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Pop Rock Nation

Category: News

music-news-from-breakups-to-the-lastest-buzz

  • Big in the UK: Cooking the Charts with They Might Be Giants

    This is the sort of thing that probably wouldn’t happen here. I just don’t think Americans take their pop charts quite as personally or as democratically as they do in the U.K. Earlier this summer, a brand of kid’s shoes put out an ad featuring “Birdhouse in Your Soul”, the 1990 major label debut single by They Might Be Giants. The duo of John Linnell and John Flansburgh have, since they started recording original songs onto a standard answering machine in the early 80s, become the godfathers of nerd-rock, and now that their original fans (like me) are pushing middle age with mortgages and children, the band have found renewed success recording four albums of “children’s music”, and performing alternate shows for grown-ups and kids on tour. The idea of sticking TMBG’s loving ode to the nightlight into an ad for kids’ shoes might’ve been genius if it weren’t so self-evidently perfect.

    I don’t know how it’s working out for Clark Shoes, but it seems to be doing well for They Might Be Giants. The song re-entered the British Top 100 pop songs late last month. Of course, songs featured in popular ads often get enjoy a run on the pop charts here as well – just as Sara Bareilles, Yael Naim, or Phoenix – but those successes seem more like happy accidents. In the case of “Birdhouse In Your Soul”, a strange populist cause – okay, a facebook group – has formed around keeping the song on the charts and trying to advance it to the top spot. That said, after four weeks, the song has only gone so far as #70 (on the chart dated 8/21; the song falls back to #72 on the 8/28 chart).

    But that’s not to say it couldn’t eventually succeed. This isn’t the first instance of the Brits attempting to cook their pop charts. See also: Buckley v. Burke. In 2008, after Alexandra Burke won the TV talent show The X-Factor, a campaign by apostles of the tragic 90s singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley attempted to thwart Burke’s cover of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” from making its predicted number one debut over that year’s Christmas sales week by urging fans to download Buckley’s own version of the song.

    It’s a Brand New Record for 1990!

    The campaign failed, but just barely. Buckley’s song charted at #2 behind Burke’s. Still, the TMBG song, while it may linger on the chart for as long as the ad airs, probably won’t reach those sorts of heights. For one thing, “Birdhouse In Your Soul” isn’t being pitted against another version of itself, or even another song. Moreover the Alexandra Burke debut was a one-off event sales week; it was also a holiday week, and it’s a holiday week that The X-Factor has annually co-opted for just this eventful purpose. So Buckley v. Burke was framed as the classic battle over artistic legitimacy between a tragic rock icon and a freshly minted “mass-produced” pop idol for the very soul of the pop chart.

    As a fan of both Burke and Buckley (although, when it comes to “Hallelujah”, count me in with Team John Cale), I, frankly, prefer not having to choose sides. They Might Be Giants‘ Elektra debut record Flood was essentially the first record of 1990, and “Birdhouse In Your Soul” was instant classic that still makes me giddy and giggly every time I hear it – even more so now that I’ve got two kids singing along with me.

    Here’s the original video from 1990:

  • Cee-lo Green’s “What Part of Forever”, or Why I’m as Happy as a Little Girl About the New Twilight Saga Movie

    I’m no fan of Stephenie Meyer’s books, or the movies they’re based off of. I’m not really into vampires and werewolves. But I get as woo-hoo excited as a TRL teenage fangirl every time a new Twilight movie comes out. It’s not because of Robert Pattinson’s gravity defying hairdo or Taylor Lautner’s sculpted abdomen and dark, forbidding gaze. (Truth be told, I had to look them both up on Google just now to make sure I had their names right.) It’s about the soundtracks. The soundtracks to these movies are amazing!

    Like John Hughes’s movies in the 80s, the Twilight movies draw their music from a collection of artists that could conceivably appeal to a pretty broad audience, but at the same time, are still mostly championed by the alterna-kids and that endangered species known as the record store employee. In the 80s, that meant bands like Oingo Boingo, Madness, Spandau Ballet, Nick Heyward, the Dream Academy, the Thompson Twins, Paul Young, Wang Chung, and Simple Minds – few of whom scored more than a couple of hits, but whose legacies have largely survived the reflexive 80s hating. A lot of these artists’ songs are more celebrated now than they were back when they were (almost) “popular”.

    Though each of the Twilight movies’ scores so far have been written by different composers, the aesthetic of the soundtracks has been remarkably consistent, and consistently thrilling. The British band Muse (who basically sound like Radiohead, only un-evolved since 1995) have appeared on all three Twilight Saga soundtracks so far, but each album features an increasingly diverse roster of the artsy cool. Though the first soundtrack trafficked more in mainstream modern rock artists like Paramore, Linkin Park, and (oh yeah) Perry Farrell, the second two have gotten more daring, bringing fairly well-known indie acts like Death Cab for Cutie, Metric and Thom Yorke, together with folks like Swedish pop chanteuse Lykke Li, rapper Lupe Fiasco and the British band Fanfarlo.


    But the Twilight Saga soundtracks do John Hughes one better. Where Hughes’ movies often licensed existing songs for the group’s catalogs (Simple Minds “Don’t You Forget About Me” and Oingo Boingo’s “Weird Science” being the big exceptions – Psychedelic Furs re-recorded a song they’d released years earlier for the title song of Pretty In Pink), the songs that appear on the Twilight Saga soundtracks are most often originals written and recorded specifically for the soundtracks. You won’t find Editors’ gorgeous piano ballad “No Sound But the Wind” from New Moon on the band’s new studio record (In This Light and On This Evening) which came out right around the same time. And the thing is, “No Sound But the Wind” wouldn’t have worked on the Editors’ album anyway – not just because it’s miles better than even the best parts of In This Light (this is, sadly, true) – but because it truly belongs with the rest of the songs from New Moon. More than anything else, these records are special because they sound like they were actually conceived as unified albums – not just a cross-promotional collection of songs by Today’s Hottest Stars, all K-Tel style; and the songs are quality – not just out-takes or throwaways – and they’re bound together not just by the subtextual narrative of the movie, but with a common sense of atmosphere and evocation.

    The latest Twilight Saga soundtrack, for Eclipse, has already delivered videos for songs by Muse and Metric. One of the latest is by Cee-Lo Green, the former Goodie Mob rapper turned retro-funk freak solo artist before teaming up with producer Danger Mouse to form Gnarls Barkley (whose 2007 debut hit “Crazy” essentially became the first pop standard of the 21st Century). On “What Part of Forever”, he sheds much of his signature flamboyance – in fact, he sheds his hip-hop persona altogether – singing a lyric about making life-altering choices over chiming guitars, a rhythm that rolls like stage-coach wheels, and a melody straight out of the sunny California folk-pop sound of the late 60s – a beautiful song for late summer.

  • Awesome Free Download: The Baseball Project “Broadside Ballads”

    Broadside Ballads

    D’ya like baseball? D’ya like story songs? How about story songs about baseball? How about story songs about baseball written by a supergroup of alterna-cool elder statesmen including the Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn, drummer Linda Pitmon, R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, The Minus 5 and, well, a zillion other side projects. These four got together last year and formed a band that specializes in baseball songs. They call their band – duh – The Baseball Project and they released their debut full-length album Vol. One: Frozen Ropes and Dying Quails in 2009. While they’re working on Volume Two (due out next year), they’ve partnered with ESPN’s The Life this summer to provide running baseball commentary in song. And those songs – six of ’em so far – are being made available for free dowload at the Baseball Project’s label home, the always awesome Yep Roc Records. No small feat: these songs have actually given me a reason to care about baseball this year.

    I mean, seriously, with the exception of my sons’ little league games and the occasional excursion to Warner Park to watch the Madison Mallards play (and eat a few brats), I like stories and movies about baseball a lot more than I like baseball itself. I never miss a chance to watch Major League II when it comes on the TV. But when the guys in the Baseball Project start singing about “Lima Time”, the references are pretty much lost on me in the same way that that punchline in Modern Family about Diana Ross’s RCA period was mostly lost on the majority of the network prime time viewing audience. But it doesn’t matter that much: the band plays a handsome variety of laid back folk rock – think The Traveling Wilburys at a Miller Park tailgate party – that sounds great even when I don’t know the relevant background of the song’s lyrics.

    Moreover, songs like “Phenom”, in which a 21-year-old ponders his ability to live up to his own hype – “Man of the hour, and that’s 400 percent of your 15 minutes of fame, and they say that I’m the most in the Washington Post… I just want to stick around for a while” – resonate outside of the sport they pay tribute to on an allegorial/metaphorical level. I love the relentless (and hopeless) optimism of “Cubs 2010”, the jangly, swinging, Woodie Guthie-ish singalong of “30 Doc”. And I’ve never been to or even cared about a baseball season opening day, but I can, nevertheless relate to the sense of excitement and expectation of “All Future and No Past” – Before a game is played! Before an out is made! – especially when the song sounds like They Might Be Giants fronting the Byrds on a Bob Dylan cover.