Brandon's Buzz

Another jam-packed week is on tap, even if you don’t count the new country album from Jessica Simpson, which also drops on Tuesday.  (My official stance on that is as follows:  The Buzz carries no water for that vapid tramp.)  Don’t waste time reading this paragraph — there is much greatness that awaits you in the previews that follow.

Released without any fanfare in the summer of 1998, a beautifully haunting record called Dressed Up Like Nebraska quietly introduced the world to a bold new talent name of Josh Rouse.  Ten years and eight albums later, Rouse reflects on the last decade of his life with The Best of the Rykodisc Years, a double-disc, 32-track compilation with pulls together highlights (including, thankfully, Nebraska‘s finest track, “Flair”) from that span of time.

Exactly fifty years after first committing her voice to record, Joan Baez is back with her first album in three years, Day After Tomorrow.  Produced by Steve Earle (an artist who certainly shares Baez’s rabble-rousing inclinations), Tomorrow includes material from Tom Waits, my brilliant Patty Griffin (a cover of her devastating “Mary” that, judging by the masterpiece she once turned Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Stones in the Road” into, is sure to be riveting), and Earle himself.

Eleven years ago, Sherry Ann called me up and insisted that I seek out End of the Summer, the then-latest record from a woman whose name I had never heard, the enigmatic and profoundly talented Dar Williams.  It took a fair bit of searching, even in as cosmopolitan a music scene as Austin’s, but I did manage to track it down, and was stunned and amazed by what wafted from the speakers.  (If you’ve never heard “Are You Out There,” the brilliant track that should have made her a superstar, best be you get yourself to and correct that foolishness immediately.)  Williams returns this week with Promised Land, a new record which enlists the vocal talents of Suzanne Vega and Marshall Crenshaw, among others.

She’s spent much of the past fifteen years trying — largely in vain — to step beyond the massive shadow cast by her one huge hit, 1995’s legendary classic “One of Us,” and having long surrendered the notion that she is ever going to recapture that kind of one-in-a-million magic, the bewitching Joan Osborne has settled admirably into a comfortably consistent career, one liberally filled with typically brilliant creativity and fire.  Osborne’s latest, Little Wild One, finds the artist continuing down the country- and folk-influenced path she started down with her last album of original material, 2006’s Pretty Little Stranger, and all I can say, if Wild contains anything even half as earth-shaking as Stranger‘s zenith “What You Are,” that was a smart choice.

The Deluxe Edition monster strikes again:  This time, it’s Chris Daughtry‘s self-titled megasmash — last year’s biggest selling album that in no way involved Hannah Montana or those High School Musical fops — getting the expanded treatment, with four extra tracks — including acoustic renditions of “Home” and current single “What About Now,” as well as a cover of Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time” (about which I can only say:  I’ll approach this with an open mind, Chris, but as much as I kinda sorta like you, you, sir, are no Lou Gramm) — plus a DVD with all five of the album’s music videos, a handful of live performances, and an interview with Chris and his band.  My advice, free of charge:  check out “First Time” on iTunes and skip the rest of this.

His punchline delivery was totally off the wall, and his absurdist style was certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, but the world of stand-up comedy (and the world, period) lost one of its brightest lights three years ago with the tragic death — by accidental overdose, by all accounts — of hilarious cult icon Mitch Hedberg.  The comic’s fans get their final chance to revel in the bizarre beauty of his observational humor this week with the release of Do You Believe in Gosh? Recorded in January 2005, mere weeks before his passing, Gosh finds Hedburg waxing eloquent on such far-ranging topics as the Headless Horseman, that “snake-haired bitch” Medusa, and the etymology of hippopotami.  Seems like a fitting tribute to the off-kilter man who introduced the phrase “with grill marks!” into my and Sherry Ann’s vernacular.

Their 2007 breakthrough As Cruel as School Children became a massive smash on the strength of its two huge hit singles “Cupid’s Chokehold” (which brilliantly sampled Supertramp’s “Breakfast in America” and featured a song-making lead vocal from Fall Out Boy’s frontman Patrick Stump) and “Clothes Off!” (a far less chaste turnabout on Jermaine Stewart’s 1986 classic “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off” that chucked the cherry wine and went directly for the money shot), and following it up may prove to be quite a chore.  But here come those rambunctious Gym Class Heroes to try anyway with their fourth album, The Quilt.

His 1991 country radio classic “Small Town Saturday Night” — “Lucy, you know / the world must be flat! / ‘Cause when people leave town / they never come back….” — singlehandedly made Hal Ketchum one of that decade’s most intriguing artists, which remained true wholly in spite of the fact that nothing he released subsequently — save, perhaps, for 1995’s “Stay Forever,” as fine a love song as you’ve heard from any genre in the past twenty years — has been as satisfying or as successful.  Having battled severe health problems for the past several years, Ketchum is back this week after a five-year hiatus with Father Time, an album containing fourteen original tracks that were written and recorded on the fly in order to craft a loose, organic collection of music.

Featuring a celebrated (and technically dazzling) duet with her father Nat “King” Cole (who had been dead over twenty-five years at that point) which strangely shared top forty real estate with the likes of Metallica and Nirvana in that strange year, 1991’s septuple-platinum triumph Unforgettable… with Love swept that year’s Grammy Awards and cemented Natalie Cole‘s reputation as one of the premier vocalists of her generation.   Now, seventeen years after the fact, Cole returns with what is essentially a sequel; Still Unforgettable contains fourteen more of the elder Cole’s classics — once again done gentle, loving justice by his devoted daughter — and includes another “duet,” this time on Cole’s frisky and fun “Walkin’ My Baby Back Home.”  As the Buzz and its chief architect are both major fans of Miss Natalie, I feel you’ll understand when I say:  “Color.  Me.  Giddy.”

Because she’s one of my favorite people on the face of the planet, don’t be terribly surprised to discover that this week’s most anticipated release comes from the terrific Judge Judy Sheindlin.  Her first DVD — last year’s Justice Served, which featured a pair of “60 Minutes” interviews and a host of outtakes and clips to go alongside nine of the most memorable cases to come across her television bench — was such a triumphant success that she’s back with the new Second to None, a new compilation of idiots and imbeciles of whom America’s Judge makes spectacularly short work.  Judy’s brutally frank take-no-prisoners approach to jurisprudence is a glorious marvel to behold, and her ever-quotable discourses (“beauty fades, dumb is forevah!“) make this a can’t-miss trove of brilliant wisdom and biting hilarity.

names dropped with reckless abandon: Dar Williams, Daughtry, Fall Out Boy, Foreigner, Gym Class Heroes, Hal Ketchum, Jermaine Stewart, Jessica Simpson, Joan Baez, Joan Osborne, Josh Rouse, Judge Judy, Lou Gramm, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Mitch Hedberg, Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole, Patrick Stump, Patty Griffin, Sherry Ann, Steve Earle, Suzanne Vega, Tom Waits