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  • New Video: The Streets “The Escapist”

    It’s my hope that if American audiences managed to “get” Amy Winehouse, then they’ll eventually “get” Mike Skinner who is better known as The Streets. The British rapper has released three excellent albums over the past six years, but has yet to really catch on with audiences Stateside, although in his homeland, he’s a megastar. His albums reveal a much more complex personality than the average 2008-era rap artist (which is probably why he hasn’t been successful here-complex personalities are a little too far-reaching for most Americans), and if you can make it through the thick accent, you’ll be rewarded with music that’s occasionally laugh out loud funny, and occasionally heart-rending.

    His new single, “The Escapist” finds Skinner lowering the tempo and adopting a reflective tone. The video is amazing. Not only is it a concept video in an age where it’s very easy to just show a bunch of chicks dancing half-naked and call it art, but the scenery is breathtaking. Besides, everyone needs to escape every once in a while, right? Boy, have I been feeling that something awful lately.

    Anyway, the YouTube video pauses frequently on my computer…I don’t know that it will do the same on yours. So I’ve also included a link to Skinner’s site, where you can not only watch the video without it stopping every 10 seconds, but you can also download the song for free. Enjoy.

    http://www.the-streets.co.uk

  • Worth A Second Listen: Hole’s “Live Through This”

    It’s a reasonably well-documented fact that most if not all artistic people are a few sandwiches short of the old picnic basket, and before Amy Winehouse took over as music’s #1 female nutjob, there was Courtney Love. Over the past two decades, Courtney’s been labeled as just about anything you could think of: opportunist, poseur…you name it, Courtney’s been called it. However, the fact that she led the music industry in Hot Messitude during the Nineties (and she’s still up there these days) should not take away from the fact that she and her band Hole made some good music: most of which appears on 1994’s grunge-era classic Live Through This.

    Hole's 1994 album "Live Through This"
    The cover of Hole's 1994 album "Live Through This"

    In retrospect, it’s pretty likely that her marriage to Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain expedited the band’s signing to major label DGC (which just happened to be Nirvana’s label), but Courtney and Hole (which also featured Eric Erlandson on guitar, Kristen Pfaff on bass and Patty Schemel on drums) had paid their dues by slagging through the underground for years. Courtney had been a fixture on the L.A. rock scene since the early Eighties, enjoying vague associations with everyone from Faith No More to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, before founding Hole. They garnered some attention with an indie release called “Pretty On the Inside” before Love met Cobain. The association gave Courtney some additional notoriety (especially when she said she used heroin while pregnant with Kurt’s baby), but her association started a trend of her music almost becoming secondary to her celebrity. Which is a shame, because Live Through This is a damn good album.

    A lot of the signifiers that associate music with the grunge era are here. The loud/soft dynamic is in full effect, as Courtney usually slurs the verses and shrieks the choruses. The lyrics are on the obtuse side-at least to my ears, but they certainly sound tortured enough. However, one thing that set this album apart from most records of that era was Courtney’s insistence on the music being as melodic as it was aggressive. Her sense of melody wouldn’t fully develop until her significantly more sanitized album “Celebrity Skin”, and most folks assume she had help in the songwriting process (in all likelihood from Kurt himself), but it’s a rarity in that it’s an aggressive rock album that you can actually sing along with.

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  • Yahoo! Presents The Top 20 Albums of All Time…For Real!

    Yahoo!’s music coverage generally leaves a lot to be desired. Their writers are unnaturally obnoxious (even for music crit-types), and they are in the unfortunate position one of my least favorite music writers as one of their main contributors (and because I have a job to protect, I won’t mention his name in public. Besides, he’s not worth it). However, this list of the Top 20 albums of all time was pretty interesting, and I kind of like the method by which this list was created.

    Of course, everyone and their mother can make a list and call it “The Top 20 Albums of All Time” (hey, anyone been reading my list of the 105 Greatest Singles of the Eighties??), but the list compiled by Robert of the Radish (dude, you couldn’t think of a better name) is certainly one of the most scientific lists of this kind.

    Robert took personal opinion out of the equation completely, instead basing his list on several factors: critical acclaim, actual sales figures, Grammy award love (probably the weakest part of his argument, considering that there have been several bands universally acknowledged as the best at what they do that have never won a Grammy…Led Zeppelin and The Who among them, although it doesn’t look like that affected Led Zep too much), and the most interesting component to my eyes, staying power as judged by the average price and availability of used copies of the CD. I found this interesting mainly because I frequent more than my share of used record stores. I’ve shopped for used music in at least five states, and I can say with some authority that there are certain popular titles that you will see in abundance in just about every used record store in America (he mentions Hootie & The Blowfish’s “Cracked Rear View”. I’ll see him and raise him one Matchbox 20’s “Yourself or Someone Like You”, thank you very much), and some that you never see anywhere (ever seen a Beatles studio non-compilation album in a used record store for less than 8 or 9 bucks, if at all? Don’t think so).

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