There Are Mash-Ups, and Then There Are Mash-Ups
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Via Idolator, here is a bizarre curio for your consumption: "Love Will Tear Us Together" by The Captain & Tenielle feat. Joy Division.
Guestroom Records Sales Chart, June 13-20, 2008
1. Coldplay
“Viva La Vida”
(Capitol)
2. Fleet Foxes
“Fleet Foxes”
(Sub Pop)
3. Wolf Parade
“At Mount Zoomer”
(Sub Pop)
4. The Cool Kids
“The Bake Sale”
(Chocolate Industries)
5. My Morning Jacket
“Evil Urges”
(ATO)
6. Centro-Matic/South San Gabriel
“Dual Hawks”
(Cooking Vinyl)
7. Shearwater
“Rook”
(Matador)
8. Neutral Milk Hotel
“In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”
(Merge)
9. Bonnie “Prince” Billy
“Lie Down in the Light”
(Spunk)
10. The Ting Tings
“We Started Nothing”
(Columbia)
Video of the Day: The Fiery Furnaces, “Duplexes of the Dead”
The Fiery Furnaces almost always fight against pure accessibility, and on some collections such as the concept disc Rehearsing My Choir, an understandably heartfelt song cycle about the Friedbergers’ grandmother, it simply went over the brink and into the abyss. Last year’s Widow City, which featured “Duplexes of the Dead,” was much more to my liking, if only because it married the duo’s love of storytelling with a (nearly) straightforward rock song structure. The Fiery Furnaces release their next disc, Remember, on Aug. 19.
Music Review: Albert Hammond Jr., “Como Te Llama”
Rating: 87
The Strokes make noise that evokes the rush of subways and Lower East Side kicks, but when guitarist Albert Hammond Jr. goes it alone, he sounds about 3,000 miles away. Hammond grew up in Southern California, where his ‘70s singer-songwriter father famously sang it “never rains,” and his second solo disc, “Como Te Llama,” is filled with sunshine. This gritty beach music still retains the unmistakable guitar tone of Hammond’s day job, but the melodies and sentiments have more room to breathe.
On “Como Te Llama,” Hammond continues to find the middle ground between indie rock fuzz and Brian Wilson’s teenage symphonies — he even has a song called “In My Room,” but instead of a paean to protective adolescent isolation, it’s about getting a girl to come home with him. Hammond stretches his sound to include a bargain-basement Timbaland-style beat on “Lisa,” but the piano lines and drum machine are soon engulfed by a wave of guitar distortion. Equally strong is the shimmery shuffling of “GfC” and the ominously kraut-rocking “Victory at Monterey.”
In his heart, Hammond is a rock classicist with wide-ranging taste in time-honored songcraft, a trait that often comes through on Strokes songs but it is most evident on “Como Te Llama” songs such as the wistful doo-wop ballad “You Won’t Be Fooled By This” and the distorted reggae on “Borrowed Time.” There are no throwaways here and Hammond clearly has too much strong material for The Strokes to undertake. Following his excellent 2006 solo debut, “Yours to Keep,” “Como Te Llama” proves that Hammond brings his “A” game no matter which coast he calls home.
Video of the Day: Broken Social Scene, “Fire Eye’d Boy”
Our favorite Canadian supergroup that isn’t the New Pornographers show who the real gym class heroes are.
DVD Review: “Mad Men — Season 1″
Rating: 94
HBO passed on “Mad Men,” AMC’s pitch-perfect series about Madison Avenue advertising executives at the dawn of the ‘60s, and that mistake is starting to feel like Decca Records skipping on The Beatles. With intoxicating detail and an unflinching eye for the hard opinions and bad behavior of men with ideas, “Mad Men” shows the creation of our modern media world, and the guys who sold us the American dream.
“Mad Men: Season 1” introduces Sterling Cooper creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm), a man whose first client was himself. While he has sculpted the perfect life and has a pristine wife (January Jones) and family, he is all about creating images. It’s his business, and Sterling Cooper is dominated by alpha males who spend their days drinking, smoking, chasing women and dreaming up million-dollar ideas, from cigarette ads to image building for Richard Nixon.
But it is 1960, and reality is creeping in, both for Draper and the world around him. The patriarchy is being punctured by Peggy Olson (Elizabeth Moss), Draper’s receptionist who seems to have the selling ideas that will dominate the next decade, and Draper’s real past starts to encroach. At its heart, “Mad Men” is a soap opera, but it covers a time of great social change with an intelligence to match the sheer volume of cloak room groping and personal scandal. Few current television shows offer writing and acting at the level of “Mad Men” — creator Matthew Weiner was a key director and writer for “The Sopranos” — and among the period details and sharp character development, the series delivers valuable insight into how a few well-suited men accumulated wealth, partied like Romans and told us how to buy and live.
Extras: A few strong documentaries on advertising in the ’50s and ’60s, including interviews with some real-life contemporaries of the Sterling Cooper men.
Random 10 for June 24, 2008
1. Stars, “Your Ex-Lover is Dead.” The Torquil/Amy duets are always the best, and this captures their frosty chemistry at its finest, contrasting nicely with the opener, featuring a creepy old guy in a burning house.
2. J Dilla, “Wild.”
3. Beck, “Dark Star.”
4. Feist, “So Sorry.”
5. Lavender Diamond, “Like a Prayer.”
6. Starlight Mints, “Inside of Me.” The Mints indulge in the kind of arresting stop-action work that Peter Gabriel and the Talking Heads helped kick off during the mid-’80s.
7. Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins, “Born Secular.”
8. Brookville, “Golden.”
9. The Delgados, “The City Consumes Us.”
10. Propellerheads, “History Repeating.” No one ever accused Shirley Bassey of possessing too much nuance and subtlety.
Video of the Day: Sunny Day Sets Fire, “Smallest Heart on Earth”
Careful with that axe, Eugenia!
Kings of Leon to Release New Disc in September
Back in Beatles times, fans used to worry if their favorite bands went six months without releasing new material, but in the U2 era, you can wait three to four years and like it, consumer.
Well, Kings of Leon are bucking that by releasing their follow-up to Because of the Times, titled Only By the Night, a mere 18 months later. The Followills, who have family in town and spent their childhoods with their preacher dad on the circuit between OKC and Nashville, begin their tour this week at Glastonbury on Friday, and continue on throughout Europe during most of the summer.
Then, it is presumed, the States will get them. Something about Europe giving them a lot more love than they get here, but that undoubtedly will change.
On George Carlin, 1937-2008
George Carlin
Four days before he died on Sunday at age 71, The Kennedy Center announced that George Carlin would be this year’s recipient of the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Carlin was never much for formal recognition, so the timing of his passing could not have been more appropriate.
I saw Carlin only once, in 1990 in a performance at the DeAnza College Performing Arts Center in Cupertino, Calif. While it’s hard to recall specifics of his set, what I always held in awe was Carlin’s ability to find ironic juxtapositions and isolate the outright lies in conventional wisdom. With this laser-like skill at parsing language and sussing out the culture’s fine art of obfuscation, Carlin had an uncommon gift, and if he had chosen to use that gift in the polar opposite direction, he could have been a wizard on Madison Avenue.
As he is eulogized today, Carlin is mainly regarded as a comedian of the counterculture, but that is specifically incorrect, and I’m not sure that such an animal exists. He was a member of the counterculture whose knowledge base and focus was aimed at the culture at-large. His comedy was fueled by righteous anger at the collectively dumb things that we do as players in society and the globally stupid things done by our surrogates.
Chase pointed out to me that there’s some irony in Tim Russert and George Carlin dying so close together, since they both had acutely sensitive b.s. detectors. But while Russert had entre to the halls of power, Carlin was screaming outside the security gate. Society needs both players to keep things straight.
