It was Saturday, 11:32 A.M. and sunlight bled through the almost closed curtains of our sub-par Vegas hotel room shared with six other people. Everyone was fast asleep (passed out), but I lay wide-eyed and delirious after a lengthy night of sitting around a green semicircle playing blackjack. Sitting up slowly I realized the line between business and pleasure was almost nonexistent when on assignment for C&V. But there was more to this trip than card decks of debauchery. There was music. There was Vegoose. After recovering the rest of the day I headed down to the Sam Boyd Stadium, a true oasis in the Vegas desert. Strewn across the sands rested giant circus tents, carved pumpkins and Halloween revelers trick or treating for some quality music and/or mescaline.
I arrived to the shows pretty damn late. The festival started around noon with Toubab Krewe, but I didn’t get there till mid-set of the Mars Volta around 8. I don’t know much about their music other than a few tracks I heard via iTunes, so don’t send us packages of dead animals when I tell you they sounded like banshees in heat scraping their banshee nails on chalkboards read by younger banshees. How bad were they? You know those Dyson vacuum cleaners that suck 5 times the force of gravity? Well, move over Dyson. You’ve got competition. Instead of harmonies, we got shrieking. There were no notes played here. All to be heard was the melody of an A.C. wall unit tumbling down an old rickety fire escape. Genuine noise.
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Norm MacDonald’s “Ridiculous” 65/100
Remember when Norm Macdonald was fired from “Saturday Night Live” as the “Weekend Update” anchorman a while back because he wasn’t funny, only to return the following season as the guest host—did he suddenly become funny? That question remains to be answered, but if you’re a fan of Macdonald’s, then you’re sure to love his new sketch comedy album “Ridiculous.”
Some notable comedians to lend a hand, or should I say their voices to this album are fellow SNL alumnae Will Ferrell, Fred Stoller, Tim Meadows, Jon Lovitz, and Molly Shannon.
With tracks like “The World’s First Two Gay Guys” and “Girls, Girls, Girls,” this album is definitely not rated PG. In the latter, Macdonald plays a psychiatrist whose schizophrenic patient played by funny girl, Molly Shannon, is not at all shy about expressing her sexual attraction to the good doctor by using the “f” word as a verb, as well as the words
cock,” “mouth,” “lick,” and “ass.” That should be enough for you to fill in the blanks. In “The World’s First Two Gay Guys,” Ferrell and Macdonald play two beer-drinking buddies who decide to have sex with each other while watching the all-time masculine American sport, no other than football, in the mid 1950’s.
“The World’s First Two Gay Guys” isn’t the first time Macdonald pokes fun at homosexuality. In fact, it’s an on-going theme found in four of the twelve tracks, one of which is the nineteen-minute sketch “Tex Hooper,” where a former country singer who often sang about loose women resurfaces after a long absence only to come out of the closet.
Comic book junkies will enjoy how Macdonald ridicules the secret identities of superheroes in the first track “The Fantastic Four” and later in “Stan & Lois.” In the CD’s opener, Mr. Fantastic gets some heat from his fellow colleagues for naming himself after the group while the remaining three members are named as a result of their powers. In “Stan & Lois,” Macdonald plays Stan, a sports reporter at The Daily Planet, who tries to get Lois in bed by convincing her that he in fact is Superman.
If you’re stuck in traffic or riding the subway, pick up this CD for commercial-free listening.
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Own a free copy of the track “The World’s First Two Gay Guys.”
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I looked at the CD cover artwork for Lisa Papineau’s “Night Moves” with hope–it was comfortable, simple and inviting. It made me want to smoke some pot, take my shoes off and make snow-less snow angels in the green grass of my Los Angeles front yard. I put the disc in my CD player and sat down excitedly on my floor to do some painting. I was secretly hoping the album would bear parallels to Air’s “Talkie Walkie,” an album to which Lisa Papineau lent her vocals. “Talkie Walkie” is deliciously different from Air’s earlier music. Like the course of Radiohead’s musical journey, it shows progression and development–a positive and pleasant divergence from their previous musical output.
I was egregiously disappointed. The first six tracks left me bored. Instead of painting, I just sat on my floor, brow furrowed. I kept thinking that if Sarah McLachlan had been blindfolded, sedated and kidnapped from the nineties, and then thrown into the new millennium to embark on her musical career, it might sound like this. Lyrical? Kinda. Melodic? I suppose. Complex? Compelling? Passionate? Interesting? No, no, no and NO!
I felt like I had felt when I bought Sia’s solo album. Zero 7’s “Simple Things” touched me deeply, left me aching for more. It’s an incredible album. I checked out their other albums and was sadly less than impressed, however. When I heard that Sia, their female vocalist, had her own album coming out, I was first in line to buy it. And was first to be disappointed. I feel similarly cheated by “Night Moves.”
Luckily, after six tracks something changed briefly. It’s amusing, because the title of the song, “What are we waiting for?” asked the very question I had been posing in my mind. Why were they waiting until track seven to wake up and smell the listener? There is a resonance in that song that affected me subcutaneously. It worked its way under my skin and into my veins and bones. There it vibrated, managing against all odds for a little over five minutes to hold my attention. It wasn’t because the lyrics of this song are poetic or moving, nor because the music is more substantially crafted. There’s just one indescribable element to it that compelled my frown to momentarily disappear. I might actually download that one onto my iPod. But once I’ve done that, I’m mailing the CD off to Bob Seger. Maybe he can make “Night Moves” work for him.
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The opening helicopter blades of The Killers’ still resonating virgin release, “Hot Fuss,” landed the indie band from obscurity onto mainstream soil in 2004. Unfortunately, their follow-up, “Sam’s Town,” is a crash landing at best. I know it’s never fair to compare album releases to elder siblings, but what we have here is a red-headed stepchild riding a black sheep. For starters, the single, “When We Were Young,” is a far cry from the exuberance held by such previous fist pumping singles like “Mr. Brightside” and “Somebody Told Me.” What’s worse, the quartet lead by Brandon Flowers has largely abandoned the “synth rock” sound and disco shuffle beats that helped put them on the map. For a pop band like the Killers to sell the genre it takes infectious melodies and indelible lyrics. Instead we have a cacophony of badly named tracks like “Uncle Johnny” and “Bling (Confessions of a King)” that drone on with zero musical drive. The Killers were much more alive two years ago, now it seems they’re gasping for breath. After giving “Sam’s Town” several listen-throughs it’s obvious why the Vegas-based band named their sophomoric (it’s a music review axiom to use the word “sophomoric”) release after a sub-par casino. Let’s hope The Killers’s third release is named “Mandalay Bay.”
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Mmm, how excited I was to review this album. Remember when Razorlight was set to be the greatest band to come out of England since the Beatles? Oasis? The Libertines? How about the New Radicals? No? Well, they weren’t quite all that, but they were pretty damn good.
When 2004’s “Up All Night” was released, I swallowed all the hype and bought the album, and it was fantastic. It did not leave my car stereo for weeks and, in fact, I almost broke my nose on the steering wheel while rocking out to it. However, the second, self-titled effort from the band seems, to put it bluntly, a little half-assed. On this album, they disappointingly stray far from their fun pub punk with the debauchery-laced lyrics that they had on their first album and head straight into pop rock territory. The new album lacks the general excitement that they had on the original. I will admit, had this new album been the first time I had heard Razorlight, I may have a different opinion, perhaps in more of a positive realm. But alas, I have heard this band and I have higher expectations of their sound. They seem to have somewhat reinvented themselves with a much catchier, poppy sound.
So, isn’t catchy good? you ask. Not when it is bordering on manufactured.
They seem to have been taking major cues from the Strokes (which is not so bad) on much of the album, but their original sound was their own and they should have stuck with it. There are good and bad and, luckily, the CD doesn’t get any worse than the wannabe ballad “Americaâ€, which is slightly bearable. Then there are the corny “Kirby’s House” and “Before I Fall to Pieces,” which might as well have been penned by, gulp, the Gin Blossoms. Don’t get me wrong, the album has some okay songs, just not the type of songs I expect from them. For example, the reggae-tinged “Back to the Start” and a couple of songs, “Who Needs Love†and “Hold On†sound almost Motown influenced. They are actually danceable. They do still maintain the simple melodic formula that makes up most of their songs, though the only small traces I can hear of the old Razorlight are on the first track, “In the Morning,†as well as the only other standouts: “Pop Song 2006†and “Los Angeles Waltz.”
The rest is not worth a listen unless you buy their first album and see what the hell I’m talking about. I want my old Razorlight back!
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