Idolator

Coldplay's forthcoming Viva la Vida, or Death and All His Friends has the Guardian moaning about the curse of the bad album title, raising the spectre of the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Fiona Apple's When The Pawn..., and Public Enemy's Muse Sick-n-Hour Mess Age to make the case that Vida's awkward title will probably sink the album, sales-wise. (Well, at least EMI will have something else to blame for the inevitably disappointing numbers besides "softening market conditions.") But surely we've all bought unfortunately titled albums in an effort to look past awkward syntax and bad puns by musicians whose output we trust? I know I have, so after the jump, I run down five owned-by-me full-lengths that I generally only refer to as "that album by those guys, you know which one I mean." (For what it's worth, the best-titled in my collection is Ill Ease's All Systems A-Go-Go!, but that particular honor can change at any moment.) More »

Somehow last night I got sucked into reading a press release about Hinder, and one thing that the poor sot who was charged with writing it kept repeating over and over was that the band of glum-ass Oklahomans wanted to bring the spirit of classic hard rock back. Having actually sat through a performance by the group (OK, it was one of those short radio-festival sets, but still, that's more than enough), I can pretty confidently say that any song they were to write about a stripper "dancer" wouldn't have a fraction of the doofy boisterousness that the above track—"All Lips N' Hips," by the Swedish outfit Electric Boys, which I have been listening to a bunch lately thanks to some research for an upcoming feature—possesses. It's so much fun, and so worthy of being cranked all the way up during long car rides, it even allows one to (almost) overlook the fact that the album it comes from is actually called Funk-O-Metal Carpet Ride. (I'm also willing to cut them some extra slack since at the time I was wearing hot-pink button-downs from Contempo Casuals.)

Electric Boys - All Lips N' Hips [YouTube]