Brandon's Buzz

Would you believe The Fray still hasn’t left my CD player? Luckily, it’s another light one out there this week, because I still have a pile of discs to get through, and if anyone can get me to divert my attention away from Isaac and the boys for a spell, it’s the miraculous woman who gives us the week’s marquee release. Read on:

If you missed it in theaters last fall, make it a point to catch up with Bill Maher’s laugh-riot quasi-documentary Religulous when it arrives on home video this week. A hilariously scathing indictment not of God himself, but rather of the phalanx of fables and parables which have been concocted wholly by human beings in vain and often foolhardy attempts to explain and quantify Him, the film straddles, and with a fierce confidence which sometimes steps a toe or two over the edge, a tricky line between debunking myths and outright mocking them, and while the whole affair gets a little tiresome in the third act (which contains a visit to “Holy Land,” a religion-based theme park whose daily ministrations climax with — I kid you not — a full-scale reenactment of Jesus’ crucifixion), Maher scorches a wide swath of Earth (and admirably so) in a valiant stab at injecting some logic and reason into our collective faith.

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Blessedly, this week is markedly different than the wallet-buster that kicked off this month in high style. (Good thing, too, because I find myself so hopelessly enchanted by The Fray’s riveting new disc — my early favorite song from which is track number five, the gloriously wrenching “Never Say Never” — that I haven’t had a chance to listen to anything else that dropped last week.) Take this breather as a chance to play catch-up, because that’s certainly what the Buzz is gonna be doin’.

(Incidentally, believe it or not, this marks the Buzz’s 200th (!) post. Many, many thanks to all of you who continue to allow this silliness into your daily lives. If you have as much fun reading these musings as I do writing them, we’re all having a gay old time. So to speak.)

On a high following last summer’s surprising and triumphant comeback, legendary country crooner Glen Campbell reminds his fans of the good ol’ days this week with yet another best-of set. Titled simply Greatest Hits, the record includes pretty much all of Campbell’s best-remembered classics — from “Wichita Lineman” to “Galveston” to “Southern Nights” to even “Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in L.A.)” — and all of them are newly (and crisply) remastered. (Misleadingly, they’re called “remixes” here, but don’t be fooled: the songs have just been cleaned up.) Also tossed in for good measure are a pair of tracks — “Times Like These” (a Foo Fighters cover) and “These Days” (a Jackson Browne chestnut) from last summer’s Meet Glen Campbell, the man’s most successful album in three decades. And if you’re looking for some one-stop Glen shopping, the Buzz proclaims you could do far worse than this.

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Well, the week we’ve been looking toward for months finally arrives. All that’s left to do now is pray that the final product is worthy of the breathless anticipation.

From the moment she tore onstage and ripped the roof off the joint belting out Aretha Franklin’s classic chestnut “Since You’ve Been Gone,” former backup singer Melinda Doolittle was my favorite among 2007’s “American Idol” wannabes. When she went down in a devastating, stunning defeat with an unjustified third place finish — shades of Tamyra in season one, and my darling Kim Locke in season two — clearing the way for an easy Jordin Sparks victory, we as a nation wondered if we’d ever see her again. But wonder no more: two years hence, Doolittle returns this week with her long-awaited solo debut, Coming Back to You. The album includes a sultry take on Kathy Troccoli’s underrated classic “If I’m Not in Love” which, even though it doesn’t match the original, is tons better than Faith Hill’s abominable cover of same. Welcome back, Miss Mindy Doo. We’ve missed the hell out of you, girlfriend.

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For as meek and measly, as dull and dreary as January’s slate of music has been so far, the month sure is ending with a hell of a bang. It’s a full week on tap, kids. Live it up:

And now, a very special announcement: the first two seasons of that ridiculously brilliant classic early-’90s sitcom Blossom arrive on DVD this week. Starring the spectacularly spunky Mayim Bialik — who, I just got confirmation today, will be appearing on Brandon’s Buzz Radio next week to promote this very release — as an unusually perceptive pre-teen swimming upstream against both a screwy (yet oddly loving) family — musician parents, one who stuck around (the dad, played to perfection by the hilarious Ted Wass) and one who hightailed it to Gay Paree (the mom, the gloriously gorgeous Melissa Manchester); and a pair of brothers, one ditzy (Joey Lawrence, playing dumb to the hilt, honey) and one drunk (Michael Stoyanov, edgy, ditto) — and the onset of puberty, the show’s crackerjack ensemble also grew to include the terrific Jenna von Oy (as Blossom’s best friend Six — as in, the number of beers it took to conceive her, she helpfully reveals in the pilot) and the dashing David Lascher as Blossom’s steady boyfriend Vinnie. Back in the day, “Blossom” was the butt of a great many jokes because of its occasional lapses into preachy pretentiousness, but it’s quite worth the effort for a chance to watch this cast play nimbly off of each other. As blatant a precursor to the twin triumphs that were “Dawson’s Creek” and “Felicity” as can be found, it’s high damn time this show made it to DVD. Buy it at once.

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I wrote the majority of what follows last night while flying home from Las Vegas (where I managed to enjoy a weekend of enormous fun and mirth wholly in spite of the fact that I failed to win as much as a penny), so if this week’s record store report seems a bit incoherent, blame the oversized slice of Sbarro pizza I scarfed down at the airport, which — though it tasted utterly divine going down — gave me the worst case of heartburn I can ever recall.

She has strayed away from that formula in recent years, but there’s no question that Mariah Carey made her name belting out sappy love songs — and the schmaltzier, the better, especially in those early years.  Just in time for Valentine’s Day, Carey has assembled eighteen of her best-remembered slow jams (line ’em up:  from “Vision of Love” and “Love Takes Time” up through “One Sweet Day” and even “Thank God I Found You,” they’re all here) and is re-releasing them as simply The Ballads, and while much of this is as disposable as it was then, pay special attention to a pair of tracks — “When You Believe,” her 1998 diva-fest duet with Whitney Houston (who was still remarkably, umm, sane in those years), and “Without You,” Carey’s smashing 1994 cover of Harry Nilsson’s classic — which have aged with stunning and extraordinary grace.

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The march toward February 3 continues in earnest, and while there’s not a hell of a lot here to jump up and down about, you might get reacquainted with a forgotten gem or two this week, and that’s also worth celebrating.

Sizzling cameos from modern blues legends
Doyle Bramhall II and Susan Tedeschi (who just happens to be the bandleader’s wife, wink wink) highlight Already Free, the sixth album from
The Derek Trucks Band. Free — which features a smashing cover of Bob Dylan’s “Down in the Flood” among its eleven originals — finds the band moving away from their bluesy roots and toward a more streamlined, soulful rock sound. I say talent this good is welcome in any capacity.

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Didja miss me?

After a forced hiatus induced by a skittish music industry unwilling to compete with two major holidays for consumers’ attention, the Buzz’s weekly record store report returns in earnest. And while there’s not a hell of a lot upon which to wax eloquent this week — in the runup to The Fray’s thrilling return on February 3, January’s slate is awfully light — it’s a great pleasure just to have something to discuss.

PS: A suggested this post’s headline, and I thought it was cute. So if you don’t like it, flog him.

And now, a band whose music I know positively nothing about: Scottish experimental rockers Glasvegas, whose self-titled debut — a smash overseas last fall — arrives on American shores this week. The album’s Amazon page describes the band’s sound as “equal parts Jesus and Mary Chain, Elvis, and Phil Spector” combined with ’60s girl pop and doo-wop influences. Kids, I can totally get with that. (Plus: bonus points for that ultra-cool band name.)

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The last of 2008’s high profile releases arrive this week, and while it almost certainly won’t be enough to rescue the year from its commercial (if not quality) doldrums, it’s comforting to note that at least artists are still trying.

Released at the height of that nauseating emo movement that swept through the first half of this decade, their self-titled 2003 debut produced the radio hit “Swing, Swing” and seemed like the biggest flash in the pan this side of Marcy Playground. Thankfully, their brilliant 2005 sophomore effort changed all that: led by a trio of stickily melodic megasmashes (most notably the magnificent pop-driven title track) and uniformly terrific vocal work from lead singer Tyson Ritter, Move Along made them instant players in a crowded field. This week, The All-American Rejects return with their third album, When the World Comes Down. The lead single “Gives You Hell” fairly admirably splits the difference between the two distinct halves of their musical personality, and while these guys — much like Kings of Leon, who made an essentially identical choice and came up holding nothin’ but aces with their breakneck masterpiece Only By the Night — are taking no end of flak from their critics for pushing their sound in a more commercial direction, I say when the music sounds this good, get the hell over it already.

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A major computer malfunction has kept the Buzz inactive for the past few days, but we’re back and better than ever, just in time for this week’s record store report. It’s another slow one out there, kids, but there are some gems hidden in the rough.

Continuing in their ongoing quest to sucker us into purchasing the exact same material — these guys have as many live albums as they do studio ones! — as often as they possibly can, those crafty fools of Maroon 5 unleash their latest project Call and Response this week. A collection of remixes, Response features radically reworked versions of the band’s massive radio hits and well-loved album tracks, and while Sherry Ann will testify that I’m all for a tasteful remix, I’m just not quite sure the world needs to be able to dance to “She Will Be Loved” (as masterfully heart-wrenching a ballad as has been recorded this decade) or “Better That We Break” or “Goodnight Goodnight.” (Does that make me crazy?) We’ll see.

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A ridiculously easy week to kick off the year’s final month, as the phalanx of November releases continue jockeying for position on the march toward Christmas morning and only one major release dares to leap into that pack. Careful, though: that one major release is a biggie, boys and girls.

Hot on the heels of March’s Pretty. Odd., the sturdy follow-up to the platinum smash debut A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out, emo sensations Panic at the Disco offer up their first live album, the CD/DVD set Live in Chicago. The hits — namely “I Write Sins Not Tragedies” and “The Only Difference Between Martyrdom and Suicide is Press Coverage” — are here, as well as music videos and a documentary chronicling their latest tour, from which this recording originates.

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A number of this week’s high-profile releases are dropping a day early to get a jump on the pre-Thanksgiving shopping frenzy, and though there are still a handful of A-listers in the pipeline — Miss Britney next week, and Fall Out Boy on December 16, most notably — what follows represents the meat and potatoes of ’08’s holiday slate of music. Eat up, kids.

His last American album — the unfairly ignored The Lead and How to Swing It, which featured a knockout guest appearance, done as a favor to her record label, by one Tori Amos — was released fourteen years ago, and while 1999’s Reload was an overseas blockbuster, he’s been off the radar for most of the last decade. But that all changes this week, as ’60s icon Tom Jones, the man whose slick swagger practically invented the term “blue-eyed soul,” returns with his much-hyped comeback effort, 24 Hours. Emboldened both by the back-to-basics return to form of Neil Diamond, and by the retro-soul explosion touched off by Amy Winehouse, Jones looks to find the sailing fairly smooth. All he’s gotta do now is deliver a great album.

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The economic news gets bleaker and bleaker, but lucky for us, the names get bigger and better in the music world, as a handful of the year’s most anticipated releases make their arrival in record stores across the land this week. I’m telling you, if this slate doesn’t jumpstart the holiday shopping season, nothing will.

Two compact discs and one digital video disc would seem to be adequate acreage in which to assemble The Definitive Rod Stewart, and, indeed, things go swimmingly on the audio side of this project: evenly split between his hedonistic years (the mid-to-late seventies, which yielded such classics as “Hot Legs,” “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” and “Tonight’s the Night”) and his more grown-up ones (late eighties, early nineties, which gave us a string of triumphs capped by the monumentally staggering cover of Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train”), the two CDs very effectively cover a wide swath of Stewart’s legendary career. (For good measure, the good folks at Rhino Records who oversaw this collection even threw in Stewart’s shattering (and super-rare) cover of “Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda)” — another Waits classic, that — which, heretofore, has only been available in America as a b-side.

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So, we finally have a new president, which means we can finally get back to the important stuff: what we’ll be listening to when we realize that the cesspool of American politics will likely do to him exactly what it did to most of the rest of ’em. Lucky for us, we’ll always have magnificent music on which to fall back.

Speaking of our new president, a compilation album which was commissioned Barack Obama’s campaign (and which, heretofore, was only available with a donation to the campaign’s website) has been granted a mass release.
Yes We Can: Voices of a Grassroots Movement features previously released tracks from Sheryl Crow, John Mayer, and Stevie Wonder, among others, as well as a new track from John Legend (an impassioned cover of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)”) and a new collaboration — their second — between Kanye West and Maroon 5’s lead singer Adam Levine.

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