty low-key week in musicland, although what is perhaps this fall’s most anticipated film gets a soundtrack worthy of the buzz. Take a look:

• Country stalwart Tim McGraw is up with his tenth studio album, Southern Voice.

 

• Paul Oakenfold, Dallas Austin, The Neptunes, and others put their own spin on some of the most famous songs in music history in the brand new collection The Remix Suite, which mainly concentrates on
  Michael Jackson’s early-’70s solo and group output.

 

• Snow Patrol spearheads the latest entry in the Late Night Tales series, to which they contribute a mellow cover of INXS’ late-’80s classic
  “New Sensation.”

 

• Those wacky New Zealanders Flight of the Conchords return with their sophomore effort, I Told You I Was Freaky.

 

• Another week, another Target exclusive: this one’s from that
  husky-voiced Brit Joss Stone, who is up with her fourth album,
  Colour Me Free.

 

• Four-time Grammy winner Lyle Lovett is up with his latest,
  Natural Forces.
• Sherry Ann is all agog over the return of MoZella, whose second album is the brand new Belle Isle.

 

• And finally, the week’s hottest-selling album will almost certainly be the soundtrack for the upcoming Twilight sequel New Moon, which contains exclusive new material from Death Cab for Cutie, Thom Yorke,
  The Killers, Bon Iver, and others.

The album that the Buzz has been breathlessly anticipating for four long years now finally drops this week, and some pretty interesting stuff drops right alongside it. David, my darling, we have missed you!

Those pesky geniuses at Now! are out to steal a bit of Ultra’s thunder with their latest brilliant compilation, Now That’s What I Call Club Hits!, which features a smattering of hard-to-find dance mixes of recent radio smashes from the likes of David Guetta (his masterful collaboration with Kelly Rowland, “When Love Takes Over,” one of summer ’09’s most intoxicating singles), The Killers (“Spaceman”), Katy Perry (“Waking Up in Vegas,” which I can’t help but kinda sorta like, wholly in spite of the fact that I think she’s utterly ridiculous), Lady GaGa (the hilariously profane “LoveGame”), and Kelly Clarkson (the puny “My Life Would Suck Without You”), among many others.

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We close out May with only a handful of major releases, but don’t be fooled by quantity this week: they’re diamonds, all.

Island Def Jam teams up with those mad geniuses over at Ultra Records this week for the sterling new compilation Just Dance, and the star power contained herein is mighty impressive: remixes from The Killers (with Armin Van Buuren’s strong reworking of their trippy gem “Human”), Lionel Richie (with his terrific new single “Just Go”), Rihanna (the painfully catchy “Disturbia”), and Duffy (the instant classic “Mercy”) pop up alongside the likes of Pitbull (who offers up his irresistibly stupid new smash “I Know You Want Me”) and my old fave Anastacia (back, thankfully, with a brilliant new single, “Absolutely Positively”), and while, sadly (and a bit misleadingly, given the album’s title), my new fave Lady GaGa is nowhere to be found on this disc, the intoxicating spirit and sense of fun that she has brought roaring back to the radio is alive and well all over it.

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For as meek and measly, as dull and dreary as January’s slate of music has been so far, the month sure is ending with a hell of a bang. It’s a full week on tap, kids. Live it up:

And now, a very special announcement: the first two seasons of that ridiculously brilliant classic early-’90s sitcom Blossom arrive on DVD this week. Starring the spectacularly spunky Mayim Bialik — who, I just got confirmation today, will be appearing on Brandon’s Buzz Radio next week to promote this very release — as an unusually perceptive pre-teen swimming upstream against both a screwy (yet oddly loving) family — musician parents, one who stuck around (the dad, played to perfection by the hilarious Ted Wass) and one who hightailed it to Gay Paree (the mom, the gloriously gorgeous Melissa Manchester); and a pair of brothers, one ditzy (Joey Lawrence, playing dumb to the hilt, honey) and one drunk (Michael Stoyanov, edgy, ditto) — and the onset of puberty, the show’s crackerjack ensemble also grew to include the terrific Jenna von Oy (as Blossom’s best friend Six — as in, the number of beers it took to conceive her, she helpfully reveals in the pilot) and the dashing David Lascher as Blossom’s steady boyfriend Vinnie. Back in the day, “Blossom” was the butt of a great many jokes because of its occasional lapses into preachy pretentiousness, but it’s quite worth the effort for a chance to watch this cast play nimbly off of each other. As blatant a precursor to the twin triumphs that were “Dawson’s Creek” and “Felicity” as can be found, it’s high damn time this show made it to DVD. Buy it at once.

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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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(Editor’s note:  I handwrote this post two full weeks ago, back when the topic was considerably more timely.  All apologies for the delay.)

Fall has been in full swing for several weeks now, and to here, its slate of new music has been uniformly stellar:  the New Kids on the Block have executed one of the most brilliantly maneuvered comebacks in recent pop memory with their startlingly fine (and fun) new record The Block (keep an eye out for this set’s second “Single,” a terrific duet with the white-hot Ne-Yo); led by Caleb Followill’s achingly vulnerable drawl, the Kings of Leon have delivered an intoxicating masterpiece with their superlative fourth album Only By the Night; and top-notch singles from Ray LaMontagne, Brandy, Jon McLaughlin, The Killers (whose latest, the strangely alluring “Human,” is marked by dopey-even-for-them lyrical content — the chorus, swear to Jesus, opens with the line “Are we human / or are we dancer?” — but a brilliant beat that splits the blissful difference betwixt “Somebody Told Me” and “When You Were Young”) and others, which would only indicate that more greatness is imminent.

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