October 2008 Archives

More on Josiah Leming: The Morristown-bred ex-American Idol contestant's new album, scheduled for release in January on Warner Bros., is being challenged by the management company 19E, which represents all Idol contestants and has an exclusive deal with Sony/BMG.

Maybe he couldn't make out the fine print for all the tears.

Former MP editor Jesse Fox Mayshark contributed this list of music he's listening to to NYC blogger Kenneth in the (212).  

Josiah Leming, the former Morristown teenager who wept a Biblical proportion of tears all over the first few weeks of season seven of American Idol, has an EP available on iTunes starting today. The five songs, grouped together under the title Angels Undercover, are available for $4.95.

If you visit Leming's blog, you'll learn that the singer likes lions, him and frank are BROTHERS bc of that night we spent in the drunk tank. HELLS YES. and hey, when you are an artist, you are allowed to have clothes on your floor.

Baby Dee introduced her show at Pilot Light on Saturday as an "evening of dirges." It started out that way for sure, with Dee performing a few originals and hymns on solo harp. That was pretty good, though Dee's booming but undisciplined voice sometimes overwhelmed the harp accompaniment. The cabaret rock arrangements on her latest album, Safe Inside the Day, seem like a better setting for her voice, which ranges from a show-tunes quality baritone to a child-like warbling.

The second part of Saturday's set, with Dee playing accordion, was less pretty good. The songs--populated by gay cops and victims of incontinence--were broadly funny, in the way that saying dirty words in conjunction with religious references can make an audience of grown people laugh. She does win extra points, though, for inventing the gerund of "ass," in a song about a bunch of naked hippies assing up the furniture. 

That ridiculous street-corner arrangement of "The Star Spangled Banner' by the Backstreet Boys last night before the first game of the World Series, along with Jessica Simpson's dreadful performance of the song at a NASCAR race earlier this month, makes me think that Carrie Underwood should be America's Official National Anthem Singer. If she could just hit that high note at the end.

If you just can't wait anymore for the March release of Zach Snyder's movie adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen, you can check out this webcomic parody. 

This was posted almost a week ago, but what's the hurry in spreading yet another report about the supposedly imminent release of Guns N' Roses' Chinese Democracy?

The allure of mainstream success, a backstage encounter with Bruce Springsteen, and the effects of massive head trauma will be to blame for Mastodon's new classic rock record, according to RollingStone.com, which fails to mention the massive lip trauma Hinds allegedly dished out last month.

The Misfits will be playing at the Valarium with locals The American Plague on Wednesday, Dec. 3. TAP singer/guitarist Alex Weatherly, aka JAW, played in former Misfits guitarist Bobby Steele's The Undead in 1999-2000.

Also, David Byrne's scheduled at the Tennessee Theatre on Sunday, Dec. 7. He'll perform music from his collaborations with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981) and Everything That Happens Will Happen Today (2008).

...even as he totally whiffs on every single point he tries to make in one of the most amusingly misguided music columns of the year. 

T.I.'s new album Paper Trail tops the Billboard Hot 100 chart in its first week, and his single "Live Your Life," with the lovely lovely lovely Rihanna, replaces T.I.'s own "Whatever You Like" as the top pop single.

L.A. post-punk/post-shoegaze/indie pop/guitar noise duo No Age has a date listed on its MySpace page at Pilot Light on Saturday, Nov. 15.

Here's the video for "Eraser," from Nouns.

The first in a series of short reviews of unsolicited promo CDs:

Senses Fail
Life Is Not a Waiting Room (Vagrant)
I'm a sucker for big melodies and state-of-the-art guitar tone. I mean, I heard .38 Special's "Somebody Like You" on the radio last week and thought, "I need to buy some .38 Special. Those guitars sound like lasers."

Senses Fail has both big melodies and laser-like guitars. Unfortunately, those tools are used in the service of lyrics like, "So help me please someone come quick I think I am losing it" and screamo breakdowns about burning on a beach "where the sand is littered with razor blades."

The latest edition of Da Capo Press's Best Music Writing series showed up in the mail this morning.

Best Music Writing 2008, edited by Nelson George, is one of the most eclectic collections in the series so far. Selections come from the usual places--Spin, Pitchfork, The New York Times, Village Voice Media, The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Slate, The New Yorker, and the Oxford American--as well as The Nation, Wax Poetics, Decibel, and the 'zine Eaves of Ass. But this edition covers a lot of hip-hop, R&B, and pop--like Noah Berlatsky's excellent essay "Give Contemporary R&B a Chance" from the Chicago Reader--in addition to indie-rock staples and essays about OMG the Internet Is Changing Music!!! LOL!!!

On his new ESPN blog, Lil Wayne says he's already working on Tha Carter IV and a new mixtape. New songs will probably leak by this afternoon.

Wayne also says Brett Favre is his all-time favorite football player, brags about his fantasy football skills, predicts a Dodgers/Rays World Series, and roots for LSU. 

Alexis Brown, singer for Knoxville's Straight Line Stitch, offered her list of the top five horror movie actors to Decibel magazine's Deciblog earlier this week. A little obvious, maybe, but hard to argue with. 

Nick Reynolds, one of the founding members of the Kingston Trio, died Wednesday. 

Charlie Louvin, to the surprise of exactly no one in the audience, sang "Knoxville Girl" last night during his set opening for the Old 97's at the Bijou Theatre. (Louvin and his brother Ira recorded the song in the 1950s.) It was neither very good nor very bad.

(In case you're wondering, there is a bad seat at the Bijou, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary. It's about a third of the way back, left of center, right behind that guy with the unusually large head.)

Stereogum has an MP3 of Louvin performing the song with Will Oldham.

Timbaland's reputation doesn't need much buttressing at this point--his hip-hop and pop production work has made him one of the few celebrity producers in the industry, and he's about to become the most unlikely member of the Dublin university Trinity College's Philosophical Society--but he gets it anyway in this essay by The New Yorker's Sasha Frere-Jones.

SFJ's not particularly kind, however, to Tim's new collaboration (Timbaland's so big that his production credits count as a collaboration) with former Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell.