Category: Music

It sounded intriguing: bring together a mega-talented Broadway star and a mega-talented studio/songwriting wizard to record an album of original music. Idina Menzel, a star of Rent and Wicked (and recently seen on screen in Enchanted), is one of very few Broadway stars of relatively recent vintage to have made the leap beyond Broadway into the wider culture. Producer extraordinaire and songwriter Glen Ballard, the genius other half of the Alanis Morrissette phenomenon of the 1990s, has more recently worked with rock and pop royalty ranging from the Goo Goo Dolls and Shakira to Dave Matthews and Annie Lennox.

As an admirer of both artists, I really wanted to like this CD. Unfortunately, the best that I can say about it is that it's produced and arranged really well. Adult contemporary pop is rarely a nursery for originality, so I wasn't expecting anything world-changing or socks-knocking-off. But given Ballard's heavy participation – he co-wrote many of the songs with Menzel – I was hoping for at least a few good tunes. The closing ballad, "Perfume and Promises," is nice. The title track and "Gorgeous" have halfway decent hooks. That's as good as it gets. The songs are so drowned in cliche that "uninspired" seems a kind way to put it. As an album, it's listenable, but only because of the pretty soundscapes.

All Menzel's vocal passion and fireworks and Ballard's studio wizardry can't polish bad, half-hearted, Disneyesque material into something truly shiny. As with Disney's latest Broadway shows, though, this is probably one of those situations where critical reviews mean little. Judging from most of the listener reaction at Amazon.com, Menzel's fans are out in force, and they love whatever she does.

I can't help it, though. I feel strongly about this. I could walk out onto the street with my eyes closed and in four seconds trip over a songwriter who could write better pop songs than these for Idina Menzel (or any singer). Hugely successful creative artists like Ballard seem to often lose perspective amid all the plaudits and awards, and start to believe that whatever they do is brilliant. And no one's willing to listen objectively and say the emperor has no clothes.

Maybe a star like Menzel, not yet a mature songwriter, needs a collaborator who's hungry to succeed. With the exception of that good ballad at the end, Idina Menzel hasn't been well served here on her first project as a singer-songwriter.

No ladies need apply to this edition of the Indie Round-Up – it's all guys, all the time.

Steve Northeast, Inside

Steve Northeast crafts energetic and emotional hard rock songs loaded with raspy guitars and cataclysmic rhythms. He puts a lot of emotion into the songs, and that, together with the deep engagement with what's going on the world, means that at times he risks overwhelming the production's generous musicality – and the excellent guitar work – with lyrics that bend towards earnest cliche. But at their best, the songs evoke the David Bowie of Heroes and the Soundgarden of the '90s. Favorites: "The Way It Is," "Out of Here," and the power ballad "Phoenix."

Listen at the website.

Jann Klose, Reverie

Jann Klose makes complex but accessible chamber pop with intelligent lyrics and contagious rhythms. Songs like "Doing Time" and "Clouds" have a European and sometimes Beatlesque sensibility. (It doesn't hurt that Klose's voice sounds a bit like Paul McCartney's.) The German-born, South African-raised singer-songwriter, now based in the Bronx, has been a theatrical performer, and he has a fine feel for how to arrange his songs with "stageworthy" effectiveness, easily slipping in horns, strings, reeds, and more unusual instruments. The touch is light; a song like "All These Rivers" may remind you of some of Sting's solo work, while the gentle "Remember Your Name" could have come out of southern California in the 1970s. Overall, a sweet salve for troubled times. Listen or buy.

The Alternate Routes, The Brooklawn Session

This disc is an acoustic re-recording of The Alternate Routes' superb debut album Good and Reckless and True, with the same eleven songs in a different order. At the moment, it's available only at concerts, and since the band is between tours right now, you'll have to borrow mine if you want it. (Low hourly rates!) You can, however, hear a couple of the tracks at their Myspace page. The disc has a sort of distant, ghostly, furry-wall-of-sound quality, very pleasing if you're in a coffeehouse mood yet want to hear good songs that aren't self-indulgent like a lot of acoustic singer-songwriter fare. Why am I writing about it if you can't buy it? Because it's another opportunity to tell you that you should really check out this Bridgeport, Connecticut band. Go out of your way if you have to; take an alternate route.

This Holiday Life, The Beginning of the End of the World

I sympathize with new bands trying to establish an identity; a band's name is quite important, but all the good ones, it seems, have been taken. Still, This Holiday Life could have tried a little harder.

Fortunately, the abbreviation THL seems to have been available – in any case, they're using it, and it flows off the tongue a lot better. The music, I'm happy to say, flows out of my speakers very pleasantly too.

The San Diego quartet has made a well deserved name for itself on the West Coast, with catchy songs and a modern sensibility which nevertheless nods back to the '80s new wave of Tears for Fears and Flock of Seagulls. A lot of the lyrics are abstract but there's no mistaking the meaning of "This is the end it's alright we're here together." "Undercover" is a strong earworm. "Animal" is a rubbery, surrealistic, evocative look at I don't know what, and "Oh Sister Please!" is another stretchy, hooky little gem. The slight quirkiness in the arrangements is amusing and endearing, not self-conscious. Overall, THL pops. Hear some tracks.

Get your Whisperado here! This post is showing off a playlist of our CD Some Other Place using the Last.fm playlist widget.

The other night I had the chance to interview Kenny Vance, a founding member of the seminal group Jay and the Americans and currently leader of Kenny Vance and the Planotones. He was also the music director for American Hot Wax, Animal House, and Saturday Night Live. I had recently reviewed the Planotones’ new CD.

In person Kenny turns out to be a one-man treasure trove of information and perspective on the early rock and roll era (and a really nice guy). You can listen to the whole interview online at BC Radio Live, and/or read excerpts over at Blogcritics. Then pick up the new disc Countdown To Love.

This week I have for you some thumbnail sketches of 2007 releases that I didn’t have time to review during the year but are worthy of note for one reason or another. That was going to be the only “theme.” But then I noticed something. Several stunningly attractive women lurked among the CD covers in the pile. And it got me thinking…

Sometimes I wish artists weren’t allowed to put any pictures of themselves on their CD packaging.

Physical appearance can skew one’s expectations unfairly. With very attractive artists, the listener can suffer from a kind of reverse prejudice. The camera adores Kyle Lardner, for example. Her stunning photos stress her Sara Michelle Gellar eyes and lead one to think she might be a manufactured pop moppet. Not so – read on for a pocket review of her new CD.

Landon (or Landonband) is fronted by Landon Dunning. Her music is harsh and sore, serious and angry and rocking – Bob Clearmountain mixed it, ’nuff said? – but her face is absurdly beautiful. Landon has addressed this by titling her CD Defying the Stereotype and using a non-glamorous cover photo. She looks closely into the camera, the black and white emphasizing her raccoon eye makeup, the beginning of a sly grin slightly curling her upper lip. The broken text of the title is stamped right across the middle of her face. So I’m fucking beautiful, she seems to be saying – what am I supposed to do about it? It’s an effective technique. Listen to the forcefulness of the music and it stops mattering what the artist looks like.

Just the other day I got word that Lara St. John, whose Bach Violin Concertos is one of my favorite recent classical discs, has a new Bach recording out. When I went to check it out, I read up on the critically acclaimed violinist, and I found that she has a penchant for provocative CD cover poses. (This kind of thing tends not to come up when you’re buying downloads and not CDs.) Do I now think about this person differently, whom I earlier admired purely for her artistry? In some subtle way, probably.

But when I start worrying about these things too much I remind myself that we are all, every one of us, imperfect animals. Artists, fans, blatherers – we may not all take ourselves equally unseriously, but we probably ought to. And artists can’t win – play up your looks and you’re accused of pandering; fail to and you’re passing up your chance for a leg up. I like Landon’s solution, but not everyone can back up the attitude with the good music like she can. So, enough blather and on to more music.

Jon McKiel, The Nature of Things

Speaking of serious, Jon McKiel’s dark alt-rock may have something of the shoegazer to it, but I found it just the thing for driving around the city streets in an angry funk, with its moody sounds and aware lyrics. Listen to some tracks at his Myspace page.

Sheva, The Closest Thing

Here’s another example of looks affecting one’s listening attitude. I was all set to hate this, or just toss it out, based on the washed-out cover photo showing the artist staring blankly into the camera as if a soap opera director had forgotten to say “Cut.” (The fact that my cover letter was addressed to “Dear Dan” didn’t help either.) It turns out, though, to be a solid piano-pop disc with some pretty catchy tunes. Sheva’s voice lacks distinction, the songs are formulaic, and some of the arrangements are overwrought – but I still liked a fair amount of this earnest, straightforward blue-eyed pop disc. Hear three tracks at her Myspace page.

Bronze, Calypso Shakedown

This smooth meld of nu-soul and easygoing disco may come out of Chicago, but it feels like warm climes and beach times. Good songs, Fender Rhodes, strings (real ones, not played on a keyboard), and vocals that alternately suggest the Bee Gees and Earth, Wind and Fire come together to make this a sweet, groovy set of original retro tunes. The songwriting weakens towards the end, but there’s a nice chunk of good stuff, and even the lesser songs go down easy.

The Spoken X, Wild Child

Spoken X pairs chip-on-its-shoulder spoken poetry with heavy, riff-based rock. The results are mixed – some songs just sound pretentious – but when Ted Golder’s lyrics sidestep a tendency to rant and slip into a descriptive or stream of consciousness groove, the songs cohere. Then the music slams with a satisfying crunch, a bit like the Doors of old. “Teo takes a stroll and walks past an old lady dressed in rags talking to her people from outer space / She used to be religious but now she’s found so much more room to express herself.” Hear more of Spoken X expressing themselves.

Kyle Lardner, Sail Among the Stars

For a more effervescent pop experience, try piano-playing songstress Kyle Lardner (mentioned above). With a teenager’s sweet vocal purity, Lardner does shimmery but sophisticated pop that’s a little bit Disney and a little bit rock and roll – nothing too new, but it’ll put the rouge on your cheeks. Songs like “The Blanket Song,” “Aways Away,” and the scintillating, Abba-like “Perfume” feel like elevated teen angst tunes, while “Moral Amnesia” and “When We’re Gone” show an admirable social and philosophical conscience. As a singer Lardner doesn’t have the vocal heft to fully bear her ambitious musical vision, but her songs, couched in these majestic arrangements, show her off well and hold a good deal of promise.

Choose, Untitled

Talk about anti-image. This experiment-minded, female-fronted band makes alternately atmospheric and metallic industrial rock. The song titles are just numbers, and all the printed materials are written backwards, as if to say, Don’t worry about reading this stuff, it’s all about the music. Kinda cool, actually, although it might have been nice if they’d compromised their principles enough to print at least the web address rightways. But it is all about the music – and the experiments. (In concert they match up the audience’s heartbeats with the beat of the music). I’d like to have a chance to catch this group live in the new year. Listen up.

Kickstart, Untitled

Fronted by the gravelly-voiced baritone of singer-guitarist Eric Strickler, these thrashy Brooklyn punkers seem to be as influenced by sixties garage rock as by late-seventies punk. Sometimes Strickler sounds as if he’s going to vomit; other times he growls like Shane McGowan. Or is it the same thing? Either way, the band’s take-no-prisoners rhythms and catchy songs add up to a big panful of rugged rock.

Laura Aidanblaise, Get Thee To The World

From Toronto comes a new singer-songwriter with an intensity of delivery rivalling that of PJ Harvey. There’s so much emotion in Laura Aidanblaise’s voice you worry she’s about to implode. The insistent intensity and melodic repetition may put off some listeners, but I find it haunting and vivid. Her seven-song disc is just about as sparely recorded as can be – just her voice and guitar on most songs – and it works fine; there’s isn’t much that swelling synths or dramatic drum fills could do to elevate or further focus the music. The last two songs do feature more instruments, but they’re used efficiently and tastefully.

“Boredom is the enemy and all that it attracts…” The words and melodies call to mind the skewed lyricism of Tori Amos’s early work, and the lyrical power suggests Ani DiFranco without the guitar pyrotechnics. There’s also a theatrical quality to the tunes that brings to mind certain Broadway music, like Sondheim. But the main point is that Laura Aidanblaise is an original new voice – probably not for everybody, but with a lot to say. Draw the curtains, brew some strong tea, and check her out.

Tommy Strazza, Welcome To The Rest Of Your Life

When you’ve had enough quiet intensity and you’re ready to rock, try Tommy Strazza; he writes hooky power-pop songs and puts them across with a voice and a classic old-fashioned rock style that call to mind Perry Farrell or Mott the Hoople – hoarse, passionate, triumphant. He’s not just a screamer, though. “Don’t mind walkin’ with some holes in my socks / If I can do my own thing hangin’ outside the box,” he liltingly sings in the folky “Goin’ Solo,” and his love song “My Love” is spacey and gentle. Still, his abilities shine brightest in his uptempo rockers like “Detour,” “Liberated,” and “Good To See You,” and the power ballad “Love, Don’t Bring Me Down.” Listen to some tracks at his Myspace page.

Hate Camels, Death Comedy Jams

This disc stands at the crossroads of progressive rock and jazz fusion, with a flash of heavy iron doing a wheelie in the intersection. Six of its seven long instrumental tracks pay tribute to a series of great comedians who have passed on – Mitch Hedberg, Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, and Andy Kaufman. Kinison gets the metal treatment, natch. Lenny Bruce draws out a jazzy improv number that evokes the Beat era. Bill Hicks gets a piece with a twelve-tone feel, and so on. But direct references to the particular comics’ personalities or styles aren’t always easy to pick out – in some cases they might not exist. No matter; the compositions have enough inherent interest to please the kind of music fans who perk up at the genres I named at the start. Hear some of the tracks at Myspace.

Lorrie Ruiz, Chewy
And speaking of fusion, Lorrie Ruiz’s good-natured jazz fusion disc might be just the thing to convince your grouchy friends that fusion isn’t always as cold, virtuosic, and inaccessible as its reputation would have it. Taking some Stevie Wonder funk, adding some Steely Dan archness and George Benson smoothness, crafting some pretty good pop hooks to hang it all on, singer Ruiz and keyboardist Joe Doria have come up with a batch of fun, toe-tapping, and friendly songs. The weakness is Ruiz’s hummy, uninflected vocals, which just make you think what someone like Stevie Wonder, or even Mariah Carey – or any number of great young neo-soul singers I can think of – would have been able to do with material like this. Fortunately the other elements are more important here. The playing – by Doria, guitarist Chris Spencer, bassist Dayna Smith, and drummer Larry Bichler – gives this disc its soul, and good songwriting gives it heart. Nicely done.

Red Plastic Buddha, Sunflower Sessions

I love to get back to psychedelia sometimes. But the same old late-sixties, early-seventies music gets tired after awhile. Fortunately there are bands like Red Plastic Buddha keeping the swoony, shimmery tradition alive. Like a Peter Max painting come to life, Red Plastic Buddha comes in colors – all over the floor. With semi-spastic guitar solos that bring to mind early Jefferson Airplane, keyboard parts that very vaguely suggest Ray Manzarek and the Doors, and vocals that range from an intense scream to a distant call, they’ve really got the flavors down. Many of the six songs deserve their psychedelic-music bloat (“Forget Me Not,” “Clouds”), while a couple are a little too underwritten to merit it (“Rollercoaster,” “Over And Over”), but overall it’s a pretty sweet 33 minutes of dark, retrograde flower power. If they sharpened up their songwriting a bit, they’d get a leg up on the other bands (and there are some) that are also keeping the groovy flame burning. Hear three tracks at their Myspace page.

Brett Dennen, So Much More

Brett Dennen is a young folk artist with a deft touch on the guitar. His singing is plaintive yet assured, and he writes in a mature, socially involved, and sharp-eyed style. I don’t love his reedy voice, although it’s starting to grow on me a little. But I am very impressed with this disc – the scope of his songwriting and the delicate emotion of his delivery make Dennen a potentially major talent. (He’s touring this summer with John Mayer.) Listen to a few tracks and see if you don’t agree.

My Holiday Gift Guide focusing on indie CDs is now available – free for the readin’! Dig it. Dig it again.

Just a photo from Wednesday night’s Soul of the Blues show at Cornelia Street Cafe. Jazz singer Sarah DeLeo, a newcomer to the Cornelia St. stage, opened the show with a set of blues-inflected jazz numbers including a great, obscure Ella Fitzgerald tune called “Too Young To Have the Blues.”

Pictured is our headliner Mala Waldron who tried out some unusual stuff and kicked Soul of the Blues butt as always.

Jake Stigers, I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got and Live & Loud in the UK

Jake Stigers hasn't slowed down since Comin' Back Again, touring and bringing the rock and roll flame to – well, I guess mostly Europe. His new CD has a loose, energetic flavor, and Stigers's facility with catchy tunesmithing has not deserted him. Several tracks have a folk-rock feel – Jeff Buckley meets James Taylor – while "Girl" is a straightforward, Beatle-esque pop nugget and "Love Is Spoken Here" has a Tom Petty twang. "Miss Reality," "Let Us Take You There," and the title track – which reminds me a lot of Joe Walsh and a little of the Rolling Stones, and that's never a bad thing – hark back to heavy southern and classic rock.

Style aside, good songs are good songs, and these are good songs, arranged with the right amount of, in some cases, sweetness that touches, and in others, gruffness that busts loose without going over the top. Above all, these songs are so good-natured you can't help smiling as you listen, right down to the excellent closer, Stigers's folk-gospel original tune "Jesus Said." The CD can currently be purchased at Koolkatmusik and will soon be widely available.

Also available is a live CD, Live & Loud in the UK, which testifies to the roadworthiness of Stigers and his band. It's a more straight-ahead rock and roll set, tempered with just a couple of power ballads, all very well recorded and mixed, but without the stylistic variety of the new studio album. So it's not as good an introduction as I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got is to Stigers and his band, but it will definitely appeal to those who are already fans. The live tracks are available for purchase through his Myspace page.

Kenny Vance and the Planotones, Countdown to Love

Kenny Vance, a founding member of the seminal doo-wop group Jay and the Americans ("This Magic Moment," "Cara Mia"), went on to a distinguished career as – among other things – music director for important American films including Animal House, Eddie and the Cruisers, and American Hot Wax, which was based on the life of legendary DJ Alan Freed. For that film, Vance created The Planotones, an initially fictional group which took on a life of its own.

Since re-forming the Planotones in 1992 Vance has continued carrying the doo-wop tradition to old and new audiences through concerts and new CD releases. His latest disc, Countdown to Love, is both a worthy torch-bearer of the doo-wop tradition and a valuable musical statement on its own terms. Most of the selections are typical doo-wop style songs, but there are some departures. His vocal-heavy version of the garage classic "Louie Louie" is fun, and "The Way You Look Tonight," with its Moonlight Sonata triplets, is quite lovely. So is the Bacharach-David classic "Anyone Who Had a Heart." The driving version of "There Goes My Baby" is refreshing when one is accustomed to the somber way it's usually played, and the a capella "My Girlfriend" closes the CD on a light, quirky note.

Tying them all together are the velvety vocals, sometimes in falsetto, other times in a sweet tenor. The arrangements have, for the most part, an easygoing texture that's clearly not the work of actual teenagers. But they bring the teen-inspired wails of doo-wop softly, comfortably into the 21st century.

The very notion of “popular” music is evolving before our eyes and ears. The appeal of a catchy tune hasn’t changed, but we are no longer the mass audience we were during most of the 20th century. Hence, massively popular hit songs are becoming fewer and farther between. We go off by ourselves and listen to new music that appeals to us individually. But when we get together in large numbers we keep using the old songs, over and over again.

Two recent observations have reinforced for me the idea that as a society we are coming to experience and use pop music very differently than we did during what I am starting to think of as the “golden age” of recorded music.

1. I’m at a college hockey game. What do you think they are playing over the P.A. to get the fans excited for the home team’s appearance on the ice? A new song by the Foo Fighters? Something off Jay-Z’s new hit album? Guess again. It’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” a 36-year-old track by The Who. And what does the pep band play in the stands during a pause in the action? “Jungle Boogie,” by Kool & The Gang, from 1973.

2. I’m watching TV. A commercial comes on for some baby product or other. The music: Steppenwolf’s 1968 hit, “Born to be Wild.” Too much time has gone by for it to be meant as a nostalgic appeal to the parents; this music predates the formative years of most of today’s baby-mommies and baby-daddies. It’s simpler than that: “Born To Be Wild” is a song just about everyone knows, whatever your age.

If you had told me, back in the 1970s when I was in high school, that the records my friends and I were playing at our parties would still be supplying the theme songs for sporting events – and college sports, at that – three decades in the future, I’d have said you were nuts. After all, 30 years before my musically formative period, big-band swing and Frank Sinatra were all the rage, and no one was listening to that any more (except “old” folks experiencing nostalgia). As a rule we didn’t appreciate, or even like, the music of one or two generations back.

And we didn’t have to. We had our own defining songs and bands that everyone our age listened to. Sure, tastes varied – some liked southern rock, some liked the Dead, some liked the heavier stuff, and some got into disco – but whether you liked or hated “Sweet Home Alabama,” whether “Hot Stuff” made you boogie or cringe, you knew those songs, and so did everyone else.

How many recent songs – and by recent I mean since the age of downloads began – can we say that about? I can think of a few monster hits, like “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley and “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” by Green Day. But mostly all I can come up with are 1990s hits like “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and “Oops! I Did It Again,” which, while they still feel recent to me, date from before the Great Splintering.

It’s not that songs with catchy melodies and great hooks aren’t being written anymore. On the contrary, with recording technology accessible to just about anyone, excellent independent projects abound, and talented songwriters flower more and more readily. While the ability to write “hit-worthy” pop tunes remains relatively rare, it can be found all over if you pay attention to indie music.

But 99.9% of the great pop tunes being written today will never reach a substantial audience, not to mention penetrate the culture at large. The releases are far too numerous, the audience much too splintered. Most of the more traditional obstacles to commercial success haven’t gone away either. So where and how are you going to hear these great new songs?

Even the most popular music websites and blogs have vastly fewer readers than the big radio stations had listeners in their glory days. You might discover a great new song or band, you might tell your friends, but even if you’re today’s version of a tastemaker – an Originator, as the psychologist and media consultant David Jennings calls it in his recent book Net, Blogs and Rock ‘n’ Roll – your “public” is still a very small subset of the culture at large. Hence the same will be true of the audience for your new favorite song.

So where will the next “Born To Be Wild” come from? The next “Mysterious Ways”? The next “Oops! I Did It Again,” even? It’s the wrong question. The right question is, how will they spread? – and there’s no good answer right now.

Is there something inherently good about the existence of mega-hit songs? Maybe not; maybe the new paradigm isn’t fundamentally a bad thing. But it certainly seems like a sad thing – not because I’m still going to be singing Beatles tunes in the shower in the year 2040, but because a kid born today might have to be doing the same thing.

Note: for a more succinct (and tuneful) expression of the point I’m making, listen to Bruce Springsteen’s new hit “Radio Nowhere.”

Update: a discussion of this post has been happening over at Uncertain Principles.