I’m going to start doing my music writing on Mondays. Hopefully this will encourage me to write more and will give me some sort of structure, cause this site is all over the place.

On the video list you’ll see stuff from Britney Spears and Lil’ Mama. You may think this is lame but please bear with me, there are totally non-sucky things to be said about them. But first, Foo Fighters… the new rock is out! Rock has been stagnating for quite a while now and I don’t tend to listen much nowadays, but thankfully there are still some bands like the foos that bring be back to the genre once in a while. The new CD, Echoes, Silence Patience & Grace, came out last Friday, and the new single is “Pretender”. I’ve been listening to it over and over for the last week. They brought in Gil Norton, who produced The Colour and the Shape, and Pat Smear will be touring with them. They’re still innovating - the awesome Kaki King plays on the track The Ballad of the Beaconsfield Miners. They still sound like the Foo Fighters, but with a more mature sound.

Matchbox-20 has a new single out, “How Far We’ve Come”, and it’s surprisingly good. I mean, this is the first Matchbox 20 song that I don’t hate. Airborne porkers have invaded an artic hell. I mean, seriously, where the hell did it come from?

Oh apparently Stars by Hum is the new hawtness. Cadillac has been using it in their latest ad campaign and I heard it play several times on VH1. Nevermind that this song was released more than 12 years ago. I was a huge fan back then but they had very little commercial success - mostly because their music can be weird.

Forgetting about the fact that Britney Spears is LAME, I’ll say that I actually like the new single, Gimme More. I actually like some of her other songs too, and that’s because they’re written by people with talent, even if she doesn’t have any. Try to listen to some of her songs in other contexts, without shame, and you’ll find out that they’re not that bad. For example, check out the great cover of Baby One More Time by Marty Casey. All of a sudden the song has this great dark quality that was hidden in bubble-gumness. In this case, imagine that Gimme More being performed by Maroon 5 (which is not that bad of a stretch), and all of a sudden it’s not that bad.

The last note is on the Lip Gloss single by Lil’ Mama. Again, you might think this is LAME, and it’s probably one of the most annoying singles of the year. However, there’s something very remarkable about this song - it’s the first hit song to have ABSOLUTELY NO MELODY. I recognize that this is hip hop and lyrics have no melody, but this doesn’t even have a hook. It’s not anywhere near the kind of music that I would listen to, but I recognize that musical taste is subjective, and in that spirit I have to recognize that this is a pretty innovative song, even if it makes me want to jump off a bridge.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 1:21 am and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.