Brandon's Buzz

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.

It’s another slow one out there, with an anticipated DVD set as this week’s must-own item. Live it up:

The debut on DVD of season one of the all-time classic CBS sitcom Designing Women back in May filled me with such joy that I couldn’t fathom what could possibly match that sensation. That is, until I bought the four-disc set for season two yesterday morning. Loaded with classic episodes from the 1987-1988 season — including “Dash Goff, the Writer” (which introduced Gerald McRaney as Suzanne Sugarbaker’s writer’s-blocked ex-husband), “Reservations for Eight” (in which a seemingly innocent ski trip for the show’s four couples devolves into an all-out battle of the sexes), and the Emmy-nominated “Killing All the Right People” (network series television’s first and best stab at dealing with the AIDS crisis) — and one of the most stunning ensembles of both characters and actors to have ever found its way onto a prime-time lineup. If all you know of this show are the horridly butchered reruns that pop up urry now and again on TV Land, dive in and watch this brilliance as it was originally presented. I swear you’ll laugh yourself silly.

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A and I have embarked on an amazing road trip to sunny, mountain-y Colorado, so this section of this week’s record store report comes to you on location from a lovely bed and breakfast just south of Cripple Creek (the state’s premier gambling mecca, from which I’m happy to report I made off with a cumulative total of $117 last night, thanks to a series of atypically shrewd choices at the roulette table as well as a shockingly loose Monopoly slot machine). I’m sitting out on the second floor veranda typing these very words, and I can’t even put into words the graceful glory of the view beyond this deck’s rails. And I certainly can’t think of three more astoundingly good artists than these to provide this morning with an appropriate soundtrack:

 

In just a handful of months, when we’re all counting our lists (and checking them twice, natch) of this decade’s finest achievements in music, and happily hurling hosannas upon the heads of those responsible for same, better believe that two of the names you’re going to hear invoked more than once — at least on this compiler’s list — are David Gray and
Michelle Branch, which brings me to wonder all the more if it’s fate, coincidence, or just sweet, stunning serendipity that they have just concurrently released their long-awaited new singles. I happened to catch Gray’s latest effort, the masterfully taut “Fugitive,”  playing on KGSR a few weeks ago, and my first impression honestly wasn’t so hot. I couldn’t be more thrilled to reveal to you now how foolishly silly that knee-jerk analysis was: the track, which teases Gray’s forthcoming seventh studio album Draw the Line (which is due September 22, and which features a sure-to-be-spine-tingling duet with the queen herself, my divine Annie Lennox, and if that’s not enough to impel to you to camp out in front of your favorite record store, I don’t know what could), picks up right where his shattering 2005 masterpiece Life in Slow Motion left off, and finds Gray dabbling in and pulling from an ever more lushly adventurous palette of instrumentation. One listen to this reminds with such powerful precision why Gray remains the finest lyricist of this (or perhaps any) generation. As for Ms. Branch, her third solo album, Everything Comes and Goes, has bounced on and off the release schedule for most of the past two years, and while there is still no firm date for its arrival this fall, we at least have a delectable new morsel with which to whet our appetites, with her crazy-catchy latest single “Sooner or Later,”  which thankfully finds her continuing down the path she began blazing with The Wreckers, the country duo she founded three years ago with pal Jessica Harp. The band is currently on an indefinite hiatus while Harp and Branch tend to their solo careers, but it’s clear from “Sooner” that Branch has taken Nashville into her bones. And whether they realize it or not, Nashville is all the better for it.

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Unless new material from Kristinia DeBarge and/or that High School Musical moppet Ashley Tisdale float your boat, this week’s new release slate is practically non-existent. No matter: this has been a fairly robust season for great new music, which always increases the odds that worthy material will slip through the cracks of your consciousness. So in lieu of a typical record store report this week, allow the Buzz to help you thresh the wheat from the chaff of summer ’09:

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This coming Tuesday is my thirty-third birthday, and outside of having a nice dinner (and perhaps a soupcon of post-meal canoodling) with A, I intend to spend it doing my favorite activity on this planet: music shopping. Live it up, y’all — there’s some terrific stuff hitting stores this week:

Admire this gal’s gumption if nothing else: Brooke White, the angelic young lady who eternally captured the hearts of most of us “Idol” freaks with her ethereal, ebullient musical stylings during season seven — YouTube her astonishing take on “I Am… I Said” during Neil Diamond week from last year, and just try to convince me you don’t ache for her with every fiber of your existence — has chosen to include on
High Hopes and Heartbreak, her hotly-anticipated post-“Idol” debut, a sweetly mellow (and utterly fascinating) cover of Kings of Leon’s transcendent epic smash “Use Somebody,” a decision that has Sherry Ann utterly aghast. (And she doesn’t even like KOL that much!) As a well-documented fan of that album (and of that song), I wouldn’t normally advocate this kind of thing, but I think the fact that White — whose easy, effortless lilt is about a hundred million miles away from Caleb Followill’s pained (if undeniably compelling) yowl — can put her own spin on an instantly iconic rock tune and hold her own doing so proves that a truly great song can withstand whatever the hell you throw at it. The Buzz loves ya, Brooke baby.

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As the world continues snapping up Michael Jackson recordings of any stripe — a fact which stands as heartening evidence that people can still be compelled to purchase actual records given the right circumstance — there’s not much happening on the new release wall this week. Chalk it up to the July doldrums:

The “Idol” cabal is certainly having itself a kick-ass summer to here: Miss Kelly’s back with a spectacular album that has entirely eradicated the stench of the leaden effort which immediately precedes it in her discography; spunky li’l Jordan Sparks has blasted back to the foreground with her fabulous smash “Battlefield,” a brilliantly bombastic Ryan Tedder tune about which not nearly enough Buzz ink has been spilled (a situation that I’ll set about rectifying next week, when the full album drops); and my beloved Brooke White offers me the greatest birthday present fathomable next week with the release of her long-awaited post-“Idol” effort High Hopes and Heartbreak, which is teased by the bouncy sing-along track “Radio Radio.” And then there’s Chris and the boys from Daughtry, who have set top 40 radio ablaze all over again this summer with the fiercely melodic “No Surprise,” the terrific lead single from the band’s sophomore record Leave This Town. Even though he can be a tad too pompous for his own good, and his sideburns more often than not tend toward the bizarre, there’s no denying that Chris is one hell of an engaging performer, and because his debut was such a masterfully executed commercial triumph, there’s little reason to believe that album number two will deviate radically from such a winning formula. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (If you’re so inclined, pick Town up at Target, whose edition comes bundled with a bonus DVD containing the band’s six videos, including the new clip for “No Surprise.”)

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Not so much happening out there in musicland this week, so please forgive the short and sweet record store report. (And don’t forget: with new stuff on the horizon from Daughtry, Reba, my beloved Brooke White, and Sweet & Hoffs 2.0, summer ’09 is far from over, kids, so enjoy this relative breather.)

• One of the great underrated American bands of the past
  decade receives a gorgeous career retrospective this week with
  Music from the North Country: The Jayhawks Anthology. (And, yes, their classic singles “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and
  “Save It for a Rainy Day” are most definitely front and center.)

 

• Hot on the heels of a big screen smash, which has spawned the
  surprise soundtrack hit “The Climb,” cute li’l Miley Cyrus is back already with Hannah Montana, Volume 3, the latest collection of songs from the Disney Channel’s cash cow.

 

• And finally, this week brings another visit from Jay Farrar
  and the brilliant boys of Son Volt, who drop their sixth album,
  American Central Dust. Methinks it’ll be quite hard to top their terrific 2006 effort The Search, which featured a spine-tingling cameo from the dynamite Shannon McNally, but if anyone’s up to the task, it’s the very gentlemen who gave us the scorching 1996 rock radio classic “Drown,” which remains one of the best songs in the history of ever. Count me in.

Summer’s most highly anticipated record — at least for the Buzz’s money — arrives in stores this week, and if the first single is any indication, we’re about to drown in a cascade of fabulousness. Read on:

One of the finest female voices in the history of country music, the incredible and endlessly fascinating Tanya Tucker, makes a long-awaited comeback this week with My Turn, her first album in eight years. Turn finds Tucker — who has never sounded better, and that’s saying something! — turning the tables on the music men she has long admired by covering some of their best-known tunes. Among the highlights: a playful take on Charley Pride’s classic “Is Anybody Going to San Antone?” and a slightly mellow version of Merle Haggard’s “Ramblin’ Fever,” as well as what is quite possibly the best cover of Eddy Arnold’s “You Don’t Know Me” since Jann Arden’s devastating one twelve years ago.

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The Buzz’s record store report celebrates its one-year anniversary this week with some welcome new visits from some of this author’s all-time favorite artists. Can’t think of a better way to mark the occasion.

With painfully earnest vocal work from the terrific Emerson Hart, and with sensationally radio-ready angst-ridden fare like their 1997 crossover debut smash “If You Could Only See,” they seemed a fair bet for megastardom. Problem was, so did all the other bands — Third Eye Blind, Sister Hazel, The Wallflowers, Son Volt — with whom they emerged from the post-grunge haze of the late ’90s, and after three albums and a handful of well-received singles which nonetheless failed to capture the magic of their breakthrough, they called it quits, and this week, you can find the highlights of their discography streamlined into one disc with A Casual Affair: The Best of Tonic. Don’t miss the inexplicably ignored 1999 singles “You Wanted More” and “Mean to Me” to get a sense of the potential these guys certainly owned, and, as with last week’s Wallflowers best-of set, the Best Buy version of Casual comes bundled with a bonus DVD, containing five of Tonic’s music videos.

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A plethora of greatest hits collections punctuates this week’s (inexcusably tardy) record store report. Take a look:

They always deserved a great deal more commercial success than they managed to achieve, and this week, Jakob Dylan’s acclaimed ’90s band The Wallflowers receive their first career-spanning best-of set with the new 16-track Collected: 1996-2005. Everything you’d expect to be here is, from the band’s terrific breakthrough smashes “6th Avenue Heartache” (which features a heartbreaking, song-making harmony vocal from head Crow Counter Adam Duritz) and “One Headlight” (which, in retrospect, set a bar of triumph they’d never be able to clear again) to great lesser-known later singles like “Sleepwalker” and “When You’re On Top.” (And if you pick this up at Best Buy, you get a bonus DVD of Wallflowers videos.)

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It’s exceedingly quiet out there in musicland this week, which gives you a perfect opportunity to catch up on some great recent records (Dave Matthews Band and Mat Kearney, to name but two) that may have slipped past your consciousness. If you must go record shopping this week, here’s what you’ll find on the new release wall:

Fresh off the brilliant remastering of her 1997 masterwork Blue Roses from the Moons, one of the finest songwriters in the history of music, the spectacular Nanci Griffith, is back this week with The Loving Kind, her nineteenth studio album (and her first of original material since 2005’s sweet Hearts in Mind). Kind finds Griffith delving into some politically charged topics, with a diatribe against Dubya (“Still Life”), an angry rant against capital punishment (“Not Innocent Enough,” a duet with musician John Prine), and, in the lovely title track, a remembrance of the Supreme Court case which made interracial marriage legal in this country. Griffith also takes a moment to pay tribute to her late mentor Townes Van Zandt in the album’s emotional high point,
“Up Against the Rain.”

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June kicks off with a pair of highly-anticipated returns and yet another dip into the catalog of an artist whose posthumous output has far exceeded what he managed to produce during his short time on this planet. Read on:

He only released one album (the amazing Grace) in his lifetime — he was recording number two when he accidentally drowned in Memphis at the heartbreakingly tender age of 30 — but his influence continues to be felt today on artists as varied as Rufus Wainwright, Radiohead, Duncan Sheik, even Kings of Leon. And in the year in which we commemorate the fifteenth anniversary of that one album’s original release, a new three-disc set, entitled Grace Around the World, arrives to reveal yet more of Jeff Buckley‘s devastating brilliance. The collection’s first two discs document, on both CD and DVD, the highlights of the two-year world tour upon which Buckley embarked to promote the record, and the third disc contains the award-winning documentary Amazing Grace, which chronicles the enduring legacy of Buckley’s tragically brief career and life.

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We close out May with only a handful of major releases, but don’t be fooled by quantity this week: they’re diamonds, all.

Island Def Jam teams up with those mad geniuses over at Ultra Records this week for the sterling new compilation Just Dance, and the star power contained herein is mighty impressive: remixes from The Killers (with Armin Van Buuren’s strong reworking of their trippy gem “Human”), Lionel Richie (with his terrific new single “Just Go”), Rihanna (the painfully catchy “Disturbia”), and Duffy (the instant classic “Mercy”) pop up alongside the likes of Pitbull (who offers up his irresistibly stupid new smash “I Know You Want Me”) and my old fave Anastacia (back, thankfully, with a brilliant new single, “Absolutely Positively”), and while, sadly (and a bit misleadingly, given the album’s title), my new fave Lady GaGa is nowhere to be found on this disc, the intoxicating spirit and sense of fun that she has brought roaring back to the radio is alive and well all over it.

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