Brandon's Buzz

The wind cries Katy this week, and urrybody figured out a while ago that whomever tried to stand in Miss Perry’s way was gonna get steamrolled. Hence, it’s hardly a pulse-pounder on the new release wall this week. A quick look at the highlights:

• Proving definitively that there’s no such thing as bad press, former American Idol winner Fantasia — fresh off a half-hearted suicide attempt in the wake of adultery allegations — steps up with her third album, Back to Me, which includes the Ryan Tedder-penned
  “Even Angels,” a one-off single from earlier this year.

 

• Christian superstar Natalie Grant is aiming to touch off a
  Love Revolution with her latest disc.

 

• Usher bookends his latest release Raymond vs. Raymond with
  a collection of remixes and b-sides, Versus, which includes guest appearances from Pitbull, Justin Bieber, and Jay-Z.

 

• David Guetta adds four bonus tracks — including new collaborations with Fergie, Madonna, and Kelis — to his smash 2009 album and renames it One Love 2010.

 

• Warner Brothers inaugurates a new series of budget-priced
  best-of sets entitled Top Ten with hits collections from Clay Walker
  and Sixpence None the Richer. (Look for upcoming titles in the series from the likes of Travis Tritt, Dwight Yoakam, and Randy Travis.)

 

• Genre-busting country band Little Big Town return with their
  fourth studio album, The Reason Why.
• The motion picture soundtrack for Drew Barrymore’s upcoming romantic comedy Going the Distance features classic tracks from The Cure and The Pretenders, as well as new tunes from Boxer Rebellion and
  The Airborne Toxic Event.

 

• And finally, the one and only Katy Perry follows up her massive 2008 breakthrough with what promises to be an even bigger retail behemoth, Teenage Dream. The lead single “California Gurls” was juvenile, ridiculous, and catchy as all hell — translation: the perfect summer smash — and the title track is rocketing up the charts right behind it, so buckle in and be prepared for Perry to be inescapable once again.

“Hi! You are the manly man! I hope you will like my cake with strawberries. I want to communicate via email. With hope, Ekaterina.”

— a fun (and certainly flattering, if not entirely accurate) comment which got caught in the Buzz’s spam filter earlier today. (For the record, Ekaterina, I do love strawberry shortcake — all the way down to my toenails, indeed — but alas, I’m taken, and it’s for keeps.)

Court Yard Hounds (featuring Jakob Dylan) — “See You in the Spring”
(from Court Yard Hounds) —

When these goofy, petulant heifers speak, they never fail to make me want to scale the interior walls of my skull trying in vain to quell the resulting brain itch. But when they sing — with or without that woefully ignorant babbling brook Natalie Maines — they never fail to create unfettered magic. (Incidentally, I am the loving boyfriend of a human being who positively detests cold weather of any stripe, and I predict this one’s gonna touch him deeply somewhere beneath the palm fronds and beach sand of his soul.)