Very brief album review

New Dan Deacon: Mostly irritating.

His Wikipedia page has got it mostly right: "Dan Deacon... is an American electronic "musician" and hipster who originates from Babylon, New York and Baltimore, Maryland."

Gold.

Hot corner

It's been a good year to be a baseball, pop, and gossip fan, with all the inter-medium shenanigans... First it was Roger Clemens with a C-list country singer, and now it's Alex Rodriguez with Madonna.

What a time to be alive.

For my entertainment, someone should start a Wikipedia page about all the ballplayer/music singer affairs. I would read that. Speaking of Wikipedia, what's up with people? I was browsing Madonna's singles list looking for inspiration for a better title (didn't find it), and I found this. Who has the time to give a frame by frame synopsis of the video? I can't imagine a world where I would have that much time on my hands.

Find a way to smile

Every once in a while a band comes along that makes you say "Well, at least things can't get much worse than this", to which the response always is - "Yes, yes it can."

Hedley is that type of band. This mook-fueled puke-fest of a band, cut from very similar cloth to Ruben Studdard, has managed to make Simple Plan seem like a group of mature singer-songwriters. The Canadian Idol excretion's latest single, "Never Too Late", is making its way up the CTV music charts with the steady ease of a third-string Nickelback single.

The best part about the whole thing is their SHOT-BY-SHOT REMAKE of Duran Duran's "Rio" from 1982. I could not make this stuff up if I tried. I wish I could, because then I'd be a very, very rich person... which in Canadian music industry terms amounts to getting pulled over in your Lamb for a DUI.

In any case, I can't see how this tribute (read: ripoff) has anything to do with the British New Wave sensation. If my English language training up to grade four taught me anything, it was how to read. Applying that exact skill of reading to the lyrics of "Never Too Late", and applying the skill of "compare and contrast", we find that the two songs have less in common than ever imagined! Jacob Hoggard's whiny, cold, and calculated attempt at an emo-anthem falls flat on its eye-liner and crushed face.

But if cultural bellwether Wikipedia is any indication, the music-loving public is eating this stuff up - "The video was parodied by Canadian rock band Hedley for their song "Never Too Late."

Tough to top that one.

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Links:

Duran Duran - Rio

American idiots

The Guess Who [Wikipedia]

Fred Durst @ Wikipedia.
Don't ask how/why I got there.

That's so U2!

Here's an amusing edit I discovered today in U2's entry on Wikipedia.

According to Alan Cross on the Ongoing History of New Music, [see 'New Rock Secrets - Exposed'] C.C. Deville, of Poison fame, had a big impact on the group's Achtung Baby album.

The only source I could find to corroborate this story was this link, which upon a cursory read appears to be the same content that Mr. Cross used for his radio program.

So one of the few tracks I actually like by U2, post-Joshua Tree, featured lead guitar by this guy.