(Because we’re a little soft on content this week, I’m going to wedge this in.) Steve Coogan is one of my favorite comedians thanks to shows like “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” “I’m Alan Partridge” and “Saxondale.” I recently invested in The Steve Coogan Collection, a thirteen-dvd (but not entirely comprehensive) box set of Coogan’s television work. About half the material was unfamiliar to me, including The Tony Ferrino Phenomenon, a highlight in the set.

The show is basically a variety show spoof featuring a one-off Coogan creation, Tony Ferrino, a former Eurovision winner from Portugal. Like all Coogan’s best work, the comedy comes from how well-realized and nuanced the character is. Ferrino is conceited and insecure. The program is a self-aggrandizing tour of the man and his music. Each song is a wonderful approximation of vacuous pop-music.

Why would this be of any interest to you, dear reader? Well, I’m not sure that it would be, but in doing a little research, I happened upon a charity performance that pairs Ferrino with Bjork. We all love Bjork, right? Check it out:

We’ve had plenty of people weigh in on the best music of the past year, reinforcing my conviction that 2009 was a superlative year for aural fetishists. However, let us not forget the dross, for there has also been a whole lot of crap. In recognizing some of the worst these past twelve months have had to offer, be grateful you have discriminating tastes. Some people eat this shit up.

Chickenfoot – Chickenfoot

The debut from this “supergroup” is the sonic equivalent of Roger Moore’s performance in View to a Kill, in which a 57-year-old Moore phones in an awkward farewell performance as James Bond, a role he should have given up fifteen years prior. Sammy Hagar (Van Halen), Marc Anthony (Van Halen), Joe Statriani and Chad Smith (Red Hot Chili Peppers) are clearly trying to carry the Led Zepplin mantle but simply come off as a terrible bar band. Even if you love Joe Satriani and Hagar-era Van Halen, this album has nothing to offer you but incompetent riffs and the death-rattle like rasps of a man who used to be able to carry a tune.

Asher Roth – Asleep in the Bread Aisle

With any other album on this list, if you were to say to me, “Herb. I know it’s not your thing, but I like it,” I’d let you have it. Lord knows I listen to plenty of stuff that other people despise. The exception is this musical abomination by Asher Roth, who’s break out single “I Love College” is lazy, derivative and repugnant. The kind of lifestyle Roth celebrates with his music is characterized by merry ignorance, lecherous sexuality and milquetoast wit. Roth is the embodiment of the worst qualities of mainstream music and the manufactured personalities it produces.

Owl City – Ocean Eyes

Tacky. Saccharine. Overly-sentimental. Garbage. Ocean Eyes is a Postal Service record filtered through a Family Circus cartoon. Every song is a polished-to-nothing and empty-headed epic-ballad that makes Captain & Tennille sound like Black Sabbath. I feel a little bad writing this, because I believe Adam Young, who is Owl City’s sole member, is a sincere songwriter. Unfortunately, he gives me a severe allergic reaction.

Various Artists – The Michael Jackson Remix Suite

The crass commercial exploitation that follows a celebrity’s death is as likely as the wetness that follows rain, but as often and inevitably as the macabre exercise occurs, it never loses its capacity to disgust. There were a number of releases in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death that exemplified this, but none more so than The Michael Jackson Remix Suite, a collection of profoundly boring remixes of Jackson’s hits that have sapped the originals of their vitality and charm. If the goal of this album was to reflect via Jackson’s songs what Jackson did to himself, mission accomplished. Like the former King of Pop, these songs are grotesque, unnatural caricatures that have been sedated to death.

Ten years ago I was enrolled at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. It doesn’t feel like a long time ago, but looking over my haphazardly-compiled best-of-the-decade list, I’m forced to consider the range and scope of the experiences that I will forever associate with these fantastic albums. It’s been a hell of a decade.

Apparently 2003 was a particularly great year in music for me. It occupies about half this list. Also, the second half of the decade only provided me with two albums. Is that a consequence of my growing cynicism? I’d like to think it’s simply a matter of these albums not having had a chance to resonate as deeply as something like Pig Lib, which was a daily source of comfort and inspiration during a tough time.

If I were to reconsider this tomorrow, I think about half the list would stay the same. Contrary to what some might say (Casey Rea, I’m looking at you), the aughts have been a fertile decade for music. (At least the first half. The second, I think, may belong to television, but I digress.)

My favorite album’s of the decade:

Deltron 3030 -- s/t (2000) – The best thing Dan The Automater, Del Tha Funkee Homosapien or Kid Koala have ever done is this early-millennium masterpiece. The production is staggering and Del is in fine-form. This is a genre-transcending hip-hop record.

Super Furry Animals - Mwng (2000) – I was pleased to see Casey The Contrarian include Rings Around The World on his list, but I’m going to have to side with its predecessor, Mwng. With their former label bankrupt, the band had a lot to prove. Rather than play it safe, SFA released an all-Welsh home-brewed triumph. They put it out on their own and managed to parlay its acclaim into a deal with a new label.

Daft Punk -- Discovery (2001) – Possibly my favorite album on this list, Discovery raised the bar. Infectious, upbeat, moving and witty, there’s not really anything that compares. It towers over the rest of the band’s catalog as well as the rest of the French House scene.

Steve Malkmus -- Pig Lib (2003) – With his solo debut, Malkmus demonstrated that he’d be just fine without Pavement. With Pig Lib, he almost made you forget about his former band. Everything about this record is seeped in excellence.

Read the rest of this entry »

Norah Jones – The Fall

Them Crooked Vultures – Them Crooked Vultures

Ladies and gentlemen, Them Crooked Vultures — the second-best band John Paul Jones has ever been in! The Led Zeppelin guys never made much of a splash in the supergroup scene, unless you’re the kind of die-hard fan who still busts out those old records by the Honeydrippers or the Firm. But when John Paul Jones got the hard-rock supersession itch, he didn’t mess around. For Them Crooked Vultures, he hooks up with Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters) and Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age), two of Zep’s smartest disciples. If these three 800-pound gorillas want to bash out an album as willfully weird and slapdash as Them Crooked Vultures, who can tell them not to? And if they do a song called “Elephants” where they basically crunch every riff on Led Zeppelin II into seven dizzy minutes, why not? (Read The Full Review)

John Mayer – Battle Studies

As Pat Benatar once said, love is a battlefield. That’s the main point John Mayer wants to convey on his fourth studio album. It’s called Battle Studies, and militaristic song titles expand on the theme: “Heartbreak Warfare,” “War of My Life,” “Assassin.” That last one is the set’s most ambitious track — an obsessive groove building louder toward clatter and buzz for five minutes, insulated by Middle Eastern background wails as Mayer likens both parties in an apparent one-night stand to killers performing a night’s mission. But the album’s tone is already set in the first two numbers, both prominently featuring broken hearts; by the third – a duet with Taylor Swift, who enters only briefly, toward the song’s end – his heart has been split in half. (Read The Full Review)

David Rawlings Machine – A Friend of a Friend

For more than 12 years, the Nashville-based musician has toured, written and recorded with Gillian Welch, exploring the well-worn byways of country, bluegrass and stringband music while making the old-timey sound new. As a hired gun, he’s played sideman to artists following in Welch’s wake or creating their own: Sara Watkins, Ryan Adams, Bright Eyes, Guy Clark, Mark Knopfler and Jay Farrar, among others. So his debut as Dave Rawlings Machine is either a case of him stepping up, or everyone else stepping back. Welch herself appears on almost all of these songs, either singing harmony or playing guitar, as do several other musician friends. But Rawlings takes the lead on every track, as a singer and picker.

For nine songs over 40 minutes, Rawlings proves fascinating company — a good man to share a front porch with. As a performer, he makes good use of his distinct, reedy tenor (imagine a twangier Loudon Wainwright). And he has a spry, jumpy guitar style that lends his arrangements some bounce. As a producer, he keeps things loose and lively, mixing covers with originals. A Friend of a Friend plays like a rough, intimate live album instead of a polished studio affair. (Read the Full Review)

LCD Soundsystem – Bye Bye Bayou (12″ Single)

Like a strong, expertly crafted cocktail downed right before what is sure to be one hell of a dinner (new album, hint hint!), LCD Soundsystem’s single “Bye Bye Bayou” (an Alan Vega cover recorded for November’s Record Store Day spinoff Vinyl Saturday) is a slippery buzz-opener that sneaks up on you in the weirdest of ways. While LCD would seem to be unconcerned with racking up any more cool-kid tokens (they have enough by now to cash in for a lifetime supply of plastic spider rings and vampire teeth), “Bayou” simply lifts Vega’s already very cool original out of the swamps, swapping the Cajun paranoia for dead-eyed heavy funk. (Read Full Track Review)

Jerry Garcia – Let It Rock

For Jerry Garcia, 1975 was a seminal year that found him splitting time between recording Blues for Allah with the Dead, directing The Grateful Dead Movie, and forming the Jerry Garcia Band–his long-running side project.

The Jerry Garcia Band — Garcia, his constant collaborator bassist John Kahn and drummer Ron Tutt — played its first show with Nicky Hopkins on piano in August 1975. The ultimate session player, Hopkins’ credits include work with The Beatles, The Who, The Rolling Stones, and Jefferson Airplane to name a very few. While Hopkins residency was brief with the Jerry Garcia Band, it played an important role in the group’s shift away from big jams toward song-oriented material. (Read the Full Review)

Starline Rhythm Boys – Masquerade for Heartache

Dust off those shitkickers, Burlington. Your blue-collar heroes ride again. Rooted in rockabilly, the Starline Rhythm Boys have been shaking honky-tonks for a decade, evoking an era of checkerboard floors and poodle skirts. Their latest, Masquerade For Heartache, finds the trio plugged into Charlie O’s — that Capital City citadel of sin — where guitarists Al Lemery and Danny Coane lead a jukebox jubilee. All that’s missing is the chicken wire, as the Boys resurrect salty anthems (“Red’s Place”) and 10-gallon covers (“Trucker from Tennessee”) to rowdy effect.

Anchored by Billy Bratcher’s strolling bass, Heartache is a vintage buffet. Western boogie? Check. Hillbilly blues? Yep, it’s all here. And if Coane’s lyrical twang sounds just a bit south of his native Montpelier, blame it on the Narragansett — beer sweetens the masquerade. (Read the Full Review)

Doom – Unexpected Guests

The early news of DOOM compilation Unexpected Guests positioned it as a field report from the indie MC’s late-decade wilderness period, spanning a half-committed star turn (2005’s Danger Doom collaboration with Danger Mouse) to this year’s bullish return to form on Born Like This. And it is… except when it isn’t– “Rock Co.Kane Flow”, taken from De La Soul’s The Grind Date, actually finds DOOM doing something of a victory lap in 2004 after his essential triad of Take Me to Your Leader (released under the name King Geedorah), Vaudeville Villain (Viktor Vaughn), and Madvillainy (Madvillain). “Rock Co.Kane Flow” is a fantastic symbiosis of DOOM’s many playful styles, but the beat itself feels weightier than what we’re used to from De La and the stakes higher (ahem) than what we’re used to from DOOM when he guests on a track. The other high(er)-profile collaborations on Unexpected don’t always fare as well– while “Da Supafriendz” spotlights a nerdy side of Vast Aire that often goes overlooked amidst Cannibal Ox’s doomsayer image, “Fly That Knot” is the second hopelessly corny track DOOM’s done with Talib Kweli (see also: “Old School” from The Mouse and the Mask) and most of the blame lies with Kweli’s increasing ineptitude at hook-writing, it’s clear these two share more camaraderie than chemistry. (Read The Full Review)

One can’t help but wonder what the late Ian Curtis would have thought of the music the other members of Joy Division would go on to make after his death. With each passing decade, the musical sensibilities of his former band mates seem to drift further away from Joy Division’s.

Take Bad Lieutenant. With New Order officially broken up, Bernard Sumner has moved on to this project, an unremarkable but pleasant enough New Order-esque  outfit. Also featuring Phil Cunningham, who briefly replaced Gillian Gilbert as NO’s keyboardist, and Jake Evans, their debut  includes contributions from such notable musicians as fellow New Order ex-pat Stephen Morris and Blur’s Alex James.

My fellow Pure Popper Tanner recently summed up Sumner’s song-writing motus operandi as succinctly as I’ve ever heard, suggesting the majority of his songs are “populist love songs.” I couldn’t put it better myself. Whereas the Joy Divisions of this world deal in the morbid and bleak, Sumner’s more inclined to fill an album with a dozen or so declarations of affection.

Should you bother with this album? Well, if you liked Get Ready and Waiting for the Siren’s call, absolutely. If you didn’t, or you never bothered to check them out, steer clear. It’s only the absence of Peter Hook’s bass sound that makes this record distinguishable from latter-day New Order.

Would Ian Curtis have liked it? One shudders to think what an Ian Curtis pushing 60 would have thought about anything. I, for one, adore it.

Tegan & Sara -- Sainthood

The Quin sisters are always up for some good referential digs, be it to the Material Girl in the broken-strummed “Paperback” or to themselves when crooning “Go steady with me/I know it turns you off when I get talkin’ like a teen” on “On Directing.” In either case, the irreverent, snide wit and easy self-deprecation prove to be an effective, if surprising, fit for Tegan and Sara’s brand of genial indie-pop, elevating Sainthood beyond mere snappy diversion. (Read the Full Review)

Devendra Banhart -- What Will Be

Banhart’s immanence has always been limited by the weirdness of his music and the size of his promotional arsenal. No more, though. Banhart jumped to a major label this year, and What Will We Be, his first recording on Warner/Reprise, marks the beginning of the end of his transition from Oh Me Oh My’s primitivism to mass culture’s sonic boom. The title What Will We Be suggests resignation, reluctance even, to this development. But its contents show a commitment to the cause, a final leap from the fringe to the fore.

The eccentric still lives to some extent. What Will We Be includes songs written from a child’s point of view about love and intimacy (“Chin Chin and Muck Muck”), silly lyrics set to seriously constructed tunes (“Willamdzi”), plastic pronunciation and wordplay (the insertion of additional syllables in the couplet “wild when/smiling” on “Can’t Help”), Spanish cooing (the moody “Brindo”), and, of course, warbling in that all-shook-up vibrato. (Read the Full Review)

Fuck Buttons -- Tarot Sport

Tarot Sport represents a subtler, more mature approach to songwriting and a sharpening of their craft. But moreso, it marks a comprehensive stylistic shift for the duo’s sound, from experimental noise with a buried pop sensibility to a sort of modernized electronic take on classic post-rock structures. And impressively, they’ve made these changes without sacrificing any of the genre-straddling adventurousness that made them intriguing in the first place. (Read the Full Review)

Jack Johnson -- En Concert

Tanner, who since he was twelve spends most of his time planning an ever-more-elaborate, ever-less-likely-to-happen wedding for himself, came upon this dull website for what appears to be a collective of wedding dj’s. Amusingly, there’s a page of indie-rock themed wedding mixes, all of which look like rough drafts for the Garden State soundtrack. Being the bitter, dry husks of human beings that we are, the first thing we thought was, “What would the opposite of these mixes look like?”

In that spirit, we proudly offer you seven tracks to spoil the mood at a wedding.

1. The Big Pink -- Dominos

“As soon as I love her it’s been too long.
And I really love breaking your heart”

2. The Mountain Goats -- No Children
“And I hope when you think of me years down the line
You can’t find one good thing to say
And I’d hope that if I found the strength to walk out
You’d stay the hell out of my way
I am drowning
There is no sign of land
You are coming down with me
Hand in unlovable hand
And I hope you die
I hope we both die”

3. XTC -- Your Dictionary

“Now your laughter has a hollow ring
But the hollow ring has no finger in
So lets close the book and let the day begin
And our marriage be undone”

4. Rolling Stones -- Out of Time

“You’re out of touch, my baby
My poor discarded baby
I said, baby, baby, baby, you’re out of time”

5. Husker Du -- Never Talking to You Again

“I’d put you down where you belong
But I’m never talking to you again
I’d show you everywhere you’re wrong
But I’m never talking to you again”

6. The Misfits -- Last Caress

“Well, I got something to say
I killed your baby today
And it doesn’t matter much to me
As long as its dead”

7. Jarvis Cocker -- Don’t Let Him Waste Your Time

” ’cause the years fly by in an instant
and you wonder what he’s waiting for
and then some skinny bitch walks by in some hotpants
and he’s running out the door”

This might be a little out of place in the Pure Pop newsletter, but as I’ve already written two articles this week, so I’m putting this up. We’re starved for content, dang it.

Here is a cover of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” that my band, The Jazz Guys, did. I’m the ugly one.

Incidentally, fans of the original song (like myself) are no doubt familiar with its video. It’s a charming piece with some wonderful choreography by Jonte. This guy is so out-there he makes Kool Keith look like Robert Frost. Check out the video for “Bitch You Betta!”. If I could kick my legs up like that, well, I can’t imagine there’d be a lot of practical applications, but it’d sure be neat.  WARNING: This is pretty crass stuff.

I Wanna Hold Your Hand ($4.88) - Before the Back To The Future Trilogy or Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis made his film debut with this charming tale of three young women who want to encounter The Beatles during their legendary 1964 New York visit for three very different reasons.

Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny ($8.88) -- Skeptical audiences skipped this one at the box office, all but ensuring we’ll never see a sequel. It’s too bad, because this Tenacious D origin story/fantasy epic is a sturdy piece of comedy loaded with inspired gags, hilarious cameos and classic D tracks.

Cry-Baby ($9.88) - John Waters‘ 1990 nostalgia fest stars a very young Johnny Depp as a 50’s gang member who falls in love with a straight-laced girl. Spoofing the conventions of teen musicals and mainstream portrayals of sub-culture, Cry-Baby is endlessly entertaining.

Nashville ($6.88) - Robert Altman directed a handful of truly great films in his vast career, and Nashville is one of the best. It features most of Altman’s hallmarks, including massive group action, overlapping dialogue and a dizzying number of intertwining plot threads. Even people entirely disinterested in the music culture of Nashville, Tennessee will find a lot in this film to fascinate them.

Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai ($6.88) -- Allright, this is not a music-themed film by any stretch of the imagination. It is a great movie by the incomporable Jim Jarmusch about a modern man living by the samurai code who owes a life-debt to a local mobster. It gets a little complicated from there. Why is it on this list? Well, RZA did the music. Duh.