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  • Pop Rock International! Morten Harket “Scared of Heights”

    Morten Harket: Still Falsetto-riffic!
    No disrespect to R.E.M., but there may be no band break-up that got me in the gut harder than a-ha’s. We all remember a-ha, of course, for “Take On Me.” But it surprises a lot of people to find that the band, long celebrated as one of the 80s greatest one hit wonders was actually a two-hit wonder here in the U.S. (you mean, you don’t remember “The Sun Always Shines on TV”, a Top 20 hit in 1986?), and that they continued touring and recording for most of the next 25 years, racking up hits in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia with singles every bit as glorious as their “one hit” – songs like “Forever Not Yours” (which boasted a great Noah’s Ark-inspired story video), the orchestral confessional “Shadowside”, and the driving, gothic “Celice” – not to mention “Summer Moved On”, a later-career falsetto-and-Spanish-guitar masterpiece, or their moving farewell single “Butterfly, Butterfly (The Last Hurrah)”.

    a-ha “Forever Not Yours” (2002)

    A-ha – Forever Not Yours (Clip) by Meubal

    They might not have gotten any play here, but each of the four studio albums a-ha released since 2000 is worth the import price you have to pay to obtain them, so, yes, it was incredibly sad for me to see this band call it a career at the end of 2010. I’ll take some solace that all three of these guys had already established interesting solo careers prior to the band’s break-up, and that the band’s dissolution is giving them time to give those endeavors more energy.

    Lead singer Morten Harket is first out of the gate with a new solo album. Out of My Hands is the fifth solo record by Harket, and his third English-language release (following 2009’s Letters from Egypt and 1995’s Wild Seed). He’s previewing the album with a pair of singles. In February, there was the lovely, driving “Lightning” which you can listen to below. And then, last week marked the premiere of the video for the second, a song called “Scared of Heights” that finds Morten indulging his falsetto maybe just a tad too much. The song’s fruity melody and even fruitier video (which features a lot of slow motion hair-ography – thank you for that, Glee – while Harket preens at the roof’s edge of a green-screen skyscraper) are an embarrassing reminder of some of a-ha’s not-so-great moments. Morten’s voice just works better on sadder sounding songs.

    Morten Harket “Lightning” (2012)

  • Commercial-isms: Swedish House Mafia vs. Absolut Vodka “Greyhound”

    Commercial-isms: Swedish House Mafia vs. Absolut Vodka “Greyhound”

    Run, Swedish House Mafia, Run!

    After the apocalypse the only things remaining were the desert, some wealthy (and competitive!) Euro-disco freak-a-zoids, and a grapefruit. Oh, and also a sliver of post-nuclear genetic material, which would later be identified and decoded by the machines as the rapidly mutating, radioactive stem cells of that instrumental break from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” – y’know the one, that part where the zombies do the zombie dance. The scientists, because they had nothing better to do, took the ribonucleic remains of that long-extinct groove, and reconstructed it, magnifiying it, amplifying it, creating the Third Millennium sonic beast they called “Greyhound”. This, much to the amusement of the freak-a-zoids.

    Is this a music video for the latest single from Swedish House Mafia? Or is it the latest ad from Absolut Vodka, introducing their new Greyhound brand? Unlike the latest video stunt by , “Greyhound” succeeds wildly as both. There’s an edited version of this that’s starting to show up on the TV, but you can see the whole wonderful George Lucas fever-dream of it below. Then you can (and should) go download the full seven-minute single, put it on your iPod, and go running (with the dogs, tonight). Enjoy this responsibly.

  • New Single! Eric Church “Springsteen”

    New Single! Eric Church “Springsteen”

    Chief Meets Boss
    A couple weeks ago, Bruce Springsteen released Wrecking Ball, his (by my count) 17th studio album in a 40 year recording career. It’s a record that sounds a lot more like the Springsteen I grew up with than any of his other recent albums: anthemic and big and totally ‘merican (that’s a capital ‘postrophe there). It occurs to me that Born in the U.S.A. is now older than all those songs I saw on those “Freedom Rock” TV commercials were back when the “Freedom Rock” TV commercials were on TV.

    So it’s sort of fitting and serendipitous that the same week Wrecking Ball showed up in stores also marked the crossover Hot 100 debut of country singer-songwriter Eric Church‘s latest single “Springsteen”, a song about how it feels to be a middle-aged schlub and to listen back to those old Springsteen records, with lyrics sprinkled all over with references to those (gulp) golden oldies (you know, like “Glory Days”).

    “Spingsteen” is the third single from Church’s third album, the extraordinarily well-received Chief, which debuted at the top of the album charts last year. And despite the fact (or because of it) that the song, Church’s twangy delivery notwithstanding, is about as country as Matchbox Twenty, it looks on pace to become the singer’s biggest hit so far.

    There’s certainly a lot to love about it, like how the lyrics, about a certain girl, a certain Jeep, and a long-ago Saturday night (now that’s country), occasionally give way to a sing-along “whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh”. Or just the song’s mellow, reflective vibe: its extended intro and outro, its piano key moonbeams, which sound more like something off a 10-year-old Josh Rouse CD than a 30-year-old Springsteen 45. And then, right at the fadeout, there a woman’s voice faintly, wordlessly echoing the chorus, as if to prove Church’s line about how a melody sounds like a memory.