Brandon's Buzz

All of twenty when he broke through seven years ago with his cocksure summer smash “Fill Me In,” super-suave Brit Craig David is back to take another stab at conquering America. His brilliant 2001 debut Born to Do It launched a trio of radio hits (the terrific “7 Days” and the middling “Walking Away” being the other two) and seemed to herald the arrival of a monumental new talent.

Things didn’t quite work out that way. Lead single “What’s Your Flava?” managed to cause a minor ripple, but David’s 2002 poorly-promoted follow-up Slicker Than Your Average was rushed and sounded like it, and barely went gold despite his debut’s platinum-plus triumph. And minus a stateside release of any kind, 2005’s The Story Goes fared even worse.

But undeterred, David soldiers on. Built around a sizzling David Bowie sample, the spankin’ new club smash “Hot Stuff (Let’s Dance)” beautifully teases Trust Me, which manages to capture all the sexy fun of Born but which also bespeaks the wisdom that only years of dizzying success and wrenching failure can provide. Fewer folks have ever deserved more a second shot at superstardom.

This very day — June 5, 2008 — A is out in Calla-forny celebrating his 29th birthday. He insisted he wasn’t planning on doing anything special, no matter how much I pleaded with him to at least go buy himself a birthday pretzel, or a birthday Jamba Juice, or a birthday slice of Stefano’s Pizza. So I’m asking you all to help me guilt him into treating himself indulgently today. (Oh, and to send along birthday wishes, too!)

Happy 29th, A! We love you in the heart!

While doing a bit of long overdue spring cleaning this evening, I popped into the player a Roxette DVD I stumbled upon at Half Price Books a few weeks back. Instantly, I was blown completely away by the utter magnificence unfurling before me. I didn’t even bother to read the back of the box when I first picked it up; this being from one of my five favorite-ever bands, I simply added it to the stack of items I had already earmarked for purchase and continued shopping, none the wiser to the breathtaking brilliance I was now holding.

These kinds of surprises are the most pleasant ones: The Ballad & The Pop Hits: A Complete Video Collection is a superlative visual accompaniment to the two hits collections (divided as indicated in this DVD’s title) Roxette released in 2004. (The Ballad Hits was the only one of the pair released in this country, and if that fact alone doesn’t make you want to instantly emigrate to Sweden, I s’pose nothing will.) The DVD contains thirty-seven of the band’s music videos, a few dating all the way back to their humble (and hilariously lo-tech) inception in 1986, and pretty much all of them — even 1993’s dopey “Almost Unreal” from the disastrous Super Mario Bros. film — supremely entertaining.

But the real hidden jewels here are a couple of hour-long documentaries which close out the disc. One of them is a riveting recollection of the making of Joyride, Roxette’s 1991 smash second record; the other chronicles the band’s brutal 1995 international tour in support of Crash! Boom! Bang!, a stunning album which the f–king idiots who run American radio refused to play because, somewhere between 1992’s “Spending My Time” (their final domestic top 40 hit) and 1994’s “Sleeping in My Car” (Crash‘s leadoff single), it was inexplicably decided that Roxette had gone hopelessly out of fashion.

You’ll understand how wholly ridiculous is that notion when you spend some time with this DVD, which contains no fewer than ten undeniable pop music masterpieces, each from the minds and mouths of a couple of luminous Swedes — Per and Marie, kind of a European remix of Conway and Loretta — who will forever got the look.