The Twilight books and films seem to have been created for tween girls — so it’s only fitting that, for this review of the New Moon soundtrack, Ted Asregadoo turned to a panel of 13-year-olds.
Artie Lange has been a core cast member of the Howard Stern radio show for eight years. Even if you are not a Stern listener, you may have encountered Lange as a regular on Mad TV, or through one of his other, often controversial television appearances. He is also the author of the best-selling memoir Too Fat To Fish, which was published earlier this year. Lange has just released his first comedy album, the aptly titled Jack and Coke (Shout Factory).
As a result of his celebrity, Lange has fought a very public battle with addiction over the years. He’s been known to miss work at his day job with Stern, or to fall asleep at work if he does make it in. It’s not just his comedy that’s edgy and raw. His life is lived right on that same ragged edge. The thing is, it’s nearly impossible to dislike the guy, and you can’t help but find yourself rooting for him through all of his struggles. He can have you laughing uproariously with his tales of hookers and eight-balls, and in the next moment have you near tears as he talks about his late father.
Jack and Coke is, as you might expect, profane, politically incorrect, vulgar, and yes, very funny. Any comedian who begins his set with the words, “I’m glad Heath Ledger died, and I’ll tell you why,” is prepared to take some chances. Lange follows that with a rather explicit description of his own alleged audition for Brokeback Mountain. For him, there is no idol too sacred to smash, no pretentious balloons that he’s unwilling to put a pin in, and no thought that needs to remain unexpressed. It goes without saying that if you’re easily offended, Jack and Coke is not for you. (more…)
One of the earlier “name artist” interviews in my writing career came when I spoke with Peter Cetera about the release of his fourth solo album, World Falling Down. During our talk, he complained about the way he’d been pigeonholed as a soft rocker, and blamed the label for continually releasing ballads as singles when he really wanted to mix things up with more uptempo tracks. It was the fall of 1992, and I think Cetera understood the shift that was taking place in music; he joked about not being on MTV anymore, mused about strapping on his bass and going back on tour, and said he missed the “yuks” of being in a band like Chicago.
As it turned out, World Falling Down was Cetera’s final album for Warner Bros., and when he resurfaced three years later with One Clear Voice, his debut for the short-lived indie label River North, I expected to hear the sound of an artist freed from his corporate shackles — not a rock album, certainly, but something that would reflect more sides of his personality. If you’re one of the few people who’s ever listened to Voice, you know this isn’t the case; it’s as mannered an album as Cetera’s ever released, as is its 2001 follow-up, Another Perfect World. As ambivalent as he might have seemed about his image, Cetera’s either unwilling or unable to break it. For the sake of his emotional well-being, I hope it’s the former — and I can’t help but think of Cetera whenever I listen to John Mayer. (more…)
Earlier this week, I posted an item to Twitter (sorry, I refuse to use the word ‘tweeted’ in regard to any action I’ve ever taken) saying that I was listening to Rhino’s latest box set, The Doors: Live in New York. The response I got was immediate, negative in tone, and came from two colleagues who know a little something about music. One took a shot at Jim Morrison, the other at drummer John Densmore. The subject of the Doors has always been, and apparently still is, a provocative one. Battle lines are drawn. Feelings are strong on both sides. In the end, the fact that a simple mention of the band evokes such reaction, 40 years after the fact, is itself commentary on the band’s legacy.
Madison Square Garden opened in 1968, the fourth building in New York City to bear that name. In addition to the world famous arena, home to the New York Knicks, and New York Rangers, and the site of many legendary concerts, the complex includes what was then called the Felt Forum. The theater, which can seat up to 5,600 people for concerts, was named after then-Garden president Irving Felt.
On January 17 and 18, 1970, the Doors showed up to play four shows, two a night, at the Felt Forum. In 1969, they were one of the first rock bands to play Madison Square Garden itself, but opted to play the smaller Forum the next time around in order to recapture the intimacy with the audience that had characterized their early career, and to take advantage of the superior acoustics that the Felt Forum offered. It was just a few weeks before their album Morrison Hotel would be released. (more…)
How much do you know about Vic Chesnutt? You might know that he currently resides in Athens, GA, and that his first two albums were produced by that city’s most famous citizen, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. You might also know that Chesnutt was left partially paralyzed following a car accident in 1983, and that 1996 saw the release of Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation, a tribute to Chesnutt. The album featured covers of Chesnutt’s songs by the likes of Madonna, Garbage, REM, the Smashing Pumpkins, and Live. Chesnutt has collaborated with Widespread Panic, Lambchop, Bill Frisell, among others, and he’s released over a dozen albums on various labels over the years.
Skitter On Take-Off is Chesnutt’s first album for Vapor Records. It was produced by indie legend Jonathan Richman and his drummer Tommy Larkin, and they had a very definite idea of how they wanted the album to sound. According to Richman, “We were both thinking that the way to get the feeling for Vic as a listener was to hear just Vic — no arrangements, no guest guitar solos, no “ironic” touches or anything else to cloud his voice or his poetry.” The end result is an album that features Chesnutt on guitar and vocals, Richman on guitar and harmonium, and Larkin on drums. It was recorded completely live, and there were no overdubs. (more…)
When Norah Jones wafted onto the airwaves in 2002, her smoky, jazz-tinged piano pop was a startling breath of fresh air; after four years of Americanized Europop, the idea that the Top 40 still had room for someone singing and playing without artifice almost felt revolutionary. Which is a joke, really, because there’s nothing the slightest bit revolutionary about Jones’ debut, Come Away with Me — but it did herald a macchiato-scented tsunami of exquisitely tasteful artists whose ubiquity threatened to turn Jones into a joke before she really got started.
This would be a lot to deal with for any artist, but it seemed like even more of an annoyance for Jones; she had bigger ambitions than a lifetime of “Come Away with Me” clones, but she looked and sounded like a girl who belonged behind a piano, crooning tasteful ballads. It didn’t help that her first tour seemed to find her in a perpetual state of stage fright, or that her voice wouldn’t let her get away with sounding anything but beautiful.
She’s certainly been willing to try, however, both on her own albums — 2004’s Feels Like Home and 2007’s Not Too Late represented subtle variations on the theme of her gazillion-selling debut — and in a series of increasingly bizarro side projects and cameo appearances. The past few years have found Jones singing (occasionally profane) hooks for a wide variety of artists, including Q-Tip, the Lonely Island, and Mike Patton’s Peeping Tom, as well as recording with country/folk hooligans the Little Willies and her punk band, El Madmo. When word got out that Jones had mostly abandoned her piano and taken up guitar for her fourth release, The Fall — and worked with a cast of characters including Ryan Adams, Will Sheff, Marc Ribot, and producer Jacquire King — it was pegged as her “rock album,” and maybe even the full-on gonzo record she seemed to be hinting at. (more…)
She’s released six studio albums in the last 16 years, and none of them have sold fewer than half a million copies. Regardless of how you feel about Sheryl Crow’s music — and my own feelings aren’t terribly warm — in purely commercial terms, she’s one of the most important artists of the last decade and change, and whatever her own artistic merits might be, her success helped open the floodgates for other female singer/songwriters during a time when the pop landscape was more male-dominated than ever. It all started with 1993’s Tuesday Night Music Club, which receives the deluxe reissue treatment from Universal this week, adding a disc of non-album tracks, B-sides, and unreleased material to the original album, plus a DVD containing every TNMC video and a new documentary.
She’s pop/rock royalty now, but in the early ’90s, Sheryl Crow was teetering on the edge of becoming a music business casualty; her greatest claim to fame was her stint as a backup vocalist on Michael Jackson’s Bad tour, and her intended debut album had been rejected by her label. Add all this to pop music’s generally jaded vibe at the time, and it isn’t hard to see how Crow could fall in with a group of ferociously talented burnouts looking for a little low-stakes jamming between dispiriting corporate gigs. Thus was born the Tuesday Night Music Club, a loose confederacy consisting of David Baerwald, Bill Bottrell, Dan Schwartz, Brian MacLeod, and Crow’s then-boyfriend (and future cult legend), Kevin Gilbert. Crow wasn’t the best songwriter in the bunch, but she was the best singer, and by far the most easily marketable, so it also isn’t hard to see how the sessions quickly turned into woodshedding for Crow’s second pass at her solo debut. (more…)
You’ve heard of West Coast, East Coast, Detroit, and Dirty South rap — and now, if Wale earns the kind of success he seems poised for, you can count on the next platinum wave in hip-hop coming out of Washington, D.C.
He’s been around for a few years, putting out mixtapes and making cameo appearances on other artists’ albums, and has been a fixture on the D.C. scene since he scored a local hit with 2006’s “Dig Dug (Shake It).” For the national audience, though — particularly casual mainstream listeners — Attention Deficit is Wale’s coming out party. Like a lot of parties, it has its dead spots, but not many — it’s a lot more like House Party than House Party 4: Down to the Last Minute.
Wale’s part of the go-go subgenre, which blends hip-hop with elements of the workout funk pioneered by Chuck Brown, expanded by artists like E.U., and pulled into the sampling era by DJ Kool, whose “Let Me Clear My Throat” gave the genre its last real breakout hit. Anyone who’s been paying attention to artists like Wale will probably bristle at the word, but go-go has been making a sort of limited comeback over the last few years, popping up in the work of artists as diverse as Gym Class Heroes and the Roots (whose “Rising Up” features a guest spot from Wale). Through singles like “Dig Dug” and “Breakdown,” Wale has identified himself with go-go, but don’t go into Attention Deficit expecting it to sound like Trouble Funk — or even DJ Kool; he’s always had more on his mind than one style of hip-hop, and as alluded to by this album’s title, he does a fair amount of hopscotching through Deficit’s 14 tracks. (more…)
Trends may change and empires may crumble, but at least one thing always seems to stay the same: Bon goddamn Jovi can’t take a dump without it coming out platinum.
During the great hair metal die-off of the early ’90s, Bon Jovi didn’t exactly seem like the first band that should have seen its career fade into an unpleasant, acid-washed memory — they were huger than huge at their peak, and unlike a lot of their peers, they were always more of a straight-ahead commercial rock band than a metal band toning down its act for the Top 40 — but neither did they seem like they had any real long-term commercial viability. When was the last time you watched the video for “Bad Medicine”? It featured dialogue, enough quick cuts to make you throw up before the one-minute mark, trendy saturated colors, and Sam Kinison. The ’80s should have clamped down on Bon Jovi like a bear trap:
But Bon Jovi didn’t tank in the ’90s. No, you know what they did? They released an album in 1992, just as grunge was building momentum and their name recognition was enough to sell two million copies of Keep the Faith. Then they smartly hid out for the rest of the decade, releasing a greatest-hits compilation (1994’s quadruple-platinum Cross Road) and one studio album (1995’s platinum These Days) before re-emerging in the broken musical landscape of the 21st century with 2000’s double-platinum Crush. (more…)
It’s rather pointless to review an AC/DC box set—you either love the band and have the thing already ordered or on your Christmas list, or you’re not going to bother. Since I am nothing if not a sucker for lost causes, I therefore direct this review to the uninitiated—those who might not “get” how a hard rock band can parlay a single, simple equation (4/4 rhythm + cool riff + screaming vocals x songs about sex) into a 35-year career. Please let me explain. Also, since the band is the collective king of the double-entendre, and such wordplay may be a bit confusing, I shall translate the song titles contained herein, so the uninitiated may better grasp of the meat of the music.
AC/DC songs live and die by the riff—that distinctive, distorted, wicked cool Angus Young guitar figure, roughly the aural equivalent of a he-wolf stalking his mate while thinking about all the other mates he’s going to do later on that night, after he and the other he-wolves have a few beers. Young got better at coming up with these riffs over the years, which leaves lacking some of the previously unreleased Bon Scott-era material collected here on Disc 1.
“Poster I Use for Masturbation” (i.e., “Stick Around”), for example, is built around a snoozer; only Scott’s leering vocal keeps the thing interesting. “Leave Me Alone So I Can Masturbate” (”R.I.P. [Rock in Peace]“) bears no riff whatsoever, unless you count the basic I-IV-V blues chords that chug behind the singer. (more…)
For the follow up to her fine 2007 album Lullagoodbye, Taylor Mills has once against enlisted the help of her Brian Wilson Band colleague Scott Bennett, as well as her husband, drummer Todd Sucherman. Bennett, who was a key collaborator on Wilson’s most recent album That Lucky Old Sun, is responsible for eight of the songs on Under the Surface (Aqua Pulse Records). He and Sucherman produced the album and played all the instruments, save for the flugelhorn and trumpet parts on “I Wanna Stay Home,” and “If We Let Go” which were played by Probyn Gregory, another member of the Wilson Band.
As a songwriter, Bennett often mines the same territory that Bruce Springsteen did on Tunnel of Love, albeit from a pop perspective. His lovers are committed, but at the same time frightened, and unsure of what the future might bring. In Taylor Mills he has found the perfect foil for this material. Mills has a big voice, full of yearning, but she never feels the need to resort to the sort of “vocalizing” that many of the popular divas of the day traffic in. She sings the songs as if the message is more important than any glare that the spotlight might cast on her. It’s a very endearing quality for a singer to possess.
There is nothing overwrought about Under the Surface. In keeping with the effectively direct vocals, everyone involved keeps it simple and to the point. Though nice production touches abound, nothing sounds fussed over. Listen to “Just a Second” to get what I’m talking about. (more…)
Artie Lange has been a core cast member of the Howard Stern radio show for eight years. Even if you are not a Stern listener, you may have encountered Lange as a regular on Mad TV, or through one of his other, often controversial television appearances. He is also the author of the best-selling memoir Too Fat To Fish, which was published earlier this year. Lange has just released his first comedy album, the aptly titled Jack and Coke (Shout Factory).![513p6Hdew9L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/513p6Hdew9L._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "513p6Hdew9L._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
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How much do you know about Vic Chesnutt? You might know that he currently resides in Athens, GA, and that his first two albums were produced by that city’s most famous citizen, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. You might also know that Chesnutt was left partially paralyzed following a car accident in 1983, and that 1996 saw the release of ![61diFLFzdpL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]](http://popdose.com/wp-content/uploads/61diFLFzdpL._SCLZZZZZZZ_1.jpg "61diFLFzdpL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]")
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It’s rather pointless to review an AC/DC box set—you either love the band and have the thing already ordered or on your Christmas list, or you’re not going to bother. Since I am nothing if not a sucker for lost causes, I therefore direct this review to the uninitiated—those who might not “get” how a hard rock band can parlay a single, simple equation (4/4 rhythm + cool riff + screaming vocals x songs about sex) into a 35-year career. Please let me explain. Also, since the band is the collective king of the double-entendre, and such wordplay may be a bit confusing, I shall translate the song titles contained herein, so the uninitiated may better grasp of the meat of the music.
