Photo via YouTube screen shot from the American Idol channelFinally. We’re done paying the Lazaro tax.
Before we get to how the elimination went down, there were two fun Idol alumni performances.
Who rocked the stage?
Scotty McCreery as “The Boy Next Door” performed first. I think Phillip Phillips’ success was helped by McCreery’s win from the previous year.
McCreery’s boyish charm makes him easily likable. He performed See You Tonight and had the teenage girls screaming.
Kelly Clarkson performed People Like Us. I’m adding the video of Clarkson’s performance because you must see what she’s wearing. She may have dressed herself in the dark.
Who were in the bottom two?
Ryno broke them into groups of two.
The groups were:
– Lazaro and Amber
– Janelle and Angie
– Candice and Kree (Summer)
Sometimes when Ryno does this, he surprises us with the results. In this case, there weren’t any surprises. They ended up exactly where you thought they would.
Lazaro and Amber were in the bottom two.
Who went home?
Thankfully, it was Lazaro. I don’t think I could’ve taken any more of him and I’m not sure he could’ve taken the pressure of singing again knowing that he was barbecue chicken.
Idol holds a live Twitter poll when the singer who has been eliminated gets to sing for their life. To show you how useless social media can be, during Lazaro’s performance, it was nearly 60/40 to save him. More than half of the Twitter accounts who participated thought the judges should’ve saved Lazaro. How preposterous is that?
This preposterous:
Randy made it as painless as possible. He sent Lazaro home sweet home.
There is danger in sending Lazaro home. We don’t have anyone else to pick on. Everyone else is at least halfway decent so people are going to have to create villains. If it weren’t for Angie’s turn from pageant wannabe to goofy teenager, I’d put my money on her. But now? I think it will be boring Janelle.
I first found Christy Moore in 1996, when a friend sent me a mix tape…
Remember mix tapes? I grew up with them. Okay, actually I grew up taping songs off the radio, but sometime in college, I was introduced to the mix tape phenomenon when I worked at a summer camp. A British friend of mine made me my very first mix tape with some excellent songs on it by artists I had never heard of prior to listening. A few years later, I was in Armenia as a Peace Corps Volunteer and another friend from Belfast, Northern Ireland, sent me a mix tape. The tape he made had all British or Irish artists on it, some of whom with which I was already familiar. But there was one song on that tape that ended up turning me into a Christy Moore fan.
Who is Christy Moore?
Christopher Andrew “Christy” Moore was born on May 7, 1945 in Newbridge, County Kildare, Ireland. He is an Irish folk singer, song writer, and guitarist who has been playing music for a living since the mid 1960s. Originally, Moore worked at a bank and played music for fun, but when there was a strike in 1966, he went to England and had a great time. He realized he liked playing music better than working in a bank with a manager standing over him all the time. Trading in his bank job for a job as a laborer, Moore began frequenting pubs and clubs in Ireland, where he met and began playing music with other musicians. In 1972, Moore released his first major album, Prosperous, which he named after the village Prosperous in County Kildare. He formed a band which was originally known as CLAD, but was eventually renamed Planxty. Moore played with the band until 1975, then embarked on a solo career.
The first Christy Moore song I ever heard…
In 1996, I was hungry for good music. In Armenia, there were a lot of vendors selling bootleg albums on cassette. I had a good time blowing some of my monthly allowance on music, though I was somewhat limited in what I could find. I mean, there was no shortage of mainstream American pop– especially Michael Jackson, because the Armenians were nuts about him– and it was easy to find Russian and Armenian pop, as well as “rabiz” music. But I would have never in a million years found Christy Moore in Armenia had my Irish friend not sent me a tape.
I remember listening to that tape on my Walkman as I walked the long way back to my apartment after picking up my mail at the Peace Corps office. Christy Moore’s gentle baritone sang a cover of a song originally recorded by The Pogues, “Fairytale of New York”…
I enjoyed the way Christy Moore sang this song, introducing it with his lilting Irish accent. Every time I hear his version of “Fairytale of New York”, I’m reminded of that day in Armenia and how hopeful and exciting it was to be in my mid 20s and living abroad. Of course, I had many tough years ahead of me, but I didn’t know that at the time. This song still makes me smile.
Years after I returned to the United States, I sought out Christy Moore’s music. I specifically wanted the album that had his live version of “Fairytale of New York” on it. I found an imported album on Amazon.com, Live At The Point. It was expensive when I bought it, but I see now that it’s dropped in price to less than half of what I paid for it. I loved the disc and later purchased another live album by Moore, Live At Vicar Street. That album had a fun Moore original, “Lisdoonvarna”.
I liked it so much that I started wishing I could see this man play live. Maybe someday we’ll make it to Ireland. For now, I have to settle for the other albums I’ve purchased by him, to include 2009’s Listen and 2011’s Folk Tale. I recently reviewed both of those albums and realized what a great storyteller Moore is with his songs, some of which he covers and some of which he writes himself. Listening to Moore’s music forces me to learn some Irish, too… or at least some Irish slang, since his lyrics sometimes include words I’ve not been exposed to here in America. His songs are also often about Irish affairs, which again I have to familiarize myself with since, not being from Ireland, I wouldn’t necessarily know about them.
My husband, Bill, is of Irish ancestry and is very interested in world events. One time I was listening to Christy Moore and he sang a song written by Bobby Sands, an Irish volunteer of the Provisional Irish Republican Army and member of British Parliament. Sands was just 27 years old when he died of a hunger strike in 1981 while incarcerated in an Irish prison hospital. I was nine years old in 1981 and had never been exposed to Sands’ story, so I didn’t know anything about him. Bill gave me the scoop as we listened to Sands’ song, “McIlhatton” as interpreted by Christy Moore…
I love it when I learn new things through music, especially when I can share it with people I love. Other songs by Christy Moore led to more learning about Ireland and Irish people and further fueled my desire to make it to Ireland someday. I want to see the origin of my husband’s people.
And to think my devotion to Christy Moore’s music started with a humble mix tape. Maybe it’s time we revisited that particular fad… with updated technology, of course!
I’ll start with a quick review for those already familiar with Mars Volta. Noctourniquet (their sixth album) is their first with song lengths averaging under five minutes, jettisoning the lengthy solos and ambient excursions. Its dark lyrics are, on average, the least obscure / most randomly effective of their career. Its drumming, with new drummer Deantoni Parks, is a bit more straightforward, sometimes pounding home the various time signatures instead of fracturing them. And the new layers of synthesizers, often pleasant, also sometimes add a level of batshit abrasiveness that I’m delighted to have in such concise doses.
For everyone else, I already dropped some clues, but let me fill in the picture more. Noctourniquet in many ways strikes me as a much weirder, geekier (and at 64 minutes, shorter) version of Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez doesn’t play everything on the album as Billy Corgan did on his, but he’s reputed to be a dictator to the top-notch players he employs. Singer/ lyricist Cedric Bixler-Zavala has, like Corgan, a voice that’s flexible but high-pitched; where Corgan’s was often tinged with an adolescent whine, Bixler-Zavala’s is more prone to the whine of an artificially intelligent dentist’s drill that wants you to understand it doesn’t like you. Both singers can convey their melodies, though, and Bixler-Zavala has also begun, on many tracks, to sound like the more recent, mellow, gravitas-possessing version of Rush’s Geddy Lee.
When I pick some individual tracks to describe, one of my motives is to help you choose, in this YouTube/ iTunes age, a place to start exploring if you’re not ready to plunge in right away. Noctourniquet, like Mellon Collie, divides neatly into harsher and prettier songs (although Mars Volta never quite play the difference straight). Want to start at the aggressive end? The Whip Hand reminds me of the most fiercely and erratically writhing Nine Inch Nails tracks (March of the Pigs, the Becoming), except with Reznor’s voice replaced by that of a heavily-echoed arena rock singer. Its “I am a land mine! Don’t step on me!” bridge risks being the most off-putting moment on the album for you, but you may well be impressed by how little you’re inclined to doubt the sentiment. (Unlike my Autocorrect, which tried to turn it into “I am a land line”.) Dyslexicon is like one of Rush’s more straightforward rock tracks being strafed by video-game weaponry, haunted by singing poltergeists, and subjected to occasional wobbling. The Malkin Jewel is like a restrained rock translation of the bizarro-land blues of Captain Beefheart, although Bixler-Zavala also reveals a new, gruff, threateningly conversational singing style in the verses, leading up to the chorus where “All the traps in the cellar go clickety-clack, cuz you know I always set them for you/ And all the rats in the cellar form a vermin of steps, yeah, you know they’re gonna take me to you”.
Pretty tracks include Aegis, thoughtful and massive, maybe equal parts Arcade Fire, Spiritualized, Catherine Wheel, and giant drum collection falling down the stairs, which launches into a slamming riff-rock chorus in 3/4 time. Lapochka is at once the closest they’ve ever ventured towards laptop-pop, and the most they’ve sounded like Shine On You Crazy Diamond-era Pink Floyd. In Absentia skitters and echoes across the nave of the church while you wait in the atrium; it’s part power ballad, part Giorgio Moroder Eurodisco, part maybe a hymnal re-capturing of In-a-Gadda-de-Vida. Imago, folk guitar plus long-held synthesizer notes and intuitive intrusions of thumping drums, highlights Bixler-Zavala’s least guarded singing, plain and a bit unsteady but easy to like. Zed and Two Naughts (fancy way of saying “zoo”) is an ambitiously constructed, soaring rock anthem.
Noctourniquet is easily my favorite Mars Volta record. They’ve always played well and had interesting ideas, but this is their album of songs, and I for one am fond of songs — especially when I feel they’re squeezing an especially wide range of interesting ideas into them. It could as logically be some Mars Volta fan’s least favorite. If there’s a track here you don’t like, it’ll be over in a few minutes. Perhaps that feels like cheating; I understand.
