Brandon's Buzz

Believe me here if nowhere else, singers: when gay folks fall madly in love with you, you’re in like Flynn, baby. We are positively undying in our loyalty and devotion to your craft and to your output. We support you when no one else will give you the time of day (how else to explain why you crazy gals Taylor Dayne and Nicki French still have careers?), we love you even when you lose your marbles (and, in some cases, because you lose them, correct, Liza?), and we stay at your side through thick and thin, through addiction and sobriety, through brilliance and boredom.

In honor of Pride month, a prodigious passel of inarguable gay icons have just released new projects for us to devour gratefully. Allow the Buzz to guide you along a tour of these records, replete with snap judgments as to their worthiness and/or lack thereof. (Believe me here, as well: your crazy Uncle Brandon will never knowingly mislead you!)

One of his chosen genre’s true masters, that ever-brilliant wackydoo Moby — from whom we last heard on 2005’s breathless, bracing Hotel — ends an excruciating three-year hiatus with Last Night, a new album of freaky beats and magical jams. Calling his latest effort both a remembrance of and a love letter to New York City’s legendarily liberal 1980s club scene (in whose glory he, as a teenager, used to sneak down from idyllic Connecticut to revel) in the record’s liner notes, Moby himself describes the project with more distinction and strength than I could ever muster, so I’ll temporarily (if not grudgingly) reject the spotlight and give him the floor:

“This record sounds like a night out… with all of the sex and the weirdness and the disorientation and the celebration and the compelling chaos.”

Hey, works for me.

No doubt you’ve heard “4 Minutes,” the much-ballyhooed collaboration with Justin Timberlake and Timbaland that leads off Madonna‘s thirteenth album Hard Candy, everywhere this spring, and while it is, at minimum, a passable track, doesn’t its very existence carry the vague but unmistakable stench of desperation? Something like, “Hi, I’m Madge, I used to be the biggest pop star on the planet, and now I’ve teamed up with the current biggest pop star on the planet so that top 40 radio’ll take me seriously again…”? It’s a fun song, without question, but the album — which also features a wan duet with Kanye West, just to put an exclamation point on the proceedings — is as painfully uneven as Confessions on a Dancefloor and Ray of Light and every other Madonna effort this side of Like a Prayer.

Recovering nicely from the inexcusable disaster that was his second record, 2006’s abominably executed covers project A Thousand Different Ways — honestly, did the world really need a remake of Bad English’s “When I See You Smile”? Of Bryan Adams’ “Everything I Do (I Do It for You)”? Of Paul Young’s “Everytime You Go Away”? Yeah, thought not — the world’s most famous “American Idol” also-ran (and its most notorious closet dweller this side of Seacrest) Clay Aiken is back on track with On My Way Here. Yes, I know I have a lot of nerve mocking Cascada yet promoting Aiken in the same forum, but I’ve always been a hopeless sucker for a big, booming, schmaltzy voice. Which conveniently leads me to…

The brilliantly intuitive Sherry Ann never fails to mock me when I bask in the brazen warmth of Josh Groban‘s tenor. (Her classic go-to is that Groban and his music are marketed exclusively to old women and gay men. My response to that is two-fold: 1. I slide comfortably into no fewer than one of those categories, so the fact that I adore him is entirely permissible, if not requisite; and, 2. Notwithstanding the fact that she is indeed running the gayest household imaginable, she could spit she’s so jealous that neither of those hats fits her head.)  The tracklist for Groban’s new concert CD/DVD set (his third in five years), Awake Live, hews closer than one may prefer to material from his latest studio album (2006’s similarly titled Awake), but any man who can belt this fluidly in a foreign tongue before thousands of worshipful fans deserves (and wins) my immense respect.

Destined to go down in music history as a one-note footnote — thanks to her bizarro 1988 cover of “The Loco-Motion” that, owing to a stunning dearth of quality tuneage that miserably lifeless summer, became a surprise hit — before her ridiculously addictive international megasmash “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” topped the charts in twenty different countries and rocketed her back onto the cultural radar six years ago, Australia’s favorite pop singer Kylie Minogue is back with her tenth studio album (and first in five years), the deliciously offbeat X. The tunes here are as light (if not quite as spongy) as angel food, make no mistake, but don’t fault her for sticking with a foolproof formula that most decidedly works.

Yes, she’s airbrushed to within a millimeter of her life in all the artwork — honest to Jesus, there’s not even a hint of a line on her face — but all the Buzz really cares about is the music, and on that count, that sixtysomething font of fabulousness Donna Summer has completely outdone herself with Crayons, her first album of original material in seventeen years. If you’re expecting another punchline-riddled disco rehash with this project, get over it: incorporating bits of hip hop, techno, and even reggae (don’t miss the title track, a sunny duet with Ziggy Marley), Summer — voice richer than ever — marvelously reminds us why she was, once upon a time, the queen of the Billboard charts. (For good measure, she even tosses in a piano ballad, the smashing “Be Myself Again.”) Crayons is an event not to be missed.

I’ve nothing meaningful to say about Sex and the City, neither the film (haven’t seen it) nor the TV series (caught it only sporadically, and in sanitized syndication, at that) that spawned it. But gay men were instrumental in every facet of its creation (which I know because the pod woman formerly known as Lauren Hutton went on an apeshit crazy tirade on the “Today” show last week when Kathie Lee Gifford asked her a question about the film), so, on that merit alone, its soundtrack companion certainly deserves to close this post. Snoozeworthy material (tracks from those insufferable twits Fergie and Joss Stone) pervades this thing, you can be sure, but there is much here to get excited about, including a new song from (future gay icon) Jennifer Hudson, a fine remix of Nina Simone’s “The Look of Love” cover, new stuff from Jem and The Weepies, and a riveting version of Don Henley’s 1990 classic “The Heart of the Matter,” done here by the marvelous India.Arie (who, one year ago, sent Stephen Bishop’s “It Might Be You” straight to the moon). It’s such a triumph, you can love it and you can face yourself in the mirror (with, wait for it… pride) the next morning.

names dropped with reckless abandon: "American Idol", Bryan Adams, Cascada, Clay Aiken, Don Henley, Donna Summer, India.Arie, Jennifer Hudson, Josh Groban, Justin Timberlake, Kanye West, Kathie Lee Gifford, Kylie Minogue, Lauren Hutton, Madonna, Moby, Nina Simone, Paul Young, Sherry Ann, The Weepies, Timbaland