Kanye WestI was in Las Vegas over the weekend and right when I touched down, my twitter feed was a buzz (a tweet?) with blasts that Kanye West’s new song Power was fire. The comments were all similar and talked about how Kanye was back.
My first thought was that I liked his segue into heartbreak pop, 808s & Heartbreak. While I thought the album was a bit inconsistent, it was also courageous, honest, and real. The dude’s heart was broken and he was expressing himself.
I do look forward to the Kanye we saw on his first three near classic albums. But I also hope that he continues to be creative and different.
My main man Big Money Mike hipped me to the song earlier today and I do have to say that it’s pure Kanye and tells me that Good Ass Job is going to be everything we expect and more.
The background chants in the early mixes I heard overwhelmed his voice, but this new mixed version evens it out.
Another Twilight movie, another epic Muse ballad. The theatrical British trio is well on its way to establishing itself as a Kenny Loggins figure for a new generation of moviegoers and this new song verges on magnificent self-parody. Only Freddie Mercury and Brian May could have wrung more drama out of this.
Contrary to what its title might suggest, the debut album by British singer-songwriter V. V. Brown, Travelling Like the Light took a while to make, and took almost a year from its original July 2009 release in the U.K. to finally land in American stores. But very much as its title would suggest, her single “Shark in the Water” has been stealthily stalking its unsuspecting prey – a mainstream pop audience – for months now. It’s been on my radar since earlier this year when it started showing up on the Logo network’s NewNowNext video playlists, but it’s only recently that the song’s relentless retro-pop grooves have started to rip my limbs apart (figuratively speaking, of course) during my morning commute.
This is great driver’s seat dancing music. It marries a kind of harmlessly sunny, hippie-folky-strummy verse (think Jason Mraz, or think of Train shamelessly ripping Jason Mraz off), with a roaring diva wail of a chorus, turbo-charged by a rocking horn section and devilishly chipper doot-do-doot back-up vocals. She seems so nice, and then you realize (like that guy in those Nicorette commercials) that she’s chewing your arm off and she’s not gonna let go. This is viciously catchy pop, and at a time when most female pop singers (even the ones who can actually sing, Christina) sound like robots, “Shark in the Water” definitively demonstrates a way to make sweetly edgy, playfully relevant pop in 2010, and still sound like a human being.
