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  • First Look: Magnetic Man featuring John Legend “Getting Nowhere”

    Magnetic Man’s self-titled debut album

    Dubstep is to the recently concluded decade – whatever we’re calling it – what “trip hop” was the 90s. That is: a dubious, and ill-defined (though distinctly British) sub-sub-genre hybrid of electronic dance music, dub, and hip-hop. Like trip-hop (and “garage”, “two-step”, “grime”, etc.) before it, dubstep has largely failed to find a footing here in the States, but that doesn’t mean its practitioners aren’t gonna try their damnedest to get Americans’ attention. And the genre has found some pretty high profile American R&B singers to make nice with.

    For example:

    Magnetic Man – a London-based partnership of djs Benga, Skream, and Artwork – recruited John Legend to sing the lead on a song called “Getting Nowhere”, the closing track of their debut album and a brooding electro-dirge that he sings the shit out of. It’s a long way from last year’s Wake Up!, Legend’s socially conscious retro-soul collaboration with The Roots, and the singer seems absolutely (and good for him!) unchastened by the lukewarm reception given his more clubby Evolver album (or by the volumes of vitriol spewed at his pal and fellow Chicago scenester Common‘s defiantly Euro 2008 album Universal Mind Control, whose whole-hearted, damn-the-fan-base embrace of its sound I admired, but many others regarded as nothing short of a betrayal.) But then, John Legend has always been about moving musically forward and backward at the same time. “Getting Nowhere” has just been released as the third single from the Magnetic Man album, and the group has put out a beautifully disturbing, urban-apocalypse video for it.

  • Old Friends, New Music: The Long-Awaited Return of Roxette!

    Roxette’s first new studio album in 10 years!
    Although they’ve put out a handful of new songs (generally in conjunction with new “greatest hits” compilations) in the interim, it’s been 10 years since the Roxette released their last studio album, 2001’s Room Service. The Swedish pop duo are best known for a string of epic pop ballads in the late 80s and early 90s including “Listen to Your Heart”, “Fading Like a Flower” and “It Must Have Been Love” from the Pretty Woman soundtrack, not to mention their star-making power-pop classic “The Look”.

    But even as their commercial fortunes waned in the late 90s, they kept making music both together and solo, with Per Gessle releasing five solo albums (including one as Son of a Plumber) and a 2005 reunion album with his pre-Roxette band Gyllene Tider. Marie Fredrikkson also put out several solo albums, mostly in Swedish, but was forced into semi-retirement when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2002. But in the fall of 2009, with a new live band, Gessle and Fredrikkson reunited for a series of smaller-scale shows throughout eastern Europe, and last year they started recording a new album, scheduled to be released internationally this month, called Charm School. Here’s the lead single from the new album: “She’s Got Nothing On (But the Radio)”.

    As is their practice, this first single is an upbeat dance-rocker driven by Gessle’s (weaker) lead vocals, but it’s got glittery 70s-style guitar riffage, a verse that knowingly nods to a 20-year-old Red Hot Chili Peppers song, and a chorus that, over a shimmer of mirror-ball synthesizers, promises to make itself at home in your brain for days. It’s nowhere near the instant pop classic that “The Look” or “Joyride” were, but it’s still proof that Per and Marie can still make a smart, fun, three-minute pop song – and make it look easy. Here’s hoping they’ve got one of their trademark ballads in store for us soon.

  • The Daily Awesome – January 31, 2011: “Blizzard of ’78” by Ida (2001)

    \’\’The Braille Night\’\’, 2001

    A couple weeks ago, friend of SonicClash and Popblerd blogger Mike Heyliger asked folks to name songs about snow that weren’t Christmas songs. Here’s one of my favorites – “Blizzard of ’78” by the indie rock quartet Ida. This 7 minute epic was the centerpiece of the group’s 2001 album The Braille Night. The song is as stormy as its title would suggest, driven forward by an endlessly repeated descending chord progression pounded out on a piano over groaning strings and a noisy snare-and-cymbals rhythmic attack. And as singers Elisabeth Mitchell, Daniel Littleton, and Karla “k.” Schickele sing the song’s chorus – “You’re a thousand miles from here, you just want to disappear” – in beautiful, shifting, increasingly urgent harmonies, you can almost feel yourself trudging down a snow-covered city sidewalk face-first into a punishing, icy wind. In other words, it sounds just like what a blizzard feels like, even if the lyrics seem less about snow and more about someone trying to overcome stage fright. But it’s the evocation that counts, right? And it’s probably one of my Top 10 favorite songs of the last decade. Click the link below to give it a listen for yourself:

    Blizzard of 78