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Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Video: Happy 75th, Willie
Willie’s fans, famous and not, share their birthday wishes for the Red-Headed Stranger. Share your own birthday greetings for Willie in the comments below.
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After the Glow: Kanye West afterparty
Don’t want to shell out for tickets to the ‘Glow in the Dark Tour’ tomorrow night? Think you’ll still need a little more ‘Ye in your life after the Erwin Center closes? Catch Kanye’s tour DJ, DJ Kraze at the After The Glow party tomorrow night at the Beauty Bar. Tickets are $15, $10 with the flier above. (We assume a printed copy will probably suffice.)
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Bobby Bones signs deal to stay at KISS FM
![Bobby pic[2].jpg](http://alt.coxnewsweb.com/shared-blogs/austin/music/upload/2008/04/bobby_bones_signs_deal_to_stay/Bobby%20pic%5B2%5D.jpg)
Bobby Bones blew his listeners a big ol’ KISS Tuesday in the form of a long-term contract extension that’ll keep him on Austin’s airwaves.
The popular morning host and radio station 96.7 KISS FM announced the multi-year deal in a news release.
“The Bobby Bones Show,” which airs weekdays from 6 to 10 a.m., is the city’s No. 1 morning show among listeners ages 12 and up and 18-34, according to statistics provided by Clear Channel Radio. The show also airs on a Clear Channel station in Wichita, Kan.
In addition to his radio gig alongside sidekicks Alayna, Amy, Carlos and Lunchbox, Bones is also a regular presence on Austin’s ME Television.
“There is no substitute for the level of passion and excitement that Bobby brings to the airwaves,” Pam McKay, market manager for Clear Channel’s Austin stations, said in the release. “It’s amazing to see how the audience gravitates to Bobby.”
“Bobby has been and will continue to be a vital part of KISS FM’s success,” added program director Jay Shannon. “I want to thank Bobby and the entire show for their commitment to KISS and Clear Channel.”
Click here to see photos from the Bobby Bones Show’s Second Chance Prom, held Friday night at Vicci.
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CD reviews: Portishead, Santogold
Portishead
‘Third’
(Island)
Few bands exited the 1990s with as much good will as Portishead. Along with Tricky’s equally seismic “Maxinquaye,” the band’s 1994 debut “Dummy” virtually defined the “trip-hop” genre. Muted, cinematic break-beats, a stalker atmosphere of sexually charged anxiety, distant vocals, alternately cold and alluring - “Dummy” had it all. The band made a decent follow-up in ‘97, an orchestral live album, then vanished. Brilliant!
So not only is it bizarre that Portishead has reappeared, seemingly out of nowhere, it’s even stranger that “Third” is excellent, a return to form without being a rehash - trip-hop is dead, long live … something else. Something even more naked and unsettled.
Beth Gibbons’ laconic voice still marks the music as nothing but Portishead, but the music itself is Portishead 2.0. The opener “Silence” is pure film score chug and rumble — Gibbons sounds as if she had no idea the guy with the knife is in the kitchen. “Hunter” sounds like a recurring theme for that third season of “Twin Peaks” that never happened, the sound of the supper club attached to the White Lodge. “Deep Water” is acoustic (!). “Machine Gun” features a minimal, industrial-synth riff that sounds both vintage and shockingly modern, given the current underground rock passion for cheap keyboards and primitive drum machine drama. Jolly good show, guys. Well, maybe not so jolly.
Recommended: “Silence,” “Machine Gun”
Santogold
‘Santogold’
(Downtown)
Santogold, aka Santi White, did time in the Philadelphia ska band Stiffed, but don’t hold that against her. Nobody else is: The buzz on this gal is deafening. She’s drawn comparisons to M.I.A., and while the song “Creator” seems an M.I.A. sound-alike, the generalization is inaccurate.
Think of her as the Gwen Stefani for Web 2.0, a New Wave princess in indie rock drag, drawing from the bits of dub reggae, the electronic ’80s, punk mix tapes and whatever musical language Björk made up. Before even the Stiffed years, she also wrote and produced a debut album for the R&B singer Res that seems equally important to her development. “You’ll Find A Way” harkens back to the ska days, opener “L.E.S. Artistes” is a dead ringer for Sleater-Kinney’s guitar rock, “Lights Out” is the sort of flawless, sprightly indie pop that would have sounded utterly at home on college radio during the first half of Clinton administration. Not as original as some would have you believe, but a striking debut nonetheless. Her next album will probably flatten us all.
Recommended: “L.E.S. Artistes,” “Lights Out”
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Review: Madonna - ‘Hard Candy’ CD
Madonna
“Hard Candy”
(Warner Bros.)
Justin Timberlake gets the best line on Madonna’s “Four Minutes:” “We only got four minutes to save the world!”
Is there a better definition of pop as the music of possibility? Give us four minutes, we’ll give you the inspiration to do anything. The punchline, of course, is that without Timbaland’s indulgent introductory yammering, the world could have been saved in three minutes, which is closer to the classic pop-song goal.
But this is Madonna we’re talking about, and Madonna has never done anything in half measures, all but embodying pop music several times in the past 20+ years. But she’s approaching AARP status (OK, OK, she’s only 50 - and in much, much better shape than I am). She’s returned to her first love: The dancefloor. She may flirt with limpid rock (“American Pie,” anyone?). She may sing like Eva Peron (“I kept my promiiiiiise!”). She may keep acting in movies where there’s little evidence that she can, you know, act (not that that’s ever stopped anyone). But Madonna returns to clubs the way the homing pigeon come back to the coop - she will always have a home there and when an image shift doesn’t work, that’s where she goes.
So it’s fitting that she end up back there for this, her final album for Warner Brothers Records, her home roughly forever. She celebrates the transition by embracing hip-hop, or rather, the bits of hip-hop beat science that she can translate to the au-courant disco that she specializes in.
To that end, she bypasses the Eurotrash techno-fluff of “Music” and “Confessions on the Dancefloor” for the Tims (Timberlake and Timbaland), Timbaland protege Nate “Danja” Hills and Pharrell Williams for their way with a sequencer. Williams seems the most sympathetic collaborator. The opener “Candy Shop” stacks up the entendres on a subtly rolling thump - her spoken “sticky and sweet” mumble is so ghost-in-the-machine perfect that you wonder why she doesn’t do the spoken thing more often. (Man, “Justify My Love” was just the best, huh? Good times.) Kanye West barely makes a ripple on “Beat Goes On.” “Spanish Lesson” is a mess, but the funky-throbbing“She’s Not Me” is about the second best she’s-gotta-be-talking-about-Britney song ever. (“Cry Me A River” will own that category forever.)
But it’s Timbaland who seems in the driver’s seat, for good and dull. “4 Minutes” can’t match earlier triumphs, but it can equal, say, “Secret” or “Frozen.” “Miles Away,” the she’s-gotta-be-talking-about-Guy-Richie song, mixes acoustic strum with a restrained Timbaland thud. In fact, there’s something altogether restrained here. There are highs on even the most unmentionable Madonna collections. She can’t quite save the world, but she gets as close as any 50-year-old pop lifer has any right to.
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Review: Joe Jackson at the Paramount
A surprisingly boisterous middle-aged crowd filled the Paramount at Joe Jackson’s Monday show, welcoming a pop craftsman who may have scaled back his return to rock (his new disc “Rain” is a trio record, not the ‘80s-reunion quartet he assembled for the previous album) but still shows no sign of relapsing into the quasi-classical mode that occupied him in the ‘90s.
Jackson played more than half of his new disc, tunes that ranged from the optimistic “Rush Across the Road” to “Solo (So Low),” a piano-and-voice composition so lushly despondent it drew a loud, spontaneous sigh from one female listener. But he also performed more than half of 1982’s “Night and Day” — from “Real Men,” on which he conserved his voice by turning the refrain’s pained wail into something more quiet and introspective, to the perfect show-closer “Slow Song,” on which he held nothing back.
In between were other old favorites. Some (the driving “On Your Radio,” for instance) arrived with the energy of the original recordings, while others benefitted from the kind of creative tweaking familiar to fans who’ve heard the three very different versions of “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” on his double-disc “Live 1980-1986”: “You Can’t Get What You Want (Till You Know What You Want)” turned into a piano-free drum-and-bass remix; the jazz standard “Caravan” wound its way into “Chinatown”; and the singer played around so much with the melody and phrasing of “It’s Different for Girls” that it seemed a deliberate provocation to those in the room who insisted on singing along. Jackson may have been flattered — he seemed a bit surprised at the end-of-show ovations — but he wasn’t going to make things too easy for them.
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Happy Birthday Willie! (day one)
The Houston Chronicle and Fort Worth Star-Telegram are celebrating Willie Nelson’s 75th birthday today, but we’re marking the occasion tomorrow, April 30. What gives?
Willie’s birth certificate puts the DOB at April 30, which is what Doc Simms, who delivered Willie in Abbott, wrote down. But according to Joe Nick Patoski’s book “Willie Nelson: An Epic Life,” a cousin who was there at the birth and named Willie Hugh Nelson, claimed the singer was actually born a few minutes before midnight. Ask Willie Nelson when his birthday is and he’ll say it’s today. Can’t help but wonder if 4/29/33 is a better numerological fit for the zen cowboy. After all, four plus 29 is 33.
We’re sticking with the public record over Cousin Mildred’s recollection. April 30 is also the birthdate given on Willie Nelson’s plaque in the Country Music Hall of Fame. But celebrate today if you want to. If anyone deserves two birthdays….
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Review: My Chemical Romance at Stubb’s
Gerard Way, lead singer for My Chemical Romance, looked a little tired Monday night at Stubb’s.
You can’t really blame the man. He and his band of Gothy-looking rockers have been on and off tour (mostly on) since their 2006 breakout album “The Black Parade.” This most recent jaunt, the fifth and final leg of “The Black Parade World Tour” is three months long. Way as much said this was the last show they would be playing in Austin for a good long time. I think everyone got their money’s worth.
So it wasn’t all that surprising that in order to keep the energy high (which it was) and to make the 10:30 p.m. hard-deck curfew (which they did), songs felt shortened, limited to a verse or two and a chorus, the better to rip through a high octane set that reached back to the band’s 2002 debut, “I Brought Me My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love.” Gone were the elaborate sets and theatrical cast of their tour’s early legs.
This was a rock band playing to a sold out crowd that absolutely adored them. Way — looking less like a rock strar and more like the comic book writer he established himself last year in the excellent series “The Umbrella Academy” — started cool and sweated himself into a frenzy as the band stripped back its material’s proggier, Queenier (as in Freddie Mercury) elements for articulate, dynamic rock that held the crowd in the palm of his hand.
From MTV hits such as “Welcome to the Black Parade” to mopers such as “Cancer” to the anthemic “Teenagers,” the crowd was easily the equal of Way’s slightly fried voice. When the black-clad masses are with you, they’re with you to the end.
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Commentary: Team Cyrus has itself to blame
Although being photographed wrapped in a satin bedsheet with a bare back showing in Vanity Fair magazine isn’t the same as exposing a breast during halftime of the Super Bowl, the Miley Cyrus/ Annie Leibovitz controversy has something in common with Janet Jackson’s famous “wardrobe malfunction.” In both cases, pop singers tried too hard to be provocative, and messed up, big time.
The hoped-for rejuvenation of Jackson’s sagging career by way of scintillation didn’t happen. And now Miley Cyrus, the 15-year-old “Hannah Montana” star on her way to becoming a billionaire by her 18th birthday, has gone from heavy rotation to spin cycle. The folks at Disney, which makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year off Miley’s wholesomeness, didn’t even know about the photo until they saw it on “Entertainment Tonight.”
“I took part in a photo shoot that was supposed to be ‘artistic’ and now, seeing the photographs and reading the story, I feel so embarrassed,” Miley Cyrus said in a statement. “I never intended for any of this to happen and I apologize to my fans who I care so deeply about.”
As soon as the migraines eased, Disney execs issued a statement blaming Vanity Fair for creating a situation “to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines.”
If Vanity Fair played anyone it was Miley’s parents, who the magazine said were on the set for the shoot. You don’t think that dad Billy Ray Cyrus, the most controversial singer in Nashville when he broke on the scene 17 years ago with “Achy Breaky Heart,” knows how the media operates? You go to Krispy Kreme for doughnuts and you go to Vanity Fair to create a stir.
Entertainment Tonight has reported that Billy Ray Cyrus was not present when the “racy” photos were shot; he had to leave for a prior commitment. No excuse, if it’s true. You don’t leave your 15-year-old with a photog known for edginess and provocation.
Team Cyrus intentionally set out to show that Miley was not just for little girls. She can’t be “Hannah M.” forever, so I think the article, in which Miley admits her favorite show is “Sex and the City,” and the PG photos, were orchestrated to transition Miley from tween to teen/ young adult. Pretty soon Miss Goody Jimmy Choo Shoes will be competing with the Rihannas of the world, just as Lindsay Lohan soon found herself going up against Scarlett Johansson and Kate Hudson for roles. Li-Lo was unprepared, but Miley wouldn’t be. But by looking ahead, the plot backfired. And now there’s backpedaling.
The Cyrus family made a big miscalculation, well, two really. First, they’re not bigger than Disney, no matter how many consecutive soldout concerts Miley and Billy do. But probably the biggest mistake was that it’s the parents, not the 10-year-old girls, who buy the tickets and the T-shirts and the DVDs. And many are outraged.
This will blow over and “Hannah Montana” will continue to be an enormous money machine. But I think someone whose name rhymes with virus learned a lesson about gooses and golden eggs.
