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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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Special Edition Live: Mark Lawrence
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MARK LAWRENCE live at Googie’s Lounge, NYC, October 1st 2008
On an almost daily basis, I wonder how up-and-coming singer-songwriters manage to do it these days. You can release your own CD, upload your tracks to the internet, then get in a car with as few people as possible and hit the road, I suppose.  Can you be a one-man business in this modern world, selling your own T-shirts and booking your own gigs and driving yourself from town to town? I guess. I’ve often dreamed of getting a CDL and becoming a self-contained trucking & entertainment industry myself, performing my favorite Marty Robbins tunes at truck stops ’round the country after dispatching giant cords of lumber, a pot-bellied pig named Porky my only traveling companion. Joe Six-Packs and Hockey Moms nationwide could band together and order my 8-Track hits comps from K-Tel! Well, a former beauty queen from The Last Frontier can dream, can’t she? Oh, nevermind…
The thing is, all these thoughts just wash right out of my mind when I witness an actual performance by a great singer-songwriter, if only because the magic of a great performance tends to sweep me up into a world where the technical aspect of being a performer no longer matters. Who cares how the magician does the trick, if the illusion is breathtaking enough, right? Well this is how I felt last Wednesday night when I caught a set by Mark Lawrence at Googie’s Lounge, a small cabaret perched above The Living Room on Ludlow Street in lower Manhattan.
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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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