J. Gabriel Boylan

It's always a little strange when holidays come to reality-television shows, since you know it had to have been taped, well, beforehand, and so everyone is just faking that it's Thanksgiving. Such was the case when the Top Chef crew headed up to a downright balmy Rochester, N.Y. (they cooked outside for the elimination challenge) to cook Thanksgiving dinner for the rock band, Foo Fighters.

Why? Well, Bravo's reality shows excel at presenting contestants with dumb challenges made slightly less dumb by involving some amount of cool (see also the drag queen challenge on the last season of Project Runway).  read more »

The Killers' latest, Day & Age, out today, was rumored to be a more stripped down affair than we've yet seen from the band. There was to be less glitzy new wave than on their unrelenting 2004 debut, Hot Fuss, and less brooding Americana-tinged arena bluster than on 2006's uneven Sam's Town. Well, sorry, wrong on both counts.

Instead of the lean approach, Day & Age bundles the disparate elements the band has toyed with to date, piggybacking earnest rootsiness right on top of glitzy dance-pop. The weird thing is, in the album's best moments, it works. If anything, the new material displays a band that knows it's a big deal and can summon tuneful bravado in a snap.  read more »

Something happened around 2001 that split off a large portion of Scottish band Belle and Sebastian's estimable fan base, which is a shame, because they've done great work since. A lot of fans had latched on to the band's infectious, bookish pop soon after its 1996 debut, Tigermilk, and five years on had simply grown out of the breezily strummed ditties and cute/wounded lyricism. Of course, the band had grown out of that, too, but cast off more listeners who grew disappointed as the band's sound roamed further and further afield, sounding more like Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac than the apotheosis of '80s-'90s British indie-pop.  read more »

What is the point of the CMJ music festival?

Ostensibly, the dizzying roster of live shows in venues all over New York City, and the magazine behind it (College Media Journal, once College Music Journal) exist to provide new music to college radio programmers and, increasingly, to online outlets. There was a time when college radio was kicky and vital and reached a lot of young music consumers, and when CMJ (the magazine) was well-written, and sent out totally great quarterly CD's. That time is long past.

Past, too, is the time when the CMJ festival presented endless exciting options to scads of intrepid fans and industry folks.  read more »

Observed this weekend at a Brooklyn wine bar: a crew of boomy-voiced 30-somethings harassing their waitress.

"This is horrible!" said a long-haired portly guy, thrusting his iPhone at her. "These songs you're playing are so tired, man! Listen, we're in the industry. Trust us. Please put on my playlist. I cannot listen to this crap!"

The waitress said she'd have the check with the manager.

("Aw man, you're like fucking Sarah Palin or something!" he blustered back, confoundingly.)

The table eventually got its way (the customer who drops $900 is always right), and they're all smiles, like they've just written themselves a fat check, like they're educating the masses, but nobody starts nodding along or asking the bartender "Dude, what is this?" like that Beta Band scene in High Fidelity.  read more »

If we're lucky, R&B is in a state of flux; if we're not, it's dying slowly. Since the 90's, the genre (especially its male component) has rewarded banality, whether in the form of sexist histrionics dressed up as seduction, the sort of stuff that gets Chris Brown and Akon hits, or the too-often bloodless smoothness of Usher, Anthony Hamilton, and, maybe best of the bunch, John Legend. And then there's R. Kelly, who is, for reasons too complex to address here, unassailable. Club bangers and crooner crap are great, and everybody needs a little stupid fun, and that Usher sure can dance, but the alarmist tends to wonder whither the thoughtful, sensitive, passionate R&B of yore, the genre that brought us everything from the Temptations to the Jackson 5 to Jodeci? When did the beat start to eclipse, well, everything?

Two very different artists, Ne-Yo and Raphael Saadiq, both veteran songwriters, producers and singers, offer different answers to such sky-is-falling questions with albums out this week.  read more »

Tuesday evening, for VH-1 and Vogue's "Fashion Rocks" show, the Black Eyed Peas performed a hip-hop version of the Rolling Stones' "Miss You." Turning one of the sexiest songs of all time into a dead-eyed, fake-funk abomination is a real accomplishment, though to be fair, it's just another day at the office for B.E.P.

Two nights earlier on the MTV Video Music Awards, the night's loud-mouthed, big-haired Brit emcee, comedian Russell Brand, told one too many jokes at the expense of clean tween stars the Jonas Brothers (and their purity rings), and precious American Idol season six winner Jordin Sparks went off script and shot back: "It's not bad to wear a promise ring because not everybody, guy or girl, wants to be a slut.  read more »

It started a couple of weeks ago, with the unlikeliest of progenitors: The Boss.

Bruce Springsteen dedicated a live rendition of his hit "Born In The U.S.A." to Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps. Everybody cheered, even though that song isn't really a "go America!" kind of song at heart, and after all these years of defending it, Bruce should know better, but whatever. Good feelings, yes?

No. When confronted with the honor, Phelps shrugged it off, and admitted he was more into hip-hop.

In fact, he put forth, he listens to Young Jeezy to get psyched up for events. Guess he's never heard "Jungleland." Not one to miss an opening in the news cycle, Young Jeezy promptly stepped forward and pronounced Mr.  read more »

Solange Knowles, like so many young people today, is an avid blogger! Recently, to accompany her posting of a song titled "F#@k The Industry" (scandalous!), Ms. Knowles wrote the following:

"Unfortunately I'm in an industry where diversity is not celebrated the way it should be. When some people see and hear something different it feels foreign to them and they don't like that. Everyone has a choice of what they like and that's a beautiful thing!!!"

It sure is, Ms. Knowles, so what is it that your song is so angry about?

"Record labels, managers, publicist, journalist, media ect [sic]… have a tendency to see something work and try to reciprocate that with another artist thinking that's what makes success.  read more »

The Jonas Brothers don’t occupy their prominent position in pop by accident, and they don’t owe their success to critics, music blogs, Imeem, Pandora, iTunes, or even a savvy Volkswagen commercial. New media be damned, they owe everything to the Disney monolith, a big old record label, and legion after legion of screaming girls.

With the release of A Little Bit Longer this week, the three brothers from Wyckoff, N.J. (just over the G.W.B.) will prove that the charts can still be dominated using the big-business pop-music model everyone keeps saying is dead, dead, dead.

Disney has been making a mint off the lucrative tween demographic for the better part of the last decade, with High School Musical, Miley Cyrus, and now the Jonas Brothers trotting out a never-ending supply of records (on the company’s Hollywood imprint), television shows (on its network), and tours (the most lucrative product of the music industry).  read more »

Randy Newman's new album, Harps and Angels, is in stores today.

What is the deal with joke rock? Does anyone actually listen to Randy Newman? At home on a stereo?

These are two questions with which I have wrestled over the past few years, as respected peers, with increasing persistence, lobby hard for Newman’s spare, early solo albums and demand that he be given a break for the cartoon soundtracks and joke songs you hear sometimes at weddings.

You know Randy: "Short people got / No reason to live!" and "I Love L.A.!"

He makes music for Pixar films that then get radio play and later, Oscars.  read more »

What does U2 sound like?

For a question that seems so absurd to ask-surely, everyone knows!--it's pretty hard to answer. Not because the band has been around for over three decades and experimented with a number of styles. Its that the answer is tautological: U2 sounds like U2. Its commercial success and attendant ubiquity has done something to it: it's transcended pop music.

Of course, Bono, The Edge, Larry, Mullin, Jr. and Adam Clayton weren't born fully grown, as their first three albums, all reissued in remastered form last week, attest. Boy, October, and War come out together today in a super-deluxe box set which cheekily leaves room for collectors to add an extra disk of their own, as if it's being left to the listener to judge whether The Joshua Tree belongs here.  read more »

Three albums come out today; all of them might be called "Indie" releases; they will be promoted and marketed heavily at Indie record stores and compete on the same Indie charts this week.

Needless to say the genre is almost meaningless as a description of the music. One of the bands is from Brazil, one is on a major label, and the third is on a label nobody's even heard of. And one band makes club-ready synth-punk, while another makes clever '80s-inspired dance-rock, and the third makes dense, harmony-laden classic rock-inspired power pop. How can three such disparate bands be part of the same scene?

Of course the designation "Indie" never stood for a genre.  read more »

The critics who praise the Hold Steady share a kind of collective relief that at last, someone's making music for men in their 30's who like classic rock.

But since when are men in their 30s who like classic rock such an underserved demographic?

I have had the band pushed on me by aging, formerly disillusioned rock lovers, and pushed again, and again. Nothing works.

I could never get into Craig Finn’s nasal wordiness and self-satisfied smartness, or sense that there was something great in the blustery arena rock of the band’s music.

It’s not that I don’t like smartness or arena rock or even nasal singers (if I could sing, I would most certainly be one).  read more »

Why should anyone care about Beck? Isn’t he just some 90's holdover gone morose, gone Scientologist, gone lame with the weight of his early successes and the death of irony, that vein he mined so long and so well?

His last two releases, the aimless Guero and the overworked yet hollow The Information were critically shrugged at and popularly buoyed by the artist’s (deserved) reputation, but seemed to have found Beck Hansen short on good ideas or good energy, something for which he was never, ever lacking.

Yet the father of two is nearing 40, at the tail end of his recording contract, undetermined as to his future, and like the rest of us looking at the abyss that is the future of music.  read more »

A couple weeks back, Ice-T, whom you may know from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, and who is also, it turns out, a famous rapper, fired a shot across the bow of the unlikeliest of enemies: gimmicky teen dance-rapper Soulja Boy.

Averring that Soulja Boy had "single-handedly killed hip-hop." Ice T continued, "We came all the way from Rakim...we came all the way from motherfuckers flowing like Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube, and you come with that Superman shit? That shit is garbage."

T later refined his message, a sort of backpedal, praising some new-schoolers who "really write something," like Ludacris, T.  read more »

A couple of months ago in this space, I reviewed Moby’s latest, a paean to New York nightlife. Interestingly, a far more convincing homage to the sounds that defined this city’s clubs over the years, to the underground originators that spawned the overground hits, comes out this week: Hercules and Love Affair.

Andrew Butler never went to the Loft, or Paradise Garage, or the Sanctuary, or even Danceteria. Yet he and his group manage to not only convey the excitement and sounds of those hallowed clubs honestly, but also to create something new out of the building blocks of the past.

Butler is the wunderkind, the Hercules, and the rest of the spirited cast is the Love Affair.  read more »

In 2008, a big day for record sales is a relative thing, for the majors and the indies alike. Physical sales are lower than ever, even for superstars; bands routinely crack Billboard’s top 10 with sales barely in the five digits. But today is a big day in the record industry.

Coldplay's newest, Viva la Vida, hits stores today; there are high, high hopes for the album. The band that broke with "Yellow" way back in 2000 has had a couple of smash records since then, A Rush of Blood to the Head in 2002 and X & Y three years later; they're as close to the sure thing (U2) as the record industry gets these days. But there's another band whose latest effort may tell more about what the future of the recording industry looks like.  read more »

When Martha Wainwright talks about her hopes for her musical career, she tries not to wish for too much.

"I have expectations, but those are dangerous,” she told The Observer. “I try to play things down so I won’t be disappointed. I just want to sing my songs, have some fun and be stylistic onstage. But really … I want to get a washer dryer!”

The 32-year-old Ms. Wainwright doesn’t have big plans to trade in her South Williamsburg apartment for something with a bit more tone, just to upgrade her laundry.  read more »

Al Green’s voice is strange and expansive and organic. For most of the 1970s his work yielded a series of gorgeous soul albums that are part of the iconography of the genre. Willie Mitchell’s arrangements pitted intermittent horns or organ over flat snare drums, with shards of smooth guitar and the occasional, lackadaisical string section. But the most important instrument of all was Green’s astounding voice, which managed always to embody at once a louche sensuality and a rumbling spiritual fire.

That magic formula remains mostly intact on the latest album from the 62-year-old, Lay It Down, which appeared on record-store shelves yesterday from Blue Note. It’s being billed as a comeback album, which is odd, since it’s not just the third album Green has released in five years, but because he’s been on a comeback, in one way or another, for closer to 15 years. One wonders when the comeback will cease and leave Green free to simply be a musician.  read more »

Over the past two years, the parodists from New Zealand, Flight of the Conchords, have scored with a hit HBO show (in which they play a hapless struggling band whose mundane adventures are punctuated by song) and won a Grammy award with their debut U.S. E.P. (seriously, a Grammy, and seriously, for an E.P., which must have made all those losers who wrote full albums feel like suckers). One half of the group even had a moderately successful indie film, Eagle vs. Shark. While Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement may not be household names, they are getting there.

Another step in that direction is the release today of Flight of the Conchords’ self-titled full-length album. The group had self-released some recordings in New Zealand, recorded a BBC radio series, and even had that award-winning E.P. last year, but this is its first proper studio album and their first major U.S. release.  read more »

In 1992, Moby was among the bristling avant garde of dance music, at a time when that genre seemed poised to break through to the mainstream in a big way. It was with him that it did break, just a few years later. 1999’s Play, mainly a roster of scratchy blues and gospel samples layered over languid, housey tracks, sold nine million copies worldwide, spawned a series of hits, and introduced us to the ubiquity principle, whereby artists and their albums’ success can be measured by the fact that you hear them everywhere. He was Feist before Feist, “Young Folks” and “Crazy” all rolled into one, somehow pumping out of speakers at the Gap, the Duane Reade, your doctor’s office, your best friend’s cocktail party, and all those Silicon Alley startup parties. Every single track on Play was licensed for commercial use. The future was then.

Like the era of "irrational exuberance" that produced it, that album is likely to be the achievement for which Moby is best remembered, though he recently remarked that “in hindsight, it wasn't fun being the crucified poster child for selling out.”  read more »

So there's no way Adam Green could have known that, when asked by director Jason Reitman what music her character ought to listen to, Juno star Ellen Page would reply "The Moldy Peaches" faster than you can say "homeskillet."

And there's no way Mr. Green could have known the film would become such a runaway success, or that a tune by his old band, the Moldy Peaches, featured prominently therein would become one of iTunes' hottest downloads, or that the soundtrack would rocket to the top of the Billboard 200, or that he'd end up reuniting with ex-band mate Kimya Dawson after a four-year hiatus to perform their old songs in front of the ladies on The View, or that thousands of teens across the country would record their own cover versions of Juno's unofficial theme "Anyone Else But You," and then load them up on YouTube.  read more »

As a steady rain soaked the village this past weekend, Dean Wareham ambled down Avenue A, umbrella aloft, a slight bounce in his step, and watched the cabs race down the street. He wondered aloud whether his roof would spring a leak under the rain, and lamented his landlord’s decision to raise the rent by several hundred dollars a few months back. He and his wife have been thinking about moving to Brooklyn, he said, but they don’t know if the rents in Williamsburg will really save them any money. (Williamsburg is the new old East Village, right?) Plus his son lives close by, with his mother, and he likes being near them. “How are the rents where you live?” he asked.  read more »

As this decade wanes, some of the chaos in the world of music seems to be settling, as those looking for new sounds grow tired of bottomless discovery. It’s exhausting, really, this omnivorous accumulation of songs. How many albums have been downloaded only to languish somewhere in the catacombs of sprawling hard drives? Yet everything hasn’t devolved into ringtones and novelty singles. The furious dismantling of the pillars of corporate greed (so long, $18.99 CD!) hasn’t hurt enduring grass-roots indie musicians like John Darnielle, who records under the moniker the Mountain Goats. In fact Darnielle’s work, idiosyncratic and acquired-taste though it may be, is more popular than ever, and his latest, perhaps most welcoming album sees him poised to break through to even more new listeners. It’s notable, especially given that he’s been making his music for more than 17 years.  read more »

This past Saturday, as a sellout crowd waited for Hot Chip to begin playing, a DJ at the Highline Ballroom played an a cappella version of Marvin Gaye singing “Sexual Healing.” Unadorned by dripping, quiet-storm keyboards and honeyed percussion, Gaye’s voice held the venue in thrall for a stirring few minutes, and those massed and awaiting the show quieted, some singing along, others just taking it in.  read more »

Everybody needs to stop complaining about Chan Marshall. If I hear another person talk about how she has smoothed over the rough edges that made her so great and eradicated all the warts-and-all charm from her repertoire, I'm going to spit.

Just a year ago, after releasing the strongest album by far of her career, Ms. Marshall, or Cat Power as she's known, cancelled a tour due to a breakdown. Plenty reacted with smug I-coulda-called-it satisfaction given her reputation for stagefright and worse. Then, a few months later, Ms. Marshall emerged stronger, leaner, and meaner than ever, and has since been treating audiences (ever larger, ever more thrilled audiences) to some of the best performances of her life. One review of her new album actually praised her former "paranoid-but-pretty" style in contrast to the strength and poise she now exhibits. You'd think people wanted this woman dead.  read more »

There are two people's voices I can impersonate well: that of Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt and Project Runway frontman Tim Gunn. It seems Merritt is forever impersonating as well, or perhaps just exploring the many forms of his beloved pop and rock songcraft. (Alas, Mr. Gunn specializes in another kind of craft, one that falls outside the purview of this review.) Of course this diversity was most prominent on the Magnetic Fields' 1999 compendium 69 Love Songs, for which he and the band ran through nearly every permutation of the love-song conceit, and came to rest on the lucky number.

Yet, while the band has always been a sucker for a blunt conceit, the years since the release of 69 have seen the very bluntness become esoteric. 2004's i was a string-laden soft-pop ode to melodrama where all the songs began with the prime pronoun and were arranged alphabetically. Then there's the string of Mr. Merritt's side-projects, from the guest-vocalist-heavy 6ths to the Gothic Archies' morose children's songs, an accompaniment to the Lemony Snicket Series of Unfortunate Events books. Showtunes was a 2006 collection of Mr. Merritt's work for Chinese theater director Chen Shi-Zeng. Recently Mr. Merritt's voice even graced a Volvo commercial.  read more »

It was almost a disaster. Ghostface Killah's new album "The Big Doe Rehab" was slated for release today, and by chance so was the latest from Wu-Tang Clan (of which he is a member).

What a pickle! Ghost was upset. The rest of the group was upset. The fans... well they were just excited about the new music. After a few tense days things were set right, so we'll have to wait another week for that Wu-Tang album, but Ghost stands alone, and thank goodness.  read more »

His album is not just the back story to the story; it’s the soundtrack that should have been.  read more »

"Magic" does cover some old ground, but this is rock with the kind of adult, unstill energy which is the same energy that took him out on the campaign trail in 2004.  read more »