It’s 2009, kids, and welcome back to another year of Popdose madness. So… How was your holiday season?

Mine was pretty good. In fact, I would say mine was better than it’s been for many years. I involved myself in various “Secret Santa” projects to help assist some of the folks who weren’t going to have anything for their kids during Christmas. It’s easy to dismiss the notion of ‘canceling Christmas’ as a lame plot device for a cheaply animated holiday special, or a sitcom bereft of ideas, or of another Disney scheme to whore out Miley Cyrus (I mean, come on, it’s gone way too far now.) Yet I was surrounded by stories of people not only considering canceling Christmas, but who had no choice.

I did what I could — which, in the grand scheme of things, was like throwing stones into the sea to turn the tide — but the chance to stave off the hardening cynicism of a child or two confronted with harsh realities, if only for one more season, helped to alleviate my own. During this time, though, I was constantly reminded of what I now consider a flat-out American myth. With the disturbance of our current global financial crisis front and center, I could not help but think of those legends of Depression-era generosity, the magnanimous arm-in-arm unification later found in Frank Capra films (critically derided as Capra-corn) and how we know, deep in our gut, it just couldn’t have been that cut and dried.

That was the nice thing about the good ol’ days and their inherent ignorance - you had newspapers to inform you of what was wrong with the world, but aside from that, there was a state of insulation. Sure, you knew times were horribly tough, but it wasn’t shoved in your face like it is today. We have drenched ourselves with so much media and so much information, as well as the need to make things seem as bad as possible to keep the audience glued to the channel or site, that there’s no way we could fashion such an “apple pie, we’re in this together” sort of mythology now, right? Our impression of the past, then, is based upon not what we know, but what we don’t know. Aside from the monologues about Wall Street fat cats plunging from their offices to their deaths, stricken with the reality of a crashing market and the prospect of having to live among the common folk, we are given a sense of camaraderie about the hard-working, upright, moral populace who shared what they had, did what they could for their fellow man and soldiered on with unwavering confidence in a brighter tomorrow, sepia-tones and triumphal background music intact. (more…)

It’s the curse of the debut album: the artist, unsure of who he/she is or what he/she ought to sound like strikes out in all directions — a power ballad here, a blues grinder there, a piano pop-tune way over yonder. The artist can be forgiven for their somewhat schizoid aim since the label has put all the weight of the company, as well as one’s own career path, down on their freshman shoulders. With that in mind, W. Axl Rose is the oldest freshman in the history of music, as his magnum opus Chinese Democracy has finally seen the light of day. The good news is that it isn’t the unmitigated failure we expected, yet it is far from the triumphant return from exodus his handlers would like you to believe.

It is the equivalent of time travel wrapped in aluminum, or vinyl if you so desire, as songs that gestated through the 15-year span in between it and the previous covers album The Spaghetti Incident? (1993) have not been updated to any semblance of modernity. Rose’s flirtation with industrial rock in the early nineties, plainly NIN-fluenced, are left intact and instantly dated as are the tracks that are NU-fluenced. Korn should be proud to hear the presence of down-tuning, hip-hop loop beats and scream chants on a GNR album, but even Linkin Park jumped that train and caught a taxi to emo-town. I suppose we dodged a Rose-colored, mascaraed bullet on that.

But there are a couple songs that I didn’t mind listening to. In fact, if “Better” came on the radio, I might not turn the dial. It has a semblance of the old attitude the band once had, and not too much of the stylistic shout-outs that bog down the rest of the album. “Shackler’s Revenge” survives a disheartening opening to reveal itself as one of the stronger tracks, and because I do have a soft spot for proggish bombast and consider “November Rain” my favorite GNR tune, “There Was A Time” survives the time trials. But where I finished Metallica’s Death Magnetic and thought, “I’ll still listen to Justice and the black album more, but I’ll revisit this occasionally too,” I can only bring myself to clicking off my favorites in Chinese Democracy’s jumble and dumping them into a hard-rock mixtape. The rest of the album is skip-fodder and, considering the majority of my music listening happens in my car, I’d rather play a different CD and keep my eyes on the road. (more…)

A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to see David Byrne live in concert. It was purported to be a celebration of the work he did with Brian Eno, famed producer and musical renegade, encompassing Eno’s production on classic Talking Heads albums as well as their collaborations like My Life In The Bush of Ghosts and a new, currently digital-only release Everything That Happens Will Happen Today. The show was composed of Byrne, a backing band, a trio of backup singers and a trio of interpretive dancers, and while that sounds like a bad, pretentious idea the whole thing came off very entertaining and ended up being a fine night of live music.

Another big plus was the lack of squirrels in the road. Come on, if you go to see bands with an extensive and memorable back-catalog you know about the squirrels. A pace is building, the classics are rolling out and the audience is having a grand old time, then suddenly the performer announces, “We’d like to play something from our new album” and suddenly it’s all screeching brakes and momentum sliding to a halt. Damn squirrels, they’ll do it every time.

That’s what’s so great about the new collaboration: nary a squirrel to be found. All the songs, even if they’re not immediate attention-getters, are very good and surprisingly song-like. I hesitate to use the word ‘conventional’ because it would tend to paint Everything That Happens… as by-the-numbers, which it definitely isn’t. These songs sat side by side with tunes like “I, Zimbra,” “Once In A Lifetime,” and even “Help Me Somebody” and never interrupted the flow, never incurred massive pee-breaks and beer raids. The album is an album, and not an excuse to tour based around weak product, thank God.

The story goes like this: Byrne found himself in the company of Eno unexpectedly, as both hadn’t co-created in awhile. Eno, over the years, made his bones by becoming an ambient artist as well as the big-time producer of several classic albums, including U2’s The Joshua Tree. Byrne mixed his sound with massive multiculturalism and founded the Luaka Bop label. Now here they were in the company of each other and the inevitable happened: one asked the other if they were up for doing something. The result? Eno sent Byrne some instrumentals he had worked up, yet these frames were distinctively song-based. (more…)

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There’s an episode of The Simpsons that, bizarrely, brings Bob Mould to mind. It’s the one where Homer, in an attempt to get some recognition and glory, winds up on the Space Shuttle. All aboard nearly die due to his bumbling, but at the last moment, he jams an inanimate carbon rod into an open hatch door, saving all from being sucked out into space. When he gets back home, who gets the adoration, praise and parade? The rod, that’s who (or what.)

Okay, so I’m stretching the parallel to the thinnest degree here, but consider this: Bob Mould left iconic punk band Hüsker Dü and created one of the finest albums of the 1980s, his solo debut Workbook. Critics nearly broke their collective ankles falling over it, and as well they should. Even with Mould’s rather square-jawed vocal delivery, the pop pops, the emotions are real and the instrumentation is spot-on. That Mould could graduate from the awesome fury that was Hüsker Dü to this was a feat.

Not everyone thought that way, though, certainly not a lot of the diehard Hüsker fans hoping the band would crap out on their Warner Bros. entries and slink back to SST Records with new, angry fire. What should have been more than a notable entry in the catalog of 1989’s releases rather remains that way to this day. I do recall an insurance company picking up the once top-ten modern rock track “See a Little Light” for use in an ad campaign, a move that usually fills me with a sense of disgust and indignation, yet I was actually pleasantly surprised. Someone other than me knows this song, I thought… Well, put one up in the plus column. But like I said before, the whole album is one plus after another. (more…)

A funny thing happened in the middle of the 1990s: Record labels looked into their vaults and found that most of their best selling titles had been in circulation for awhile on CD and, as one would expect, weren’t as exciting to the buying public anymore. Remember that in the initial run of the compact disc labels were suddenly flush with cash, old assets were getting new sales life and all was right with the world. Once they had reached the tipping point where most consumers had CDs of Rumours, Dark Side of the Moon, Sgt. Pepper’s, etc., they had a crucial decision to make. Shall we now go out into the great, wide world of new music acts and fill our rosters with exciting, up and coming talent?

Nah, too much work. Let’s reissue those old CDs again, only this time, we’ll stuff the back nine with B-sides, unreleased tracks and live cuts. It sounds crass, but don’t knock it. It works. The labels did get a kick-up of interest through this process of “double-dipping,” and sometimes it was for the best. Labels like Rykodisc and Rhino took a lot of care in representing classic albums, often bringing them back with better, remastered sound to make the package more palatable to those who had tinny, digitally fraught originals. Other labels took notice and, as you’d expect, the business of the deluxe reissue started booming. CDs wound up with extra tracks best left on the cutting room floor, songs pared with awful guide vocals, blooper reels, inclusions of little to no interest to the average music fan. The Elvis Costello fan has felt the impact the hardest, as Mr. MacManus’ output has rotated from the original Sony Music auspices to the Ryko reissues, then to the Rhino reissues, then to his current home at Universal Music. You could own four separate versions of My Aim Is True, each with its own plusses and minuses, none rising above the rest to definitive status.

Look, I’m a fan and a collector. I’ve been skunked more than once by the “special edition” label. I know what it’s like to buy something only to have it supplanted only a year later by the bigger, better, badder version. To prove my point, I have dedicated this week’s post to some of my favorite special edition extras. These are things the labels would rather we left alone. After all, some of these tracks are the only reason why you ought to repurchase these things, and I’m going all renegade by just plopping them here for your perusal. I’m a rebel and I’ll never, ever be any good. Ready to receive your bonuses? Oh la Saleema! (more…)

The legend goes something like this: a young writer-turned-director is over at Universal Studios taking a tour of the facilities. He’s introduced to another young hotshot fresh off an assignment on Rod Serling’s Night Gallery TV show, who’s in the beginning stages of a TV movie of the week about a man being menaced by a 16-wheeler truck driven by an anonymous party set on destruction, but perhaps the truck is driven by no one at all. In some odd way, the seeds of the blockbuster book and movie Jurassic Park are planted on this occasion. The writer-turned-director, Michael Crichton, and the hotshot TV director, Steven Spielberg, will visit and revisit that theme of being pursued by something faceless, something foreign, and something that inexplicably wants to do harm without just provocation.

Sadly, that’s kind of how Crichton’s life has come to a close as well. He kept his fight with cancer out of the public conversation, but those who regularly stalk the local Barnes & Noble had to figure something was up the past year or so. Crichton was both studious and prolific, his stories steeped in detail and factual bits and pieces. It was that very trait that caused critics to scoff when Spielberg chose to adapt Jurassic Park (1990) for the big screen in 1993, as they couldn’t imagine how one would be able to adapt the author’s genetic ruminations into a plausible summer thriller. (Special effects wizard Stan Winston was instrumental in creating the physical, as opposed to digital, dinosaurs for the movie; he passed away in June due to complications from multiple myeloma, a cancer of the plasma.)

Crichton, for a time, could be counted on to write at least one book a year. His is a name that conjures up a genre in readers’ minds every time they hear it, just as the names King, Koontz, Grisham, and Clancy do. You may not know the actual story you’re going to get, but you know the stage it will likely be set upon. So the infrequency of his output in recent years seemed to be strange. Was it a semi-retirement? Was it a belief that he’d done whatever he wanted — including directing six feature films and creating the Thursday-night television staple ER, now in its 15th and final season — and the time had come to kick back? Now we know.

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Yup, yours truly is taking a week off to get all his ducks in a row. Have you ever tried getting ducks in a row? Damn buggers won’t stand still and it’s not legal to nail their flippers down anymore (Blast you, PETA!)

However, I will take one more shot at reminding everyone that this coming Tuesday is Election Day for America. Please, in the name of all that’s warm, fuzzy and smells like yummy Toll House cookies, do your civic duty and vote. And if you’re a rebel from way up North or way down South and want to crawl ‘cross the border to vote as well, go nuts.

My point is that after 20-something months of campaigning, he said, he said, she said, she said, bridges to nowhere, That One, war torture, Hussein, Joe the Plumber, Average Joe, train rides to D.C., moose field dressing, vilification, fist bumps and a certain Cindy’s scary Wiccan eyes, I’d love it all to be over in just one evening, versus some sick Advent Calendar of Recounts. So get out there, make your voice heard and pray the electoral college doesn’t bitch-slap your opinion straight into the circular file.

Good luck, America, and I’ll see you next week with a monster post full of MP3 goodness! You’ll plotz!

Grab a hold of something, folks, and take a deep breath. Next week is Halloween, the unofficial start of the holiday season. Christmas Club accounts are starting to turn around, desperate retail outlets fearing one of the worst shopping quarters in decades are trying to pump up the good cheer, candy cane colors and “insane year-end prices!” The kids are starting to get in the spirit and while, for some, that means the spirit of getting more than giving, you can’t help but be just a little tweaked when they’re so happy. They don’t know the extremes of bad finance, credit crunch, etc. et. al. I hope that, when they get to my age and position, they’ll never have to.

Another thing that comes with the holidays is holiday music. I won’t go into that too much (we’ll just say there’s a nice lump of something coming in your Popdose stocking soon enough, and leave it at that) but I’ve made no bones about my opinion of such tunes. They’re a hat you can only wear once a year. Even my beloved A Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack sounds slightly screwy in the midsummer heat, don’tcha know, so music of lesser stature and quality definitely doesn’t see the light of day until the temperatures flirt with the 40s. And besides, in my messed-up brain, I associate other music with holidays anyhow. Mostly, they’re involved with gifts received during festivities, but often it’s because they’re things I’d rather listen to any day rather than the standard “Holly jolly, nice ‘n rosy, comfy cozy, shove a fistful of mistletoe up your bunghole” repertoire. Feelin’ all jingle-belly now? Outstanding, let’s begin.

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I was ready — so ready — and fired up to tear into the new AC/DC album like a grizzly bear on chubby hikers. These old guys have been cranking out the same album all career long, including a jump from deceased lead singer Bon Scott to longtime and current singer Brian Johnson. The AC/DC pattern is simply a thudding stomp of a beat, a concise riff, often dumb lyrics based on substances, debauchery, lust and mayhem and a voice that could never work in any other setting. Add in the predictability of material, a chunk of years off, another one of these cheesy Wal-Mart distribution deals and the AC/DC logo becoming a fashion statement as bland as the Nike Swoop and there should have been no reason for me to be kind to Black Ice.

Guess what? It’s not bad.

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