music-news-from-breakups-to-the-lastest-buzz
Kanye’s “Love Lockdown” Video: Mr. West Goes Tribal
With attention building for his upcoming fourth album “808s and Heartbreak” (out November 25th), Kanye West has just premiered the video for his Top 5 single “Love Lockdown”. Typical of the artier-than-thou West’s previous works, this is a pretty arresting video visually. I can see this cleaning up at next year’s VMAs…and it’s so damn refreshing to see a hip-hop video where the ass-shaking is not coming from a sea of bikini-wearing chicks. I’m just […]
New Music In Stores and Online10/7/08: The Streets, Sarah McLachlan, Oasis & More!!!
Obviously I can’t have a record buying bonanza every week, otherwise I’d go broke. Definitely not a good look in today’s economy. So, this week will mark something of a vacation for me, with only one release that I’m nutso about. Here’s this week’s lineup of releases.
The Streets “Everything is Borrowed”:
Folks on these shores (most of ’em) don’t get Mike Skinner or his style of music. Considering I didn’t think Amy Winehouse would cross over, I think Skinner is long overdue for some American love. “Everything is Borrowed” is his fourth, and reportedly the last album he is releasing under the Streets moniker. Expect more personal raps spiced with enough British slang that you might have to IM your best friend from London to ask “what the hell is he talking about here?”
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B-B-B Ben Folds Hits The Mark On “Way To Normal”
You know the story about the boy who cried wolf? When the wolf finally attacked him, no one came to the rescue because they thought he was faking? Let’s flip that theory a little bit and apply it to humor. If you’re known for being the class clown, people are at the very least going to be taken aback when you decide that you’ve come to a time when you need to be serious. That’s what happened to singer/songwriter/pianist Ben Folds when he released “Songs for Silverman” a couple of years back. After a decade of delivering bratty humor and sarcasm (applied to very real feelings and emotions), Silverman was a bit of a left turn-and it was stone cold sober. Ben’s fans didn’t really know what to do with the album, and it was a bit of a disappointment. At the very least (for people like me) it took a really long time to get into.
So, the folks who loved “Silverman” are going to see “Way To Normal” (Folds’ third official solo album) as a regression. The people who were turned off by “Silverman”‘s pointed lack of humor are going to see it as a return to form. I’m not sure how I see it. Folds remains a ridiculously gifted storyteller and songwriter-certainly the only person who can deliver a tune with a Broadway-ready melody and follow it with a bit of snotty punk attitude. Even though some of his lyrics are unnecessarily vulgar in that “South Park” GROW UP ALREADY!! kind of way that high-minded folks (like I pretend to be sometimes) won’t appreciate, they’re all very real, even though they might be played for laughs. On this album, Folds hints at the reasons behind the dissolution of his third marriage, his lack of comfort with his celebrity, and on a song or two, is downright goofy for the sake of being goofy.
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