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Pop Rock Nation

Category: News

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

  • First Listen (and Free Download): The Thermals “I Don’t Believe You”


    Portland indie-rockers The Thermals are known for writing nerdy, two-and-half-minute punk songs with an off-handedly topical point of view. You could call their most recent albums concept records, but that’s just a fancy way of saying they’ve been relatively thematically coherent. Last year’s, Now We Can See dealt with morality, mortality and science while their 2006 record The Blood, The Body, The Machine was a more narrative affair on the intersection of organized religion, governmental authority and personal agency.

    The group, led by singer-songwriter Hutch Harris, is getting ready to issue their fifth album next month. The album’s called Personal Life, and this time around, their focus is on love and relationships, the things that make relationships great, and the things that destroy them. It’s a direction hinted by the song “Separate” (issued earlier this year as one side of a split single with the Cribs), although lyrics like “separate I’m amazed I ever gave away all I held so dear” are ambiguous enough that they could just as easily be a pointed repudiation of political bipartisanship as they might be the post-break-up musings of a freshly single free-thinker.

    “I Don’t Believe You” is the lead single from Personal Life, and it’s an immediately lovable bit of candidly dismissive, singalong power-pop, even if it can’t match last year’s “Now We Can See” in either recklessly energetic dorkery or googly-eyed catchiness. Click below to hear the song for yourself. In addition to releasing the song as a good old-fashioned 45 (with a download card that includes two bonus videos), the band’s label Kill Rock Stars is currently offering the song for free download at their site. (Thank you Kill Rock Stars. You’re awesome.)

    The Thermals – I Don’t Believe You by killrockstars

  • Big in Europe (Actually Big Everywhere Except Here): Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP “We No Speak Americano”

    Back when I was in high school, there was this British dj collective called Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers who scored a Top 20 hit called “Swing the Mood” by basically taking a bunch of hits from the 40s and 50s – incongruously matching the Glenn Miller Band with the Everly Brothers, among others – and mashing them all together into a single track fit for school dances and wedding receptions. Urgh. For awhile there, “Swing the Mood” was inescapable although thankfully it never reached the achieved the sort of cultural saturation the “Macarena” would half a decade later.

    Now, storming charts all across Europe – around the world, in fact – is the Australian duo Yolanda Be Cool (named for a Tarantino quote) who teamed up with producer DCUP for a single called “We No Speak Americano”, which is essentially a 21st century house music puree of a 1956 performance by Italian pop singer Renato Carosone called “Tu Vuò Fà l’Americano”. In addition to going Top 10 in the duo’s home country and New Zealand, “We No Speak Americano” has so far topped the charts in the UK, Switzerland, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Sweden, Finland, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Austria, and, yes, Romania. Congressional Republicans may have much of the country convinced that the single greatest threat to the American way of life is creeping socialism. I beg to differ. Creeping socialism has nothing on the creeping ubiquity of this song – little more than a musical gimmick writ large, albeit one with an adorably silly (and expertly executed) “silent movie” video.

    And if you’re curious, here’s some pretty awesome video of Renato Carosone’s original. I could totally party with these guys!

  • First Look: Phil Collins “Heat Wave”

    Phil Collins has posted a video for his take on the 1963 Martha and the Vandellas classic “Heat Wave”. It’s from Going Back, his forthcoming collection of Motown and other 60s pop and soul covers which finds him backed by a very large band which includes former members of Motown’s iconic house band the Funk Brothers, a couple of longtime Genesis associates, and a herd of back-up singers, who all appear to be having a blast. Collins’s love for Motown is no secret. Collins was still considered mainly an album rock guy best known for his work with Genesis (who hadn’t gone completely pop yet) and for the moody atmospherics of “In the Air Tonight” when his 1982 cover of the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love” gave him his first solo top 10 hit. That song played a pivotal role in establishing Collins as the pop superstar he would become by mid-decade with his No Jacket Required album and he’d later return to the Motown sound with his original song “Two Hearts” from the movie Buster, which ending up topping the charts in early 1989.

    Phil Collins “Heat Wave” (2010)

    Phil Collins “You Can’t Hurry Love” (1982)

    Phil Collins “Two Hearts” (1988)