We are now officially in the fourth quarter sales market. Department stores have begun to roll out the Christmas decorations, big summer movies are winding their way to the DVD department and some major releases in music are on the horizon for the all-important time in the retail year. It seemed appropriate, then, for me to discuss some of the most recent new releases in my headphones, one of which comes with a lot of expectation and another that exploded unbidden from out of the blue. Intrigued?

Ben Folds, Way to Normal (Epic)

I’ve been a fan of Folds’s work for a long time but find his solo efforts incredibly uneven. His last release, Songs for Silverman, was a leaden, ballad-heavy affair with very few tracks to really grab hold of. The latest, Way to Normal, should have been a return to form but only half succeeds. Sure, he regains a bit of his bounce and more than a bit of his bite, but the songs come from a sticky place: the dissolution of his third marriage, a relationship that informed most of his previous two albums. What you end up with is a lot of songs that make you feel like a friend has borrowed your ear for a while, relating to you how horrible that witch he used to be with has been. All the while, you have a sneaking suspicion that this friend is hardly as innocent as he claims.

I have no idea about the details of Folds’s personal life or how his marriage came apart. With semi-scathing tunes like “Bitch Went Nuts”, “Errant Dog,” and “You Don’t Know Me,” I frankly don’t want to know. Kiss-off and piss-off songs are common fodder in pop music, but they’re easier to take in smaller doses. They’re also easier on the ears when the production isn’t as abrasive as Dennis Herring’s. Tweedly-sounding synths, canned beat construction, occasional distortions that could be mistaken for blown speakers all attempt to frame the tunes in the most modern way, but become tiresome after a while. Worse, “You Don’t Know Me” employs the wonderful Regina Spektor and gives her nothing to really work with. Spektor, like Folds, has harnessed the power of solo voice and piano to great effect, so it’s really disappointing to find that anyone could have contributed her part on this song. (more…)

DOWNLOAD THE FULL MIX HERE

My copy of Paste magazine came in the mail a couple of weeks ago, and if you don’t know about Paste, they provide readers with a CD sampler in each issue. While checking out the latest offerings on this month’s sampler, one song in particular made me perk up my ears. It’s by a band called HoneyHoney whose song “Little Toy Gun” got quite a few spins in my car last week. The more I listened to the song, the more I played the music geek game of “Spot the influence.” The more I played the game, the more my mind started to find “sound alike” artists, and thus this mix was born!

Etta James, “Something’s Got a Hold On Me”

I could have included the “Oh, I love this song”-inducing “At Last,” but why go with a top-of-the-hour cooker, when you can go with a sleeper and get more mileage out of it? (more…)

So much of our lives are shaped by how we carry ourselves — our self-confidence, if you will. Yet I have come to believe that confidence is actually an indicator of:

a) the ability to convince people you have confidence when, in fact, you don’t, or

b) severe narcissism and a delusional belief in one’s self.

As luck would have it, I once befriended a co-worker, with whom I shared some musical interests, who fell very much into “column B.” He was a guitarist who fancied himself a singer/songwriter and, while his songs were pleasant enough, he had an uncanny knack for writing tunes that keenly captured the essence of songs that already existed. When he played a show and a girl came up afterwards and said that one of his songs sounded like something she’d heard on the radio, but she couldn’t remember what, he took it as a supreme compliment.

I had never met a guy who took such shameless pleasure in talking about himself. At first, I just thought it was because we shared an office and quickly ran out of other things to talk about, but when we ventured out for a night on the town at one of L.A.’s many hotspots where aspiring (and expiring) actresses gather, the night would invariably go a little like so:

He’d spot a couple tramp stamps, wander over, introduce himself, and then challenge the women to get a word in edge-wise over the next couple hours before escorting one “lucky lady” back to his place. (more…)