Posts Tagged ‘Album’
‘Glee’ Heartthrob Mark Salling Reveals His ‘Pipe Dreams’ Album Art, Tracklist
A month after enlightening the masses with his single “Higher Power,” Mark Salling—aka Quinn Fabray’s babydaddy Puck on Glee—has revealed the cover art and tracklist for his upcoming album Pipe Dreams. This comes the same day that Billboard reports Salling’s co-star Matthew Morrison (”Mr. Schuester”) is looking at February 2011 as a month for the release his own debut LP.
First, here’s Mark’s Pipe Dreams tracklist, as posted on Amazon.com:
1. Migration
2. Lone Ranger
3. Higher Power
4. Mary Poppins
5. The Descent (Confessions of a Ghost)
6. Illusions
7. Musical Soulmate
8. Willing and Wonderful
9. Scarlett Glasses
10. Doppelganger
11. Pipe Dreams
The release date for Pipe Dreams is listed as October 12, which is about three weeks after Glee’s second season kicks off (September 21).
And speaking of which, the Emmy-winning series‘ Season 2 opener premiered at Paramount Studios in Hollywood last night (flip through our photo gallery from the event), and Billboard has posted their somewhat non-spoiler list of spoilers. The two catching our eye? “Two faculty members team up for a plot they call ‘Operation Mean Girl’” and “One character refers to the glee club’s repertoire as a ‘drag queen’s iPod’.”
On the flip side, we’re guessing Mark Salling’s debut album is anything but.
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The rise of album sequels? Snoop Dogg announces ‘Doggystyle 2′
Fresh off a triumphant performance of "Doggystyle" at this year's Rock the Bells, Snoop Dogg has announced that he has begun work on its sequel, "Doggystyle 2: The Doggumentary." The only catch is that it will be produced by Swizz Beatz, not Dr. Dre, who produced the entirety of the original.
The information was relayed via a YouTube viral video, presumably recorded after a long night of recording. Holding up a CD-R, Snoop claimed that he'd cut 18 songs that evening. To which Beatz, best known for his production work with DMX and Ruff Ryders Entertainment artists, added, "that’s how we used to do it back in the day. It's not about the single, it's about the sound. So we constructing sounds for the album."
Declaring that Swizz "laced his boots up" for the new record, Snoop boasted that the producer, who is Alicia Keys' husband, had given him some gangsta [stuff], some crib [stuff], some R&B [stuff,] some hip hop [stuff,] hard [stuff], and some mean [stuff.]”
The forthcoming record doesn't lack predecedent. In fact, it dovetails with a recent trend among veteran rappers. Last year, Chef Raekwon scored a critical and commercial triumph with his "Only Built 4 Cuban Linx 2." More recently, Capone-N-Noreaga released "The War Report 2." Other planned sequels reportedly include Redman's "Muddy Waters 2" and the GZA's "Liquid Swords 2."
The decision to release sequels for highly venerated records is a savvy move, if not a tad cynical. With a built-in brand name and base, a sequel's odds of commercial success are significantly greater due to simple name recognition. After all, the music industry is prone to the same market forces as Hollywood, an industry that has long depended on the sequel as a dependable revenue generator.
Unfortunately, like their Hollywood analogues, the sequel is rarely if ever as good as the original. Though Raekwon's effort was a triumph under nearly any metric, few would consider it on par with its predecessor. More often, they've played out like cash-grabs from artists unable to capture the magic that produced the original classics.
That's not to say that "Doggystyle 2" can't be a great work in its own right, but without beats from Dre, and without the smooth hook powers of Nate Dogg, it will certainly require a dogged effort.
– Jeff Weiss
Album review: Jenny & Johnny’s ‘I’m Having Fun Now’
The heterosexual working couple may be replacing the band of brothers as the primary unit of the 21st century rock group. In Arcade Fire, Sleigh Bells and the Dirty Projectors, a balanced blend of male and female sensibilities creates the kind of buzz once caused by all the boy energy of classic rock. Relatively balanced, that is: In most groups built around such units, the man remains the primary creative force (at least on the surface). As in most workplaces, in pop music women have made significant but limited gains.
Jenny & Johnny represent a different situation. In this couple, the woman is the powerhouse and the man, though forceful in his own ways, rises to her challenges. Jenny Lewis and Johnathan Rice have been creatively and romantically involved for half a decade; the lady, one of indie's most successful thinking beauties, is the bigger star. Maybe that's why this project, though lighthearted, has some of the prickliness of a real day-to-day relationship. The title may be "We're Having Fun Now," but there's room for wisecracks, bitterness and worry amid the lovey-dovey stuff.
"I'm Having Fun Now" distinguishes itself from Lewis and Rice's solo efforts, or hers with band-on-hiatus Rilo Kiley, by going for a very specific tone. The fuzzy but bright production by the duo, with help from old friends Mike Mogis (Bright Eyes) and Pierre de Reeder (Rilo Kiley), has been compared to classic AM radio fare but is really closer to the jangle pop of the 1980s — bands like the Three O'Clock and Opal in L.A., Let's Active out of North Carolina, and the Chills from New Zealand. It's prettier than what today's shoegaze revivalists do, but still a little jarring and tart.
Merging voices and exchanging lines, Lewis and Rice don't duet so much as banter. Some, like "Switchblade," are directed at the kinds of shifty characters a musical couple might encounter in Hollywood. Others tackle the relationship theme in language that's highly literate and never over-sugared.
What other pop couple would dream of being together forever in a New Yorker cartoon? That's just how urbane and aware Lewis and Rice can be, working out their power dynamic with the "record" switch on.
– Ann Powers
Jenny & Johnny
"I'm Having Fun Now"
(Warner Bros.)
Three and a half stars (Out of four)
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Weezer’s Album ‘Hurley’ Not Named After Beloved ‘Lost’ Character After All
Weezer’s Brian Bell revealed that the inspiration behind the band’s new album title was not Jorge Garcia’s character Hurley Reyes on Lost, although the actor’s smiling visage scored the album cover art. Instead, it was a cross-promotion with surf clothing company Hurley. We would have preferred continuing to think that the band was comprised of a bunch of really big Losties.
Video interview below of Bell breaking the bad news at the Mile High Music festival.
Says Bell, responding to the question “How did you get the title of your new album Hurley?”:
“The inspiration came from a surf company called Hurley, that was funding the record at the beginning of the recording process… I don’t even know how they’re tied in so much, although, we got some clothes and we did a photo shoot where we’re wearing these clothes, and I think we’re selling these clothes in malls. So how that’s tied in, I don’t know. I think it’s this whole, like… tying in different medias. And then using Hurley, the character from Lost, which I’ve never seen in my life, as our mascot almost, for this record, is somewhat post-modernistic maybe. I hope people don’t look at it as too jokey. Cause it certainly comes across that way, without reading into it a little more deeply. That’s it as far as the name and the album cover goes.”
This is a different story than what frontman Rivers Cuomo told Spinner earlier this month. “We struggled super hard trying to come up with an album title, trying to find some kind of phrase that summed up the whole aesthetic behind the album,” Cuomo said. “I was coming up with all kinds of stuff, but ultimately, we just went with some random word that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.”
Well, at least they didn’t put a pair of board shorts on the cover of their album.
[Vulture]
Opinion and analysis of the day’s music business news. — The story of Playlist.com is far more interesting than the actual music service. CNET’s Greg Sandoval wrote a good article about the company’s recent Chapter …
Weezer are looking to play a couple of their albums completely in concert on an upcoming tour. Frontman Rivers Cuomo told MTV that the band plans to play all of their 1996 album Pinkerton , which is being reissued on …
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Album review: Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’
Katy Perry signs the liner note acknowledgements on “Teenage Dream,” her second major label album and first as a certified superstar, “Love, the new & improved Katy Hudson-Perry-Brand.” If you didn’t know about her fiancé, Russell B., or the actress with her given name who beat her to fame, you might think the singer was referring to herself as a salable item. Something, perhaps, like Maybelline mascara in its familiar pink and green tube — a commodity so definitive in its category that it starts to seem original.
Perry likely wouldn’t mind being compared to a feminine product. “I love an obvious innuendo,” she once told an interviewer. She also loves the God-given gift of her lovely breasts and the bad-girl business of rock and roll, which she approaches the way the ad men on “Mad Men” approach cigarettes and cold cream. How to capture its spirit and sell it? How to make it seem new, yet unthreatening to an average boy or girl? Bury the dark side, scrub the dirty parts with Ivory and insist, as Don Draper would, that it’s something your audience has never before encountered. That’s madcap Katy, both slap-your-face fresh and unapologetically calculated, a brutally effective advertisement for a self.
More than her Christian background or the chick-lit limits to her take on sexual liberation, what makes Perry a controversial artist is her essential hollowness. “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag drifting through the wind, wanting to start again?” she sings in the power ballad “Firework.” Perry felt like that bag, but then realized what a bag was for: to be filled up with shiny, purchasable things.
Though her lyrics generally recount familiar scenarios on the road to romantic fulfillment, Perry’s real subject is consumerism. From the bouncy-house Scandinavian beats provided her by super-producers Max Martin, Stargate and her mentor Dr. Luke to the childlike enthusiasm with which she embraces lyrical clichés to the vocal style that combines sports arena chants with karaoke croons to her Halloween store look, Perry is the living embodiment of what it means to be bought and sold.
Her songs are like ads, with hooks that hit like paintballs and choruses that exhort like slogans; she delivers them with the gusto of a pitchwoman. On “Teenage Dream,” the songs alternate between weekend-bender celebrations of hedonism and self-help-style affirmations encouraging listeners to get an emotional makeover. Either way, acquisition is the goal: of a great love, a happy hangover, a perfect pair of Daisy Dukes.
To judge Perry as inauthentic or unoriginal would be wrong; as with any great ad campaign, uncanny familiarity is her greatest achievement. She can sing a line like “you make me feel like I’m losing my virginity,” and never once hint that she might be thinking of Madonna. She can feign a rocker’s stance on the Alanis-inspired “Circle the Drain” or a hip-hop diva’s stutter on the Rihanna-influenced “E.T.,” and convince you that it fits her perfectly. No tailoring required! Whatever person exists beneath Perry’s wigs and costumes is irrelevant to her music. Her process of self-creation is the purpose and sum of her art.
It’s enough to millions of listeners — especially young women — because this kind of constructed self has been a feminine reality since long before Peggy Olson started hawking Pond’s cold cream. “Put your hands on me in my skintight jeans,” Perry murmurs to a paramour in the title track, but it’s the clothing that matters more than the chance to get naked.
— Ann Powers
Katy Perry
"Teenage Dream"
(Capitol)
Three stars (Out of four)
