October 13 New Releases
For a complete listing of new releases visit our on line store. For rock and roll collectibles visit our web site. New releases are always subject to change.
CDs
Bowling for Soup - Sorry for Partyin’
Punky power pop pranksters Bowling for Soup have made a career out of matching catchy, unusually well-crafted pop music with clever, humorous lyrics suggesting that the band was eternally stuck in high school. With 2009’s Sorry for Partyin’, the group, whose members are quickly nearing middle age, seems to be regressing even further, trading in frequent references to cheerleaders and jocks for an extended penis metaphor (“My Wena”) and a paean to shirking all manner of responsibility, including cleaning up dog doo (“No Hablo Inglés”). Elsewhere, the group makes a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek bid for chart success with “A Really Cool Dance Song,” which matches a throbbing Lady GaGa-esque beat and electronic squiggles with the group’s usual sarcastic flair, and delivers one of the best celebrations of all things brewski-related since Tom T. Hall’s “I Like Beer” with the even more enthusiastically named “Hooray for Beer.” As was the case with “Much More Beautiful Person” and “When We Die” on the unit’s previous release, The Great Burrito Extortion Case, however, Bowling for Soup occasionally dispense with the silliness to get reflective; “Me with No You” is a midtempo, acoustic-based, straight-up sensitive heartbreak song that could easily be covered by any number of teen-pop or Nashville country singers. Throughout, the band varies little from its proven musical formula of catchy, snap-tight, and energetic guitar rock, but the primary focus on this album, as always, is on having fun, and Sorry for Partyin’ makes forgiveness easy. ~ Pemberton Roach, All Music Guide
Bob Dylan - Christmas in the Heart
After the initial shock fades, the existence of Christmas in the Heart seems perhaps inevitable. After all, the thing Bob Dylan loves most of all are songs that are handed down from generation to generation, songs that are part of the American fabric, songs so common they never seem to have been written. These are the songs Dylan chooses to sing on Christmas in the Heart, a cheerfully old-fashioned holiday album from its Norman Rockwell-esque cover to its joyous backing vocals. Apart from the breakneck “Must Be Santa,” which barrelhouses like a barroom, Dylan doesn’t really reinterpret these songs as much as simply play them with his crackerjack road band, dropping in a little flair — restoring “we’ll have to muddle through somehow” to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” singing the opening of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in its original Latin — but never pushing tunes in unexpected directions. Many would argue having Dylan croon these carols is unexpected enough and, true, there are times his gravelly rumble is a bit pronounced, but nothing here feels forced, it all feels rather fun, provided you’re on the same wavelength as latter-day Bob, where the sound and swing of the band is as important as the song, where there’s an undeniable nostalgic undertow to all the proceedings. And, of course, there’s no better time for celebratory sound, swing, and nostalgia than the holidays, which may be why Christmas in the Heart is a bit of a left-field delight. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
Christmas on Mars might be the Flaming Lips‘ bona fide sci-fi epic, but Embryonic is the musical equivalent of the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey: transformative chaos that results in a new start. From The Soft Bulletin onward, the Lips seemed focused on tidying the loose ends of their earlier work, almost to the point of constraining themselves. Their wilder side is unleashed on Embryonic’s 18 tracks, and the band sound, more off-the-cuff than it has in years — some tracks are barely longer than snippets, others are rangy epics, and it all holds together so organically that listeners might wonder just how much these songs were edited. Musically, Embryonic is the least polite the Flaming Lips have been in nearly two decades, mixing in-the-red drums, blobby, dubby bass, squelchy wah-wah guitars, and sparkling keyboards into a swirl of sounds that are strangely liquid and abrasive at the same time. Occasionally, the band uses noise in an almost ugly way, as on “Convinced of the Hex,” which scrapes eardrums with static and distortion before falling into a loose but driving Krautrock groove that adds to the song’s tribal pull (complete with growling and wailing in the background). The Miles Davis-inspired “Aquarius Sabotage” opens fuzz bass and keyboards so chaotic, it isn’t just free jazz, it’s free-for-all jazz, while “Your Bats” is as soulful as it is noisy, piling roomy drums atop more delicate hand percussion, strings, and brass. The Lips balance these confrontational tracks with calmer moments like the vocodered loveliness of “The Impulse “ and “Gemini Syringes,” an expansive respite that features “additional spoken announcements” by mathematician Thorsten Wormann. Embryonic might not be a literal concept album, but it often plays like one. An astrology motif runs through the ultra-spacy “Virgo Self Esteem Broadcast” and the tumbling instrumental “Scorpio Sword,” another track that suggests that the album’s ultimate concept may be that chaos is a profound agent of change. It’s also the Flaming Lips‘ most emotionally raw album, despite — or perhaps because of — its free-flowing nature. Wayne Coyne often sounds like he’s singing from another dimension, musing on humankind’s frailty with the wonder of an alien or a newborn on “If” and “The Sparrow Looks Up at the Machine.” This is also some of the band’s most bittersweet work; on the beautiful “Powerless,” Coyne sings “no one is ever really powerless,” but the music dwells on the weighty implications of that thought rather than its potential freedom. Even the playful “I Can Be a Frog,” which features Karen O as a one-woman noisemaker, is minor-key. Then again, little about Embryonic is clear-cut or straightforward — these noisy, pensive, sometimes meandering songs take awhile to decipher and often feel like they’re still in the process of becoming. These very qualities, however, make these songs some of the Flaming Lips most haunting and intriguing music in some time. ~ Heather Phares, All Music Guide
Lightning Bolt - Earthly Delights
Before launching an acoustic tour in late 2009, Los Lonely Boys found time to return to the studio and record 1969, a short ‘n’ sweet homage to one of the most pivotal years in rock & roll. The bandmates cover material by the Beatles, Santana, the Doors, Buddy Holly, and Tony Joe White, and they do so with clean, polished execution. The Garza brothers are all comfortable with this genre, having grown up in a musical household filled with classic rock and Latin rhythms. Accordingly, 1969 draws a clear link between the band’s studio albums and the material that inspired it. ~ Andrew Leahey, All Music Guide
Brian Setzer - Songs from Lonely Avenue
Three decades into his career, Brian Setzer’s sound is so well-established that his only trump card lies in formal aesthetic experiments, and he pulls out a doozy with 2009’s Songs from Lonely Avenue. Far from being a Doc Pomus tribute album, Songs from Lonely Avenue is a “soundtrack to an unwritten film,” an album equally inspired by ’50s film noirs, R&B, and rock & roll, a conceptual stroll through smoky clubs and dimly lit back alleys. There are no surprising sounds here — Setzer hauls out his jump blues and slow-crawling ballads — but that doesn’t mean this is tired: Setzer is reinvigorated by his concept, turning in his first collection of all-original material in his entire career. Although the songs are essentially vehicles for the concept, the entirety of Songs from Lonely Avenue shows Setzer to be a master of mood, maybe not digging too far underneath the surface, but creating a record that is an engaging slice of noir fantasia. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
LPs