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Archive for November, 2008
Cold Blood Kisses My Love
Wed Nov 26 2008 by Lucas Jensen
San Francisco funk ensemble Cold Blood were contemporaries of Bay Area greats Tower of Power and supposedly got their first break from Janis Joplin. Driven by the powerful vocals of Lydia Pense, the band unleashed a number of classic early-’70s records, including 1973’s monster Thriller (a decade earlier than Mr. Jackson!), which includes this epic version of Bill Wither’s “Kissing My Love”.
The Wah-Wah In TV Show Themes: A Survey
Wed Nov 26 2008 by Michaelangelo Matos
This post began innocuously enough a few months ago, when I was visiting my friends Jessi and Eric in Portland. Jessi had gotten into watching Match Game reruns every morning, and she showed me a couple. My first instinct was to say, “What the hell is this?” The orange sets, the public drunkenness, big crabbypuss Charles Nelson Reilly, Brett Sommers as Auntie Mame on bad meds, that second-rate louche lothario Richard Dawson, the insistence during the ’70s to add a ‘7X to the title of any goddamned thing (”Match Gaaaaaaame ‘76!”), contestants like the one Jessi dubbed “Cokehead Guy,” who had a big bushy early Rob Reiner ‘do in very light brown + big ’stache + frosted glasses and a manner that suggested he would have licked his gums forever if there weren’t cameras and a studio audience. But most of all, it was the theme music: ridiculously bumptious wah-wah guitar and horns so peppy they could induce a hallucination. I now go around humming that goddamned theme all the time. And it now leads us to a mini-tribute to TV themes with prominent wah-wah guitars, right after the jump.
The Script Get A Little Bit Choked Up
Wed Nov 26 2008 by xhuxk
Though these Dubliners somewhat amusingly claim to merge rock (or rather, whatever wimpy music silly Irish people erroneously classify as rock) with “hip hop lyrical flow,” their self-titled Phonogenic catapulted up to No. 19 on the Heatseekers chart last week; the £6.99 iTunes price listed on their MySpace page was presumably not a major factor, but every little thing counts. Clearly they are following in Celtic soul-brother footsteps previously laid down by Thin Lizzy and Black 47 and House of Pain and people like that. “Think U2 versus Timbaland, Van Morrison remixed by Teddy Riley,” their bio on MySpace says, and their fans contribute comments written in cryptic Dublin hip-hop lingo: “Alri lads wats d story??,” goes one. “Was doin me business midterm test d oda day nd der was a question on break-even analises r sumfin nd wen i just saw breakeven ur song was n me head n i cudn concintrate, twas gas, i distracted nearly every1 else 2, am auctaly listening ta breakeven now lol!”
Warner Music Group: Making Money By Making Less
Wed Nov 26 2008 by Lucas Jensen
The report on Warner Music Group’s earnings is typical doom-and-gloom for the most part, even though there is hope amongst the negativity. WMG beat Wall Street expectations and actually increased net profits to $6 million in the fourth fiscal quarter of this year, up from $5 million the year before. Ringtone sales are weak (boy, that fad dried up pretty quickly everywhere), digital sales are steady, and CD sales are down. Things don’t look that great on the face of it, but there is that increase in net profits that’s rather curious.
Idolator’s Bands On The Run: The Heligoats Open Up The Books
Wed Nov 26 2008 by Lucas Jensen
A few months ago, I wrote a piece about how hard it was for artists to make money on the road, given then-high gas prices. Since then, gas prices have gone down, but I don’t expect them to stay that way, and they are still twice as much as they were a decade ago. My main point was to challenge the conventional wisdom that artists “make their money on the road.” Idolator put the word out to some artists to see if they would follow in the footsteps of Hope For Agoldensummer and open up their books, and Chris Otepka of one-man band The Heligoats (and formerly of the Chicago power-pop band Troubled Hubble) answered the call. Otepka is a seasoned road vet who scrimps and saves with the best of them. Being a part of a one-man band means gas costs aren’t split, but going solo means you don’t have to pay anybody and that all of the money comes back to you. How’d The Heligoats do out on the road? Not too shabby! Let’s see what Chris had to say.
Videodrone Gets “Mad” With Ne-Yo
Wed Nov 26 2008 by Michaelangelo Matos
The clip for Ne-Yo’s new single “Mad” isn’t quite… More »
“Spin” Comes Around To M.I.A.
Wed Nov 26 2008 by anono
Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe, and Spin are given a once-over by a writer who’s contributed to many of those magazines, as well as a few others! In this installment, he looks at the new issue of Spin:
The Bellamy Brothers Ride A Waterslide To The U.K. Charts (Again)
Wed Nov 26 2008 by Michaelangelo Matos
This year I’ve watched the British Top 40 regularly–haven’t listened to everything on it (do you think I’m nuts?) but an ambient sense of what’s going on is nice to have. Three weeks ago, on the Nov. 9 chart, there were ten new entries, most of them from usual suspects both worldwide (Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Leona Lewis, Christina Aguilera, T.I.) and local (The Script, Will Young). And then, at No. 30, was just about the last thing I figured I’d see in any 2008 chart: the Bellamy Brothers’ “Let Your Love Flow.”
