Four songs flow like something that flows
March 25, 2009
That’s how I flow. Badly.
KKCK:
Jamie Foxx w/T-Pain “Blame It”
After so many songs about bartenders, and buying one more drink, and boat trips, T-Pain decides to help Jamie Foxx assign blame for, well, whatever needs blame assigned to it. The song is smooth, auto-tuned, and it has T-pain. That should get it a spot on the next Nowcompilation at the very least. I think this makes Jamie Foxx the first actor first/singer second to have a song in KKCK rotation since Jennifer Love Hewitt’s “How Do I Deal”. If that’s not select company, I don’t know what is.
Flo Rida w/Wynter “Sugar”
IT SAMPLES “BLUE (DA BA DEE)” BY EIFFEL 65. That’s either awesome or horrible, depending on your feelings about Eiffel 65 and Flo Rida, and the combination thereof. Again, all I have to say is IT SAMPLES “BLUE (DA BA DEE)” BY EIFFEL 65.
Manchester Orchestra “I’ve Got Friends”
This song reminds me of some of the forgotten modern rock of the mid to late 90s, right between Grunge and Creed-rock. My boss hates it when anyone on air says “we’ve got” or “I’ve got” so this song should frustrate him just a bit more than usual.
Nickelback “If Today Was Your Last Day”
It’s Nickelback. I really doesn’t matter what I say, but I will mention that for a slow Nickelback song, it has a strong and pronounced beat. Of all the singles so far, this has the biggest “Mutt” Lange fingerprint. One would think production tricks that worked so well in the 80s and early 90s wouldn’t work now, but since they do I must conclude “Mutt” is some kind of genius.
Pick to click: Nickelback and/or Eiffel 65.
Battlestar Galactica is now over. What an ending. I’m watching it again tonight with the other big BSG fan I know. I’m curious to hear his take, which should be either “awesome” or “that sucked”. Biffy is a man of few middle grounds. In a few weeks Terminator: TSCC wraps up, possibly for good. There are a few shows I might want to start, but on the other hand I might just keep what I have. There was a time I watched so little TV I almost dropped cable. I never did, because I do enjoy a baseball game from time to time. DVR upped my viewing habits, but a combination of ratings and endings should help drive it down again.
Braeden has had some…challenging nights the last few weeks. Most babies are sleeping through the night at his age, but the emphasis on that sentence is “most”. He’s been up at least three or four times a night over the past week. I now understand why “teething time” elicits such a groan and look of misery on the faces of parents everywhere. So far his best career track might be magician, with an emphasis on escape artist. We have a swaddling blanket of some kind that wraps him up, and it fastens with Velcro. By the next morning, he’s either one arm out, both arms out, or has it off completely. This morning he had somehow gotten his arms and legs out without undoing the Velcro. Last night he got out and turned himself over, which was bad because he’s also still hooked up to an apnea monitor with corded electrodes. On a more positive note, he’s sitting on his own and he certainly enjoys baby-talking. I think we’ve got a future chatterbox kid on our hands.
I’m still not writing as much as I was a few months ago, but I think some of that has to do with twitter. The only thing I really wish Twitter would add is a way to separate the people I’m following. They’d fall neatly into: friends, web-comic artists, and people I don’t know who don’t draw web-comics. I don’t want to use something that has to be downloaded, because I split my tweets between up to four or five computers a day.
The other morning I used Braeden’s nap to finally watch the original Vanishing Point. I know it’s a cult classic, but all it did to me was make me want to take a long, fast road trip through Colorado and Nevada. That’s also what the movie Scorched and many other movies made in the American Southwest make me want to do. As of right now, a long road trip through that area is only on my list of things to do after winning the lottery.
I’ve been watching a bit of spring baseball. I’m ready for the season, or as ready as I’ll ever be. My big fantasy draft is this Saturday, and I’m not preparing as much as usual. The reasons are a combination of no time to prepare, and that past years when I’ve really prepared it hasn’t helped any. This year I’m going with a more “seat of the pants” and “follow my gut” strategy. We’ll see how that works.
Speaking of work, I should do some.
ZZ caught up
August 3, 2008
Yelling about music is reserved for Jeph Jacques and his music blog. His comic strip isn’t bad either, and by “not bad” I mean “when I decided to start at the beginning to catch up it consumed my soul until I was fully caught up”. I was going to split this blog into two, which tied into the first sentence more (I left it because I dig QC). First we’ll have the ZZ Top part, then the non-ZZ Top part in a day or so.
I’m almost caught up on my ZZ Top. A while back I got my hands on all of the post-Afterburner ZZ Top albums, and while some I’d listened to and blown off, I had a desire to now go back and check out what one of my favorite bands in high school has been doing since…well, since I was in High School (although Recycler came out during that time, I’ve never owned a copy).
The previously mentioned Recycler was up first, and while I still didn’t care for it, I didn’t find it as derivative as I remembered it being. True, “My Head’s in Mississippi” is still a heavier “La Grange”, but none of the other songs struck me as carbon copies of other ZZ Top songs. Antenna was a lot more fun to listen to than I remembered. “Fuzzbox Voodoo”, “Girl in a T-Shirt”, “World of Swirl” and “Pincushion” were big standouts, and the album only seemed a bit lacking near the end. My memories of driving seventy miles to get Antenna probably didn’t help, as I’m sure I listened to Eliminator the whole way. I heard it then as another letdown, where as now I hear it for what it is. It’s a decent album and a nice pick up from Recycler’s post-syth thud.
Then there’s Rhythmeen. I still remember seeing ZZ Top had a new album coming out, and I was pretty excited because all the buzz I was hearing was good. Too bad all the buzz was from magazines I was reading while working at Q98 in Fargo. Radio trades that push songs never go out of their way to say bad things. In fact, they go above and beyond the call of duty to accentuate any positive they can find (or they make one up) to get a station to jump on a track. One of them tracked airplay and gave PD opinions, and most PDs were liking the new single. We were playing it, and it wasn’t horrible (the song “What’s Up With That”). Then, one fateful day before I hit the road for Veblen, I bought Rhythmeen on cassette (I took longer in switching to CD, okay) and the title track almost made me tear up, no joke. It was that good. I was convinced ZZ Top was back and just like I remembered. The rest of the CD took that great start and dialed in the rest, with the exception of “She’s Just Killing Me”. Listening to it today, the feeling of them phoning it in wasn’t dashed, but there were a few tracks I liked more now than then.
XXX was something I picked up used the year after it came out, as I was still a bit turned off by Rhythmeen. I listened to it once, and not since. I remember it being just bad, but now I realize some of those feelings are leftover from Rhythmeen. XXX is a work that a lot of bands that have been around a long time make. I can’t think of anything bad to say about it, but I also am at a loss to say what was good about it. It is what it is, and it is just there.
Right now I’m listening to the one ZZ Top album I’ve never heard before, Mescalero. The song on as I type is “Piece” which was the first single, and a song that instantly turned me off from even looking for the album used. The other songs on the album (so far) are not only better, but give me some hope for the Rick Rubin-produced album we might hear this year. Mescalero sounds like ZZ Top went into the studio to do an album like they used to in spirit, but sounding like they have for the last few decades because it’s how their sound has evolved to at this point. Can Rick strip away all that ZZ Top has added and get them back to the sound that made them favorites back in that shack outside “La Grange”?
Ask me again this fall (hopefully). In the meantime, I think I’ll keep these later-career ZZ Top albums around. My iPod isn’t taxed for space…yet.
…and by “out this September”, I mean on the SciFi channel.
KKCK:
Rihanna “Disturbia”
Not only is this the third of three new songs on the re-release of Good Girl Gone Bad (now called Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded, which sounds like a sequel for a made for Spike TV movie), it’s the third one to be a single, following “Take a Bow” and “If I Never See Your Face Again” (with Maroon 5). Three of the album’s seven singles are now from the re-release, which begs the question about how relevant the original release is. I’m not sure which is my favorite yet. “If I Never See Your Face Again” has a definite 80s vibe, and “Disturbia” reminds me a little of songs like “S.O.S.” and “Pon De Replay” in that it is not another “Take a Bow” type of ballad. Judging by the calls, the listeners don’t share my feelings about Rihanna. Ever. I only get calls for “Take a Bow” which is starting to border on how annoying the calls for “Unfaithful” were. The only fast Rihanna song that got the phones buzzing was “Shut Up and Drive” which is my least favorite fast Rihanna song. The moral here? Fast Rihanna songs do alright, but Rihanna singing a ballad is like Rihanna printing money. I’m just happy that on this occasion an artist I said would be around for a “long time” is so far living up to that.
Newton Faulkner “Dream, Catch Me”
The first time I heard this I focused more on where I’d heard his voice rather than the song. I was convinced he was the lead singer of some other band I couldn’t think of. After deciding it was Blue October, I checked his wiki entry, only to find out he’s not the former lead singer of any band, and is only the current lead singer of Newton Faulkner. The song gets the dreaded “pretty decent” mark from me, which is a nice way of saying I don’t have a lot to say about it (which I admit here for the first time!)
September “Cry for You”
Good news everyone! We added a Swedish pop star with a dancy beat. No, it isn’t a song from Robyn. Rather, it’s September! No, I know it’s June. Her stage name is September, and not even Green Day could sleep through this one. Sorry, I can’t resist a bad pun built around “Wake Me Up…” and you know the rest. In the fine tradition of Real McCoy, Ace of Base, Vengaboys, Eiffel 65, Cascada and Ian Van Dahl, we have a new dance-pop song with a fast beat that even I can dance to, albeit badly. This type of music will never be my favorite, but one popping up now and then is good for a CHR station. As a Midwest CHR, we do acknowledge and affirm that no electronic dance song, no matter the beat, no matter the lyric, no matter the sound, will ever touch the Rednex in popularity.
Mark Medlock “Summer Love”
American Idol? Been done. Canadian Idol? Uh…moving on. Pop Idol in the U.K.? We’ve gone there, but now we move on to…Deutschland sucht den Superstar, and their 2007 winner. Now, before I dismiss this as our music director feeling his German heritage again, I ask you give it a listen. It is a formulatic electro-pop song, but the summer vibe and vocals that flow very well with the music (English vocals, BTW) make it a song that I don’t mind hearing once or twice a day, probably for a few months at a time. Mr. Medlock’s life is an interesting read. I don’t know if he’ll totally cross the pond, but you can judge for yourself in a variety of places. Also, it is nice to hear a winner of one of these Idol type of shows releasing something with some thump in it. I must be in the mood to dance. I’ll let the wife know to close the curtains and move the cats with weak stomachs out of the room.
Pick to click: Rihanna
I had a lot to say about Battlestar Galactica’s mid-season finale, but Greg Dean at Real LIfe Comics said it all:
Truth and a frackin’ bag of space-chips.
I don’t often write about webcomics, but I’m always meaning to. I read about 80-100 of them every week. I had them in a folder that I could just open as a long stretch of tabs, but I had to break that up when went over seventy. As a kid, one of my favorite activities was reading the comics page every day. I used to save rolls and rolls of the Aberdeen American News, and I had a box or three full of Sunday comics pages. Some days I’d just get them out and read them all again, which is a practice I stopped once I started buying collections of comic strips. My interest in the comics page had waned during the 90s into the 2000s, but webcomics have revived my love of the medium to a point where some days I’m standing in the studio wondering how Shortpacked, Questionable Content, Starslip Crisis, Kevin and Kell, Sinfest, Marilith, PVP, Schlock Mercenary, Evil Inc, and others will wrap up their storylines for the week/month/ever. I’d like to start featuring some of my favorites, mainly because I don’t have the resources to buy stuff/donate/help them out any other way. It’s about the least I can do, but if my ship ever comes in, or if a ship lands on my house and I net the insurance, I’ll buy shirts/books/whatever until I can’t.
Kate is painting the kid’s room today, with some help from a friend who is in town visiting. She surprised me on Father’s Day with a picture frame (with a current ultrasound in it), a card, and a little Seattle Mariners onesie. Hopefully the team doesn’t suck so bad by the time he’s old enough to root for them, or against them. I had my time rebelling against my step-dad’s love of the Cubs, but he, Harry Carey and WGN wore me down within a few years. I want him to grow up liking whatever team he chooses, and I’ll try and be supportive even if he picks the *shudder* Yankees.
Mac is back from the vet, and she’s been meowing like crazy. The vet thinks her hormones are out of phase, which is causing her to think she’s pregnant. Her behaviour is a lot like when she was expecting kittens, so there might be a lot to that diagnosis. I just hope she stays as friendly and close to her daughter Eileen when they wear off. Listening to the two of them meow at each other is about the cutest cat sound I have ever heard.
In quick other blog news, I ranted about FNMTV, and wrote about one of my favorite Kate moments of my life at the old russ4life site.
The sound of new Local H isn’t cute. It’s angry, depressed, introspective, raw, and everything one would expect from Local H. Too bad Scott Lucas’ new muse was his last break-up.
