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Continue reading →: Merle Haggard: A lot of pride in what he is
Since I’m not schooled in Merle Haggard’s (vast) catalog, I have to evaluate I Am What I Am against the six studio albums I own and the superb 2006 single-disc comp Hag: The Best of Merle Haggard, which is, naturally, incomplete but presents such a staggering number of great performances…
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Continue reading →: Life is a mystery
Another excellent Ewing review. This one, part of his years-long project of dissecting every British number one single: Madonna’s “Like a Prayer.” I agree: the song is as magnificent as it was meant to be.
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Continue reading →: Jace Everett: Swagga like him
If you watch “True Blood,” then you’ve heard “Bad Things” over the credits. Jace Everett sings it like he heard Chris Isaak’s “Baby Did a Bad Bad Thing” minutes earlier and liked it, a suspicion that goes double for the show’s producers. I’m pleased to report that host album Red…
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Continue reading →: Singles 8/19
Finally, after a few weeks of rain, the clouds break. Some of the year’s best singles posted this week. Even the chorus hook of the Usher single hasn’t gotten on my nerves. Two surprises: the blandness of the Taylor Swift single, which is to say it’s “observant” in a predictable…
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Continue reading →: The strength is within: Cathy Dennis ‘Too Many Walls’
There’s a British woman named Cathy Dennis responsible for co-writing Britney’s “Toxic,” Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” and “California Gurls,” and the Pop Idol/American Idol theme, along with stuff by Sugarbabes and loads of Europop that has never troubled these…
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Continue reading →: Some albums I’ve really liked this year
Don’t take the sequence too seriously. Vampire Weekend – Contra Big Boi – Sir Lucius Left Foot… The-Dream – Love King Against Me! – White Crosses Rick Ross – Teflon Don Four Tet – There is Love In You Merle Haggard – I Am What I Am LCD Soundystem –…
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Continue reading →: Truffaut: Styleless style
Francois Truffaut’s last interview. The best bit is how he stretches the contours of realism: Well, Jean Vigo’s influence is obvious in “The 400 Blows.” But certainly “The 400 Blows” is also, if less obviously, influenced by Renoir’s work, be it in a simple gesture or in some solution to…
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Continue reading →: Me vs the world
Since I haven’t read the comic book/graphic novel/whatever of Scott Pilgrim vs the World, I have to evaluate what stands before me: recent Michael Cera performances + Matrix-style aerobics + post-adolescent heterosexual romcom + “post-modernism” + Natural Born Killers approach to staging violence + Scary Movie parodying The Matrix and…
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Continue reading →: I gave you all a boy could give you
Several days of living with an album I should have downloaded long ago has proven to be a tautological misfire: I should have downloaded Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret long ago. I’ll put it this way: the likes of “Sex Dwarf” sounded unspeakably perverse when I was twenty-one. The more…
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Continue reading →: Singles 8/12
Katy Perry – Teenage Dream (5) The Roots ft. John Legend – The Fire (4) Hanson – Thinkin’ About Somethin’ (3) Fakeblood – I Like It (3) Swedish House Mafia ft. Pharrell – One (3) Darin – Lovekiller (3) Flo Rida ft. David Guetta – Club Can’t Handle Me (2)…
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Humanizing The Vacuum 