Fruit Fight!!!If you’ve been watching E!’s coverage of the Grammy red carpet tonight, you’ve no doubt seen and heard a new commercial for Trident Vitality gum featuring a bunch of beautiful well-dressed people engaged in a really, really (fruit) juicy fruit fight. The song’s by French DJ Martin Solveig in collaboration with the Canadian pop trio Dragonette, and it’s called “Hello”. Solveig has been a fixture of the Euro-house circuit for more than a decade (he released a greatest hits comp called So Far five years ago), and “Hello” is the lead single from his forthcoming fifth studio album Smash. Already a Top 10 hit throughout Europe and rising quickly up both the Canadian pop and the U.S. dance charts, “Hello” dances gleefully along the knife edge between catchy irresistibility and sugarbuzz headache. My favorite part comes when Solveig goes all Samurai chef on the vocals in the last verse. The song was given the long-form video treatment – an epic, high profile cameo-laced tennis match between Solveig and fellow countryman dj Bob Sinclar. You can watch a shorter, more song-oriented edit here:
Buffalo Tom’s ”Skins”Buffalo Tom, the venerable Boston indie rock band led by singer-songwriter Bill Janovitz, is getting set to release their 8th studio album, their first since 2007’s truly awesome “reunion” album Three Easy Pieces. The new album’s called Skins and it’s set to hit stores next month, but in anticipation of the record’s release, the band has posted an EP of live acoustic(-ish) performances, including “Arise, Watch” from the new album, “CC and Callas” from their last one, and their 1993 college radio hit “Treehouse”, along with a rambling but touchingly heartfelt take on the New Order classic “Age of Consent” that will have Counting Crows kicking themselves for not having thought of it first. You can see video of all four performances below. You can also click below for a link to download the Bones EP:
Magnetic Man’s self-titled debut album
Dubstep is to the recently concluded decade – whatever we’re calling it – what “trip hop” was the 90s. That is: a dubious, and ill-defined (though distinctly British) sub-sub-genre hybrid of electronic dance music, dub, and hip-hop. Like trip-hop (and “garage”, “two-step”, “grime”, etc.) before it, dubstep has largely failed to find a footing here in the States, but that doesn’t mean its practitioners aren’t gonna try their damnedest to get Americans’ attention. And the genre has found some pretty high profile American R&B singers to make nice with.
For example:
Magnetic Man – a London-based partnership of djs Benga, Skream, and Artwork – recruited John Legend to sing the lead on a song called “Getting Nowhere”, the closing track of their debut album and a brooding electro-dirge that he sings the shit out of. It’s a long way from last year’s Wake Up!, Legend’s socially conscious retro-soul collaboration with The Roots, and the singer seems absolutely (and good for him!) unchastened by the lukewarm reception given his more clubby Evolver album (or by the volumes of vitriol spewed at his pal and fellow Chicago scenester Common‘s defiantly Euro 2008 album Universal Mind Control, whose whole-hearted, damn-the-fan-base embrace of its sound I admired, but many others regarded as nothing short of a betrayal.) But then, John Legend has always been about moving musically forward and backward at the same time. “Getting Nowhere” has just been released as the third single from the Magnetic Man album, and the group has put out a beautifully disturbing, urban-apocalypse video for it.
