In which we consider bands so band-like they began their name with the word "band"...
The Band
Coalescing while backing Canadian rock and roll godfather Ronnie Hawkins and the electrified Bob Dylan, an honorific was never necessary for the Band. The name was both humble and arrogant, a nod to the anonymity from which they sprung and a proprietary eponym (like "Kleenex" or "Xerox") for their brand of country rock that, while considerably different from the hits of the late 1960s, formed a template for four decades of edgy would-be folkies. (And, if you want to continue the analogy, probably the first band to popularize anachronistic clothing.)
The Band was comprised of four Canadians and one Yank, but all were masters of Americana, transplanting the mythos and emotional sweep of the rural heartland into the electric age. They were also somewhat unlikely counterculture icons, given their frontier milieu and their associations with "traitor" Dylan (who famously skipped Woodstock; the Band, however, played on). If there's a people's band, pre-E Street division, this is it.
Music From Big Pink introduced the quintet with a bit of songwriting assistance from Dylan. His three co-credits are unsurprisingly some of the best tracks on the record: the opening "Tears of Rage" is actually a slow, melancholy shuffle and a warning that we're going to be dealing with some very raw emotions. In "The Weight," guitarist Robbie Robertson picks up on these cues in a heartsick classic that announces his presence as the group's creative 500-pound gorilla. Robertson certainly didn't have a monopoly on talent in the Band, but "The Weight" is their quintessential song, something so pure and sweet and clear of conviction that you almost forget how achingly sad it is. A sob story about a transient who tries hard to be good, I also dig that it name-checks Nazareth, Pennsylvania, home of the Blue Eagles and C.F. Martin & Company--a.k.a. Martin Guitar, the manufacturer of the popular hollow-body guitars favored by many musicians of the era.
Big Pink has some nice symmetry in its closing number, "I Shall Be Released," another showcase of Dylan's lyrics that cauterizes the wound opened on "Tears of Rage" and offers some hope, however distant.
The rustic feeling is enhanced and the training wheels are removed on The Band, and the result is the group's creative masterwork. A deeper commitment to roots music is obvious through the record from "Across the Great Divide" to "Rag Mama Rag" to the pretty awesome Grateful Dead impression on "Jemima Surrender." Most are probably familiar with "Up On Cripple Creek," an early ode to the quirky dream girls that so captivated the secretly-grounded men of the beat, hippie, punk, New Wave, 'alternative,' and hipster generations. It's easy to get swept up with the narrator of "Creek" as he describes his staunchly loyal, doughnut-in-tea-dipping paramour who, perhaps coincidentally, is not his wife.
The Band balances the jug band work-outs with countrified arias with a tenuous foundation in historical fact - the slinky "King Harvest (Has Surely Come)" and the epic "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." What these songs may lack in verisimilitude (or, um, claims on a higher morality in the case of "Dixie") they make up in verve and tears and gut feeling. There's an urgency I detect on this album, something about many of the tracks that perfectly captures an immediacy that's like sitting in on their original recording sessions. They have a life about them, and "Dixie" is the nerve center.
Two specific things impress me about "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down":
1. It turns me, a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee and detractor of revisionist Southern claims about Civil War history, into putty in old Confederate hands.
2. It was recorded, like the rest of The Band, in Los Angeles. This is kind of like if Jimi Hendrix recorded his version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" in Brussels.
The years after The Band marked an inevitable decline in the face of corporate rock's ascendancy, and the Band had the good sense to bow out after their 1976 swan song, The Last Waltz. The fissures were already showing by 1970, though, with "Stage Fright" capturing a new era of uneasy feelings about the group's sudden fame and fortune.
Robertson had one last epic in him, "Acadian Driftwood," the centerpiece of the mostly-average Northern Lights-Southern Cross. Swapping famous American guilt (devastation of the American South, 1864-1865) for famous Canadian guilt (18th century deportation of Francophone Acadians from Nova Scotia to Louisiana), "Driftwood" takes even more poetic license than "Dixie," but is no less resonant in its lamentation of defeat. On a record that includes interminable synthesizer-driven jams and inexplicable Steely Dan pastiches ("Jupiter Hollow"), "Driftwood" is a jewel.
The extended edition of Northern Lights-Southern Cross also has the unrepentantly religious "Christmas Must Be Tonight," a glorious slice of holiday cheese. And now that we've mentioned treacly, misguided Xmas songs...
Band Aid - "Do They Know It's Christmas"
Band Aid 20 - "Do They Know It's Christmas 2004"
Many things have been said about "Do They Know It's Christmas" - it's pandering and trite, it's problematic, it's self-satisfied, it probably perpetuates the annoying/horrid cultural stereotype of the "starving African," and considering the checkered track history of European Christians intervening in African affairs, do they even care that it's Christmas?
Ultimately, I give Band Aid mastermind (and onscreen Roger Waters surrogate) Bob Geldof the benefit of the doubt. The Boomtown Rats frontman raged for several years against the myopia of the Me Decade and eventually won over many of his peers. It led to the creation of the modern benefit concert template (Live Aid) and was taken as a charitable challenge by musicians across the pond ("We Are the World"). Even naming the project "Band Aid" was an act of self-awareness that demonstrated Geldof's understanding of his very small role in addressing a very complex problem. It's the type of project that will always attract opportunists but as long as they're reciprocating some of that benefit, I don't see any major harm.
The song itself is extremely dated now, with a giggle-inducing spoken word portion stuck in the middle that forever captures some of the flavors-of-the-month (Dad, what's Bananarama?) alongside strange vamping (from Paul McCartney, of all people) and an intensely serious Christmas message from David Bowie that nearly stops the song in its tracks, mostly because he sounds like the only guy on the record besides Geldof who genuinely cares about famine relief. Also, Bono kind of being a dick...feed the world!
Musically, there is no real excuse for "Do They Know It's Christmas 2004" except, perhaps, for Chris Martin to take over the alpha dog vocals from Paul Young and for Dizzee Rascal and the Darkness' Justin Hawkins to do a call-and-response sing-rap. It doesn't even have the spoken word part. The word 'inessential' comes to mind.
Band of Horses
A band at their best when gloomy and anthemic, like the Shins crossed with Explosions in the Sky and scrambled with grits - "The Funeral" (from the debut Everything All the Time) and "Is There A Ghost" (from Cease to Begin) stand out in this regard.
Everything All the Time dances with a peculiar sort of alt-country darkness and as such might be Band of Horses' most interesting record to date, full of "Monsters" come to feed on us and the ministrations of "Wicked Gil" ('helping evil people to say things they show'). But Cease to Begin runs in the opposite direction, flirting with romantic dream pop in the likes of "Detlef Schrempf" (sadly not an ode to the former Mavericks/Pacers/Supersonics/Trailblazers sharpshooter) and "No One's Gonna Love You."
It's worth mentioning that Cease to Begin was recorded after a massive lineup overhaul that left only two original members, Ben Bridwell and Mat Brooke, which may account for the diverse tone of the sophomore record. Also contributing - the money made after "The Funeral" became a hot commodity among music directors for commercials and television shows. Normally I find this annoying, but in this case it couldn't have happened to a better song. And lest we forget their country roots, Band of Horses offers the mid-album stomper "The General Specific."
2010's Infinite Arms continues the slow expansion of the band's music palette but there's something about it that's just too willowy about it for my taste. It's a record tailor-made to grab the attention of the NPR crowd that likes their music alternative but not too abrasive. To oblige, the band tosses in some strings on "Factory" and busts out the Eagles harmonies on "Older" and "Blue Beard." It's still a quality record anchored by Bridwell's wistful vocal, which only helps the group maintain its creative stamp throughout myriad personnel changes and stylistic dalliances.
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
Sunday, February 13, 2011
B-52s to Badfinger
B-52s
A quirky quartet best known for the pop mainstay "Love Shack" and cameos in oddball TV shows and films (Kate Pierson as a blind millionaire in The Adventures of Pete and Pete comes to mind), one could argue that the 'retro' craze finally caught up with the B-52s and their goofy exhortations to "bring your jukebox money" to their acid sock hop.
But if you listen to the seminal B-52s song "Rock Lobster," released 10 years before "Shack," it reveals a band that began as unrepentantly weird New Wavers, detailing a bizarre surf party with a lengthy breakdown of animal noises (my favorite is the narwhal that sounds like a British police siren).
It comes as a shock that the outsider-artists behind "Lobster" and the squealing rave-up "Private Idaho" ("underground like a wild potato/don't go onto the patio") could ever notch such a huge corporate crossover smash. The AIDS-related death of B-52 guitarist Ricky Wilson in 1985 could be pointed to as the beginning of a creative schism and a dampening of the band's original go-go spirit. But that seems like an overreach for the sake of causality. If anything, "Shack" and "Roam" - the two radio hits from 1989's Cosmic Thing - are a kind of tribute to Wilson and re-ignited the band, finally affording them the clout to spread their wild, barely-substantiative kitsch to the masses.
Chief amongst these kitschy delights is the sprechgesang of Fred Schnieder, who perpetually sounds like a square's fevered impression of Mick Jagger. It translates well to parody and has become an indelible piece of the pop culture fabric - my favorite example is an improvisational comedy exercise called "Hey Fred Schnieder, What Are You Doing?" where each player attempts to concoct a wacky non-sequitur in the unmistakable tone and cadence of Schnieder's singing voice.
Twin cannons Pierson and Cindy Wilson aren't slouches either, shining bright on "Roam" - the B-52s' biggest single after "Love Shack."
The Babys - "Back on My Feet Again"
A power-popish band featuring future solo and Bad English hitsmith John Waite and, by the release of "Back on My Feet Again" on 1979's Union Jacks, the future Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain. As a window into the thought process of the guys who would write "Missing You" and "Faithfully," respectively, it ain't much. If anything, it's more revealing of the house style of the Chrysalis label to which the Babys remained signed for their entire 1977-1981 run (and later the home of Huey Lewis and Pat Benetar): punchy, middle-of-the-road, and disturbingly infectious.
Bachman-Turner Overdrive
There is perhaps no greater embodiment of the ironic relationship between the "classic" guitar rock bands of the 1970s and 80s and the modern corporate jingle than Bachman-Turner Overdrive. After starting out as working class rockers from Winnepeg, they were something like standard-bearers for guitar-based pop in the early 1970s, just heavy enough to warrant a sweet logo but not too heavy as to preclude their songs from Top 40 airplay.
Prostrated at the feet of album rock innovators Led Zeppelin and the Who, BTO was nonetheless a singles band. "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" is an obvious Who ripoff, somewhat lackadaisical in its abrupt verse-chorus transitions and haphazard drumming. It was also a Billboard number one. Its laid back vibe hooks you like a drug; if there's a Heaven, this is the song that plays on the escalator in the lobby.
Though today the kids might know it best as "the Office Depot song," there's actually an anti-corporate message in "Takin' Care of Business" (BTO was not fond of fully enunciating its gerunds). It has a clear message about throwing off the shackles of the workaday world and embracing your true passions, no matter how little they pay. Since this is an easy idea to get behind, most people don't notice that BTO is essentially taunting them by confirming that they have achieved this most honored status. They are rich rock musicians and you are not.
To continue the 'Canada's version of the Who' analogy, here's Keith Moon introducing a live version of "Business":
Backstreet Boys
Ah, the Backstreet Boys, the evergreen companions of my weekday afternoons watching the Carson Daly-hosted Total Request Live. I can still name them all...Brian, Nick, Joey, Harpo, Alf, the Fonz, and the mustache guy - Kevin, I think.
Though I jest, I also realize it could have been much worse. I went through the boy band era with an older sister and thus my exposure to the likes of Limp Bizkit and KoRn was minimal. Better to turn out an oversensitive vanity plate than an entitled, surly misogynist.
"As Long As You Love Me" is a ballad of the ferocious desperation and neediness that is BSB's calling card. The clumsy body-morphing video (immortalizing Nick Carter's mushroom head) doesn't improve anything and the entire premise of the song is creepy to me. People who don't care who you are or where you're from or what...you...did when they're trying to hit on you probably have some pretty big skeletons of their own. Just suspicious, is all.
If life was fair, "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" would have taken the piss out of BSB like any other egregiously self-aggrandizing song from a debauched rapper or rock star. Here they are, trumpeting their self-described originality and sexuality and ruining the classic Universal horror movies by doing a ripoff of the "Thriller" dance in the house from Casper, and we let them off the goddamn hook.
Due to some quirky publishing decisions, their self-titled U.S. debut was a compilation of their first two international LPs, and thus you had the group introducing themselves by proclaiming that they were "back." I remember a special on MTV, airing around the premiere of the video for "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)," where the Backstreet Boys counted down their favorite 100 or 50 or something music videos...guess which one was #1? In conclusion, everything about this song is horseshit.
I guess that leaves "I Want It That Way" as the most tolerable BSB song. It is classic pop schmaltz, with a stellar buildup, quotably dumb lyrics ("you are my fire"), and the all-important key change. It is, by its co-writer's own admission, a slick piece of utter nonsense and an unabashed tribute to the boy band songwriting template.
A stellar explication of said template:
Bad Company
A busted Led Zeppelin knockoff, right down to their look. At least they have an excuse - they were managed by Led Zep promoter Peter Grant, whose personal story is a lot more interesting than anything I could write about Bad Company. For a while in high school I was obsessed with sifting for gold among the playlists of classic rock format radio stations. The plodding, interminable "Feel Like Makin' Love" and "Rock 'n Roll Fantasy" are like thick, dried-out clods at the bottom of the pan.
Bad Religion
I first heard Bad Religion through the soundtrack to the video game Crazy Taxi; it was punk only in the sense that owning a Sega Dreamcast in 2000 kind of made you an edgy misfit (note: not really). I don't know a lot about these California hardcore lifers but what I do know, I like.
"Hear It" just dazzles me with its opening riff, which is irrelevant to the rest of the song (this was on the character selection screen...my favorite was Gus). "Ten in 2010" and "Them and Us" are high-energy shots of thrash. I'd like to think that hearing them over and over improved my sense of justice by osmosis. To truly understand, though, requires a lot of further study as they have built a world unto their own in the past 30-plus years. Thus the question: when do punk rock bands start playing the hotel-casino circuit?
Badfinger
No pressure here: only one of the first bands handpicked to be on the Beatles' Apple Records imprint, debuting with a song - "Come and Get It" - written by some nobody named Paul McCartney.
"Will you walk away from a fool and his money?" was a sadly prescient lyric, as creative struggles and financial mismanagement left the band broke after six years. Personal demons eventually decimated Badfinger, as guitarist Pete Ham and bassist/guitarist Tom Evans both committed suicide, unable to bear the stress of the group's seemingly-unending downward spiral. The entire story is chronicled in an exceptional edition of Behind the Music.
As with most power-pop bands, time has been kind to Badfinger's music, especially the oft-covered "Without You" and the bouncy "No Matter What." They weren't the last or the most enduring band to bear the "next Beatles" albatross, but they might have been the most influential in their own right.
A quirky quartet best known for the pop mainstay "Love Shack" and cameos in oddball TV shows and films (Kate Pierson as a blind millionaire in The Adventures of Pete and Pete comes to mind), one could argue that the 'retro' craze finally caught up with the B-52s and their goofy exhortations to "bring your jukebox money" to their acid sock hop.
But if you listen to the seminal B-52s song "Rock Lobster," released 10 years before "Shack," it reveals a band that began as unrepentantly weird New Wavers, detailing a bizarre surf party with a lengthy breakdown of animal noises (my favorite is the narwhal that sounds like a British police siren).
It comes as a shock that the outsider-artists behind "Lobster" and the squealing rave-up "Private Idaho" ("underground like a wild potato/don't go onto the patio") could ever notch such a huge corporate crossover smash. The AIDS-related death of B-52 guitarist Ricky Wilson in 1985 could be pointed to as the beginning of a creative schism and a dampening of the band's original go-go spirit. But that seems like an overreach for the sake of causality. If anything, "Shack" and "Roam" - the two radio hits from 1989's Cosmic Thing - are a kind of tribute to Wilson and re-ignited the band, finally affording them the clout to spread their wild, barely-substantiative kitsch to the masses.
Chief amongst these kitschy delights is the sprechgesang of Fred Schnieder, who perpetually sounds like a square's fevered impression of Mick Jagger. It translates well to parody and has become an indelible piece of the pop culture fabric - my favorite example is an improvisational comedy exercise called "Hey Fred Schnieder, What Are You Doing?" where each player attempts to concoct a wacky non-sequitur in the unmistakable tone and cadence of Schnieder's singing voice.
Twin cannons Pierson and Cindy Wilson aren't slouches either, shining bright on "Roam" - the B-52s' biggest single after "Love Shack."
The Babys - "Back on My Feet Again"
A power-popish band featuring future solo and Bad English hitsmith John Waite and, by the release of "Back on My Feet Again" on 1979's Union Jacks, the future Journey keyboardist Jonathan Cain. As a window into the thought process of the guys who would write "Missing You" and "Faithfully," respectively, it ain't much. If anything, it's more revealing of the house style of the Chrysalis label to which the Babys remained signed for their entire 1977-1981 run (and later the home of Huey Lewis and Pat Benetar): punchy, middle-of-the-road, and disturbingly infectious.
Bachman-Turner Overdrive
There is perhaps no greater embodiment of the ironic relationship between the "classic" guitar rock bands of the 1970s and 80s and the modern corporate jingle than Bachman-Turner Overdrive. After starting out as working class rockers from Winnepeg, they were something like standard-bearers for guitar-based pop in the early 1970s, just heavy enough to warrant a sweet logo but not too heavy as to preclude their songs from Top 40 airplay.
Prostrated at the feet of album rock innovators Led Zeppelin and the Who, BTO was nonetheless a singles band. "You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet" is an obvious Who ripoff, somewhat lackadaisical in its abrupt verse-chorus transitions and haphazard drumming. It was also a Billboard number one. Its laid back vibe hooks you like a drug; if there's a Heaven, this is the song that plays on the escalator in the lobby.
Though today the kids might know it best as "the Office Depot song," there's actually an anti-corporate message in "Takin' Care of Business" (BTO was not fond of fully enunciating its gerunds). It has a clear message about throwing off the shackles of the workaday world and embracing your true passions, no matter how little they pay. Since this is an easy idea to get behind, most people don't notice that BTO is essentially taunting them by confirming that they have achieved this most honored status. They are rich rock musicians and you are not.
To continue the 'Canada's version of the Who' analogy, here's Keith Moon introducing a live version of "Business":
Backstreet Boys
Ah, the Backstreet Boys, the evergreen companions of my weekday afternoons watching the Carson Daly-hosted Total Request Live. I can still name them all...Brian, Nick, Joey, Harpo, Alf, the Fonz, and the mustache guy - Kevin, I think.
Though I jest, I also realize it could have been much worse. I went through the boy band era with an older sister and thus my exposure to the likes of Limp Bizkit and KoRn was minimal. Better to turn out an oversensitive vanity plate than an entitled, surly misogynist.
"As Long As You Love Me" is a ballad of the ferocious desperation and neediness that is BSB's calling card. The clumsy body-morphing video (immortalizing Nick Carter's mushroom head) doesn't improve anything and the entire premise of the song is creepy to me. People who don't care who you are or where you're from or what...you...did when they're trying to hit on you probably have some pretty big skeletons of their own. Just suspicious, is all.
Music Videos by VideoCure
If life was fair, "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)" would have taken the piss out of BSB like any other egregiously self-aggrandizing song from a debauched rapper or rock star. Here they are, trumpeting their self-described originality and sexuality and ruining the classic Universal horror movies by doing a ripoff of the "Thriller" dance in the house from Casper, and we let them off the goddamn hook.
Due to some quirky publishing decisions, their self-titled U.S. debut was a compilation of their first two international LPs, and thus you had the group introducing themselves by proclaiming that they were "back." I remember a special on MTV, airing around the premiere of the video for "Everybody (Backstreet's Back)," where the Backstreet Boys counted down their favorite 100 or 50 or something music videos...guess which one was #1? In conclusion, everything about this song is horseshit.
I guess that leaves "I Want It That Way" as the most tolerable BSB song. It is classic pop schmaltz, with a stellar buildup, quotably dumb lyrics ("you are my fire"), and the all-important key change. It is, by its co-writer's own admission, a slick piece of utter nonsense and an unabashed tribute to the boy band songwriting template.
A stellar explication of said template:
Bad Company
A busted Led Zeppelin knockoff, right down to their look. At least they have an excuse - they were managed by Led Zep promoter Peter Grant, whose personal story is a lot more interesting than anything I could write about Bad Company. For a while in high school I was obsessed with sifting for gold among the playlists of classic rock format radio stations. The plodding, interminable "Feel Like Makin' Love" and "Rock 'n Roll Fantasy" are like thick, dried-out clods at the bottom of the pan.
Bad Religion
I first heard Bad Religion through the soundtrack to the video game Crazy Taxi; it was punk only in the sense that owning a Sega Dreamcast in 2000 kind of made you an edgy misfit (note: not really). I don't know a lot about these California hardcore lifers but what I do know, I like.
"Hear It" just dazzles me with its opening riff, which is irrelevant to the rest of the song (this was on the character selection screen...my favorite was Gus). "Ten in 2010" and "Them and Us" are high-energy shots of thrash. I'd like to think that hearing them over and over improved my sense of justice by osmosis. To truly understand, though, requires a lot of further study as they have built a world unto their own in the past 30-plus years. Thus the question: when do punk rock bands start playing the hotel-casino circuit?
Badfinger
No pressure here: only one of the first bands handpicked to be on the Beatles' Apple Records imprint, debuting with a song - "Come and Get It" - written by some nobody named Paul McCartney.
"Will you walk away from a fool and his money?" was a sadly prescient lyric, as creative struggles and financial mismanagement left the band broke after six years. Personal demons eventually decimated Badfinger, as guitarist Pete Ham and bassist/guitarist Tom Evans both committed suicide, unable to bear the stress of the group's seemingly-unending downward spiral. The entire story is chronicled in an exceptional edition of Behind the Music.
As with most power-pop bands, time has been kind to Badfinger's music, especially the oft-covered "Without You" and the bouncy "No Matter What." They weren't the last or the most enduring band to bear the "next Beatles" albatross, but they might have been the most influential in their own right.
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Eradication Breakdown: The Letter 'A'
With one letter of the alphabet done - and 25 more to go - I'd like to take stock of what's not making the cut in my collection anymore. I've created three categories for the misses: Bucketful of Fail, for stuff I didn't have to think twice about; One Shining Moment, for stuff that I remember sounding good once upon a time but just isn't connecting anymore; and Close But No Cigar, for stuff that I genuinely liked but couldn't see myself listening to again. Lest I forget to accentuate the positive, I've also listed the Five-Star Songs for the tracks achieving that most prestigious of iTunes' pointless rating system (if you rate anything below a 3, why do you even own it?).
Here's what's failing, floundering, or just under the bar from my run through the 'A's:
Bucketful of Fail
Abe Vigoda - Skeleton
EVERYTHING SOUNDS LIKE NOISE!
Against Me! - "Here Comes a Regular"
There goes an undistinguished cover.
Allister - "Fraggle Rawk"
When (free) Napster died, it took most of the novelties with it.
American Music Club - The Golden Age
Wouldn't want to be a member anyway.
Andrew W.K. - The Wolf; Close Calls With Brick Walls
Party fouls.
The Automatic Automatic - Not Accepted Anywhere
Whatever whatever.
One Shining Moment
Aerosmith - "Janie's Got a Gun"; "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing"
It's hard to swallow the earnestness of "Janie" after a few weeks of Steven Tyler ogling American Idol hopefuls young enough to be his granddaughters. Maybe he's just got space dementia.
Alan Jackson - The Greatest Hits Collection
Keeping it ready for the next barbecue.
Architecture In Helsinki - In Case We Die
"Do the Whirlwind" is alright.
Close But No Cigar
Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass (except "None Shall Pass" and "Coffee")
Hip-hop heads should give him a second (or third) look.
Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo
They're just starting out but may have passed me by already.
Five-Star Songs
ABBA - "Take A Chance On Me"
AC/DC - "Back in Black"; "Highway to Hell"
Strange bedfellows.
Alphabeat - "10,000 Nights of Thunder"
What do you do next when the best song you'll probably ever write is the first track on your first album? Oh...yeah.
Andrew Bird - "Dark Matter"
Animal Collective - "Peacebone"; "My Girls"; "Brother Sport"
I am fortunate to have cool friends.
Arcade Fire - "Wake Up"; "Intervention"
Serious sauce...
The Archies - "Sugar, Sugar"
...and its antidote.
Bucketful of Fail
Abe Vigoda - Skeleton
EVERYTHING SOUNDS LIKE NOISE!
Against Me! - "Here Comes a Regular"
There goes an undistinguished cover.
Allister - "Fraggle Rawk"
When (free) Napster died, it took most of the novelties with it.
American Music Club - The Golden Age
Wouldn't want to be a member anyway.
Andrew W.K. - The Wolf; Close Calls With Brick Walls
Party fouls.
The Automatic Automatic - Not Accepted Anywhere
Whatever whatever.
One Shining Moment
Aerosmith - "Janie's Got a Gun"; "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing"
It's hard to swallow the earnestness of "Janie" after a few weeks of Steven Tyler ogling American Idol hopefuls young enough to be his granddaughters. Maybe he's just got space dementia.
Alan Jackson - The Greatest Hits Collection
Keeping it ready for the next barbecue.
Architecture In Helsinki - In Case We Die
"Do the Whirlwind" is alright.
Close But No Cigar
Aesop Rock - None Shall Pass (except "None Shall Pass" and "Coffee")
Hip-hop heads should give him a second (or third) look.
Avi Buffalo - Avi Buffalo
They're just starting out but may have passed me by already.
Five-Star Songs
ABBA - "Take A Chance On Me"
AC/DC - "Back in Black"; "Highway to Hell"
Strange bedfellows.
Alphabeat - "10,000 Nights of Thunder"
What do you do next when the best song you'll probably ever write is the first track on your first album? Oh...yeah.
Andrew Bird - "Dark Matter"
Animal Collective - "Peacebone"; "My Girls"; "Brother Sport"
I am fortunate to have cool friends.
Arcade Fire - "Wake Up"; "Intervention"
Serious sauce...
The Archies - "Sugar, Sugar"
...and its antidote.
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