Rock music and oil: do they correlate?

Some interesting food for thought.

This swings way harder than it should...

Paul Anka doing "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

Am I a bad person for liking a lounge-Nirvana cover...?

Review of Thievery Corporation's latest album

Here's my review of Thievery's Corporation's Radio Retaliation, for musicOMH magazine.

For one of their funkier songs, check out this live performance of "Hare Krsna."

Bill O'Reilly cites himself as proof of God's existence...

Can't wait for Bill O'Reilly's new book, which will be an undoubtedly heart-wrenching memoir about his humble beginnings. (Can you claim working class status if you went to a private Catholic boarding school? Hrmm...)

In Bill's words:

"Next time you meet an atheist, tell him or her that you know a bold, fresh guy, a barbarian who was raised in a working-class home and retains the lessons he learned there.

"Then mention to that atheist that this guy is now watched and listened to, on a daily basis, by millions of people all over the world and, to boot, sells millions of books.

"Then, while the non-believer is digesting all that, ask him or her if they still don't believe there's a God!"

Uh, okay, Papa Bear...

Song In The Head: Jens Lekman's "Your Arms Around Me"

This track's too catchy for words...

Shameless plug for my college band...

Yes, the Fuzz - that irresistible fusion of funk and jazz. (Because "the Fuzz" sounded better than "the Jank"). I found out last week that my six-piece combo from Pomona is magically on YouTube. I think it's only fitting that our last gig ever was also our first gig to be put up. It was a bittersweet show - it was right after graduation, and I for one got far more teary-eyed from this concert then from any of the hackneyed "do something with your life" speeches at the ceremony itself.

In any case, check it out below. This song ("Sewage") is an original, but we also do a cover of Average White Band's "Pick up the Pieces" and an extremely reworked version of the Youngblood Brass Band's funky-beyond-words "Brooklyn." I'm the one bobbing my head like a madman on the keys...

And if I play the same three chords, will you just yawn and say...

Yes, it's all been done. I wrote a story for Gelf last year about music plagiarism, where I explored some interesting issues about originality and ownership of similar-sounding songs. At what point can an artist get a song protected? If someone else steals the melody? The lyrics? The intonation? The same chords?

I was reminded of these perplexing questions when I saw the below YouTube clip of a stand-up at Penn State marveling at the fact that he can't escape "Canon in D" due to its chords' ubiquitousness in modern rock music. He took some creative liberties - not every tune he plays has that exact 1-5-6-3 chord progression ("Let It Be," "No Woman No Cry" and "With or Without You," are all 1-5-6-4) - but the point's well-taken.

Indeed, I can't tell you how many times I've been jamming on that 1-5-6 riff on the piano and come across a famous pop melody ("Under the Bridge," "Head over Feet," even Akon's "It Don't Matter"). Back in my freshman year emo phase - all three weeks of it- I was messing around with tunes by the eternally lovelorn Dashboard Confessional, and realized that "Hands Down" had the same chords as a slightly more optimistic love song called "Let's Get It On." (Not to mention Van Morrison's "Caravan" and the verses in "Here's to the Night").

Apparently, G-Em-C-D can be applied to depressed singer-songwriters, graduating from high school, making babies AND barefoot gypsies singing around the campfire. Go figure..

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Indie hits the dance floor...

An air of novelty has always surrounded the work of Omaha-based Tilly & the Wall, mostly due to its eccentric tap-dancing percussion. The group is invariably classified as indie even though the multi-layered female harmonies are more closely rooted in pop influences then anything else. (The "indie" moniker has all but lost its meaning: I popped Coldplay's X&Y into my laptop the other day - don't ask me why - and its genre was described as "Alternative/Indie"...)

Anyway, judging from new single "Beat Control" the group is now aspiring to reach the dance-friendly masses with an unabashedly catchy, slickly produced, bass-heavy rumpshaker. The song is the band's best bet for a top-40 hit - in six months it's already gotten twice as many YouTube views as any other T&TW tune EVER - and yet curiously enough it doesn't appear on the latest album (o). Go figure...

(and go enjoy, below)

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New Eagles of Death Metal leak

The Eagles of Death Metal has always been too much of a side project for Josh Homme (QOTSA) et al. to be commercially viable as a band of its own right, which is a shame since the group's first two albums, 2004's Peace Love Death Metal and 2006's Death By Sexy, deliver a slinky, sleazy mix of blues-rock come-ons, peppered with country influences, Elvis Presley posturing and a rambunctious cover of Stealer Wheel's "Stuck in the Middle With You" (also known as "that song from the ear scene in Reservoir Dogs").

The latest album, the ever-cheeky Heart On, has been in the works for a while, with the release date currently pegged as October 28. EoDM hasn't lost its sense of humor, judging by song titles like "Prissy Prancin'" and "(I Used to Couldn't Dance) Hot Pants." Also expect some guest appearances from Dave Grohl, QOTSA regulars (Nick Oliveri, Joey Castillo), and maybe even this dude you might have heard of named Jack Black.

Anyway, here's an early leak of "Ask Me Why" from the new album. (Thanks, MySpace hackers!)

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Lindsay: switching sides?

I had heard that Linds Lo had been mugging for the camera rather suggestively with socialite Samantha Ronson, but I never expected it to come to this...

Is this love, or this "I Kissed a Girl" bi-curiosity? Your guess is as good as mine...

Sniffing out bias, one website at a time...

We have filters for everything these days - you can filter out superfluous search results, report spam, protect your children from porn, and generally edit out anything you don't want to waste your time on...

The only natural progression, then, is a filter that checks for the political biases of an article on the web.

It's a promising premise, and it became a reality with yesterday's unveiling of Spinspotter. A BusinessWeek article gives a solid summary of the program. I just downloaded it, and haven't been too impressed - though, granted, it's a beta version, and it also depends largely on the contributions and commitment levels of its users (a la Wikipedia) to establish parameters for bias. In any case, it should be an interesting social experiment for objective journalism. I'm curious to see how it pans out, and encourage you all to give it a try.
(At the moment, it's only available for use with Firefox...)

From the producers who brought you the Tipping Point...

Malcolm Gladwell seemed to have disappeared from the face of the earth after 2005's Blink, his second book after the wildly successful 2000 release The Tipping Point. He dabbled in some more New Yorker articles but has only written three stories in the past year.

But he's baaaack...



He is scheduled to publish his third book on November 18, titled Outliers: The Story of Success, which rather ambitiously tries to tackle ideas about genius and achievement. Sounds like it could be a bit too self-helpy, but as someone who has poured over the New Yorker archives and emptied its Gladwell contents, I'm always down for some fresh pop-psych reading...

In any case, here's a little sneak preview in the form of a speech he gave at the 2007 New Yorker Conference . It's a little drier than some of his other talks, but hey - Gladwell at 50 percent is as good as any talking head...

Musical qualities that automatically make any song better

-Handclaps
-Wordless background harmonies
-Upbeat acoustic guitar strumming
-Bright piano chords
-Slap-bass
-A healthy dose of spunk

Songs I've heard lately that have many of the preceding characteristics:

Noah and the Whale's "Five Years Time"

It's effervescently catchy, comfortable in its laidback, midtempo pace and likeable enough that the whistling at the beginning and end barely interfere with its execution. Plus, Charlie Fink somehow imbues his simple, silly lyrics with a certain whimsical grace (sample couplet: "In five years' time we could be walking around the zoo, with the sun shining down over me and you"). His voice sounds like a grainy love child of Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum and the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne.

Jamie Lidell's "Another Day"



White dude can sing! The lush keyboard riff is a bubbly bit of faux-Motown. Critics seem to hate on this guy cuz he admittedly rips off virtually every black soul singer from the 60s and 70s (album cut "Figured Me Out" is a pretty spot-on imitation of Jamiroquai, who himself robs Stevie Wonder more or less wholesale). That said, I challenge anyone to find anyone else who has come out with such genuinely buoyant R&B in the past couple years. It's usually all overbelted, overproduced or simply joyless (see anything by Mario or Ne-Yo). Give me some derivative Stevie-aping over shitty soul any day...