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.

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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They burst off the blocks exactly ten years ago with their instant classic debut smash “Meet Virginia,” and followed that up a pair of years later with an unforgettable, monumentally magnificent — and, natch, Grammy-sweeping — tune called “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)” (which you shan’t be stunned to find sitting front and center when the Buzz makes its picks for the best songs of the decade next month).  As the aughts progressed, they seemed to get mired in a mysterious malaise — if you made it all the way through their dopey, depressed 2006 effort For Me, It’s You with your sanity fully intact, you’re absolutely to be commended — but it pleases me no end to announce that my current favorite band Train is back in bidness with an exhilarating, gloriously gratifying new record, the brand new Save Me, San Francisco.

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October roars to a close with a huge list of necessary tuneage, including a must-own new album from one of the best bands going. Dig in:

The year’s most hotly-anticipated theatrical event lands this week when This Is It — a film culled from over one hundred hours of footage of Michael Jackson’s final days, footage recorded during rehearsals for what were to be Jackson’s farewell concerts — debuts on three thousand screens today. To accompany the film, which is expected to be an epic, record-shattering blockbuster, comes an identically-titled 2-CD soundtrack, which contains a collection of Michael’s best-loved classics, as well as the Paul Anka-penned title track, which was discovered in a box of tapes in one of Jackson’s vaults this past summer following his passing.

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Pardon the truncated record store report this week, but — at least on the face of it — there’s not a hell of a lot out there this week to jump up and down about. But don’t let first appearances deceive you: there might just be a pleasant gem or two awaiting you among what follows.

• Those ’90s heroes Sister Hazel are still plugging away at it;
  their latest effort is the aptly titled Release.

 

• Rising country star David Nail has just gone and made his atrocious cover of the unheralded Train classic “I’m About to Come Alive”
  the title track of his debut album.

 

• Her under-the-radar debut landed her a surprise Grammy nod for
  Best New Artist; let’s see how R&B diva Ledisi follows it up with her sophomore release, Turn Me Loose.

 

• Speaking of atrocious, all hail the return of Eurotrash dance outfit Cascada, who are back with their latest full-length project,
  Evacuate the Dancefloor.

 

• After an extended hiatus, Third Eye Blind are back and trying to re-catch lightning in a bottle with their new album, Ursa Major.

 

• After knocking our socks off with her cover of “Born to the Breed” from last year’s Judy Collins tribute project, the fabulous Amy Speace returns with her latest album, The Killer in Me.

 

• Alt-rock hero Brendan Benson steps away from The Raconteurs
  for a solo offering, My Old Familiar Friend.
• Country queen Reba McEntire is up with her 25th studio album,
  Keep On Loving You. (As near as I can tell, the title track is not a cover of the REO Speedwagon rock classic, as much fun as that might have been.)
• And finally, season two of the CW’s guiltiest pleasure
  Gossip Girl arrives on DVD.

Election Day is playing hell with this week’s new music slate: Hilary Duff and Dido have already blinked — their new projects, originally scheduled to be released this Tuesday, have been shuffled to Novembers 11 and 18, respectively — and the few stars who are taking the leap this week will have to do battle with strong holdovers AC/DC (whose new album has already soared past the million-sold mark) and those pesky High School Musical churren. In other words: chin up out there. It’s a slow one this week.

In the immediate wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001, the arrogant pricks who run radio behemoth Clear Channel Communications (which owns and operates well over one thousand stations nationwide) sent to all its outlets a memorandum which strongly suggested they strike from their playlists 166 songs that the company had deemed “lyrically questionable.” Even in such an irrational, knee-jerk climate, the inclusion of more than a few of these songs — the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian,” for instance, which is as harmless as a soda jingle — seemed entirely nonsensical, but none more so than that of John Lennon’s touchstone “Imagine,” one of the most powerful prayers for everlasting peace and unity that has ever been written.

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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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I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: in the wild madness that is the contemporary music scene, the toughest hurdle to cross must be crafting a stellar follow-up after your debut scores a bullseye. (Like, for instance, aren’t you just dying to see what fresh magic The Fray and Amy Winehouse and Snow Patrol are going to conjure to try to top their initial breakthroughs? The old saying — that one about “you have your whole life to write and record your first album, and you have six months to a year to write and record your second” — really is true, and some artists — like David Gray, who followed up his stunning starburst White Ladder with the even stronger A New Day at Midnight; or Train, whose magnificent thunderbolt “Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)” blasted them right past the dreaded sophomore slump — navigate that pressure more gracefully than others.)

Add to the former category San Diego rock band Augustana, whose blisteringly brilliant 2005 debut album All the Stars and Boulevards was one for the time capsule. Led by the surprise radio smash “Boston” — I defy you to name me another top 40 radio staple from the last decade that has no chorus whatsoever — and buffered by one boffo song after another, from the sensationally fiery opener “Mayfield” to the devastating album closer “Coffee and Cigarettes” (to say nothing of the socko title track, already on the shortlist of this new century’s very best singles), Boulevards was (and remains) an intoxicating, intricately constructed marvel.

The band (led by the extraordinary Dan Layus, whose wise voice always seems to know just when to slump and just when to soar) has just released Can’t Love, Can’t Hurt, its second full-length effort and quite a worthy successor to Boulevards. While it lacks outright even one individual track that matches the intense power of any of Boulevards‘ MVPs (though the sinewy “Hey Now” and the mournful “Fire” each come awfully damn close), Can’t Squared overflows with the same brand of glorious, bittersweet piano-based melodies that put these guys on the map three years ago. It’s a don’t-fix-what-ain’t-broke triumph for the ultra-talented Layus — for whom stardom seems absolutely predestined — and his comrades, who seem to be just one more radio hit away from the big time and who, at worst, have just proven definitively that their masterful debut was no fluke.