Thanksgiving week

Posting will either be lighter or heavier this week, depending on the whims of the Turkey Gods.

Late harvest

Enjoy the best crop circles of 2007.

Already?

I was hoping to put off my annual look at the UK Christmas single woo ha until December started, but I am alerted to an underdog that I must champion.

Christmas chart battles are usually the territory of reality TV stars, novelty artists and Westlife, but this year a very unlikely pop star has thrown his hat into the yuletide ring.

Malcolm Middleton, once of Scottish "miserabilists" Arab Strap and now a successful miserabilist in his own right, has announced he will release the single "We're All Going to Die" in a bid to make it the Xmas number one single.

"Dying is a bit like writing a letter to Santa," explains Middleton, by way of a press release, "unless you've been a good boy or girl, you're fucked."

Go to his MySpace for a listen, it's quite nihilisticly jolly!

Copyright kielbasa

In the news

Boy George Charged For Allegedly Enslaving a Norwegian

Continuing with the genres

Continuing on with my glurbling on about Saturday Morning bubblegum pop, I offer this bit of fluff, a segment from the 1969-71 Hardy Boys cartoon. The conceit of the show being that in addition to solving crimes, the boys are in a band. The producers of the show were able to push out two soundtrack comps of the songs, which are now quite the collector's items.

So, enjoy the excellently catchy well-produced tune, while also goggling in amazement at the astonishingly rotoscoped psychedelic animation.



Meanwhile, here is a review that cought my eye - The Duke of Straw examines Corb Lund's new CD and proclaims it to be "the greatest horse warfare album ever." I think I will recant all the bad things I have ever said about genre compartmentalization if I can find my way to a store that has a labeled section for "music about horse warfare."

Have a taste.

This Week in Pod doesn't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard

Between my last post and this one, I have added a grand total of three CDs to my iPod. They are:

Various Artists - Mojo Magazine: Americana 2004
Various Artists - The Songs of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart
Various Artists - Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection

I have a playlist programed to only play things that have been added in the past week, so currently I have a playlist that only contains the contents of those three discs.

It's an odd mix. The three of them are odd mixes to begin with, but mixing them together is particularly odd.

From what I've been able to tell, "Americana" is a term that started out in the early nineties as sort of an umbrella term for record stores that didn't want to have separate racks for "Blues" and "Country/Western." As it was presented as a holistic genre, contemporary artists began believing that it really was one, and we are left with things like Gomez. I am very strange about "Americana" because while I hate the genre as a concept, I tend to really like just about everything that gets coded with the term.

(I am a hoot in record and video stores when I am in a foul mood and start asking the manager to quantify the genres. I stopped going to Blockbuster because every time I went in I took issue with the fact that they had separate sections for "Action" and "Adventure." "If this 'Action' film turns out to be quite adventurous, can I get a refund?")

Boyce and Hart were a songwriting team/occasional band. History has caused them to be be best known for their stint writing for The Monkees, but a look at their resume shows that they had their fingers in a lot of the sixties. One thing that they didn't have their fingers in, I discover, was what was called "The Bosstown Sound," a bunch of bands from Boston that were marketed heavily in the mid-sixties as an American response to the "British Invasion" bands. (See, here's those arbitrary genres again.) I had presumed that Paul Revere and the Raiders was one of the Bosstown bands, because their first single was a Boyce/Hart tune and, well, the name and the whole Spirit of 76 outfit/getting their photos taken with muskets thing.

Turns out the guy's name was really Paul Revere, and he showed up at precisely the wrong time, or right time depending on how you want to look at it. The Boyce/Hart song was "I'm not Your Stepping Stone," later covered by The Monkees, and then The Sex Pistols. You could write a dissertation on the meaning and trajectory of that one song.

I'm certain I picked up the Scooby-Doo CD because it had the tracks from the first season that played in the background as our heroes were being chased back and forth across the screen. While televised animation of the late sixties and early seventies stunk to high heaven, the folks making it were blessed with a bunch of talent pumping out the bubblegum pop in the background. Also on the disk are two tracks from the era of Scooby Doo when every episode had a guest star, and the musically inclined guest stars would do a song. These two tracks are from Davy Jones, who was at the time recording with Boyce and Hart, and Jerry Reed, who would later become best known for acting in and performing the theme song to Smokey and the Bandit, in a genre that is now wrapped into "Americana." It all comes together quite nicely, doesn't it?

Most Played Song:

Thea Gilmore - "Bad Moon Rising"

I pick ten tracks at random:

Abra Moore - "Summer's Ending"
Paul McCartney - "Nod Your Head"
Kirsten Bråten Berg - "Bånsuller"
764-HERO - "You Were a Party"
Jimi Hendrix - "Love Love"
Cold 8 - "Club Hearts"
Lisa Loeb - "Furious Rose"
Brian Keane - "American Open"
Maire Brennan - "Peacemaker"
Matisyahu - "Close My Eyes"

For hard drive space (and my own sanity) I do have to delete the occasional album. This week I deleted:

Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection

I had completely forgotten that I owned this CD:

Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection

The last thing that I ripped:

Scooby-Doo's Snack Tracks: The Ultimate Collection