Mike Salsbury’s Blog

I first discovered The Proclaimers when they released a 1990 single entitled “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” to some critical acclaim and Top 40 success (it was the #3 single in 1993).  Since then, I’ve tried to keep up with them and check out their albums as they’re released.  While surfing Spiralfrog.com’s library, I ran into the 2007 album “Life With You” and decided to give it a listen.

If you’re not familiar with The Proclaimers, they’re a Scottish rock band composed of two identical twin brothers, Charlie and Craig Reid.  Unlike some bands, their Scottish accents come through loud and clear in their music, as do their political views.  They support Scottish independence from Britain and are politically active in that regard.

One of the things I really like about The Proclaimers is their ability to turn a phrase.  Where some bands would take the cliched route in a love song and describe a woman in a red dress by comparing her to a rose or some other red object, The Proclaimers describe a pale woman in a red dress as looking like “blood lying on snow” (in the track of the same name).  While I celebrate this as an interesting turn of phrase, I have to wonder how a woman would react to being described as looking like blood on snow.  But this isn’t the only unusual choice of words in the song.  Later, they say “It’s taken generations of lucky breeding to make you” to the woman they’re interested in. I’m not sure how many women would be swept off their feet by such phrases, but they are fun to listen to.

I found “Harness Pain” to be a very strong track.  The listener is told they must harness pain if they want to hold “the flame” and “tell the truth about love”.  They’re told that “when you try to succeed you mostly fail” but you harness the pain and become stronger.

“The Long Haul”, “S-O-R-R-Y”, and perhaps certain other tracks seem to take on the Iraq war and its supporters, saying “I miss the days when the threat to our position didn’t come from some religion but from godless communism.”  We’re told “we’re not barbarians like we were way back when, we’ve learned from history, so we get to go around again” and “tell your sons not to bother with football, get a backpack on and crawl, we’re in this for the long haul”.

In terms of music and performance, this is as good an album as any other from The Proclaimers.  However, in terms of its content, it’s a far more politically charged piece than earlier albums like Sunshine on Leith.  

If you like The Proclaimers’ unique sound and can stomach their political views (whether you agree with those views or not), you’ll find this an enjoyable album and fair amount different from mainstream pop music.

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If you haven’t heard Jonathan Coulton’s “Baby Got Back” cover, stop reading this review right now.  Go to his site, download it, and play it. If that doesn’t convince you that you want to know more about what he’s done, I’m probably not going to do much better in this review.

I’ve heard Coulton’s work described as “geek rock”. That might be the best description.  It’s a soft, melodic, rock sound with great vocals.  The songs on this album are about “geeky” topics like mad scientists and Mandelbrot sets.  While music about these topics might sound like something that will never rise above the level of a “curiosity”, Coulton’s songwriting, instrumentals, and vocals combine to create a sound that is just plain catchy.  You’ll find yourself wanting to sing them not long after you stop listening.  At least, that’s what happens to me and at least a couple of other people I know.

Jonathan Coulton’s album “Where Tradition Meets Tomorrow” is available online through CDBaby.com for the low, low price of $7.00 plus shipping.  Given that there are 5 songs on the album, that works out to a slightly-worse-than-iTunes price of about $1.40 a track.  The nice thing about CDBaby.com’s site is that you can listen to a pretty lengthy clip of each song on the album before you shell out that “buck forty”.  The disc you’ll get back from CDBaby is real, commercially-pressed disc with silk-screened artwork on it that is shipped inside a full-color cardboard sleeve.  (You expected a jewel case for $7?!  I didn’t.)

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Since the 1980’s, I’ve been pretty fond of the music of Depeche Mode.  Back then, their music was heavily loaded with synthesizer sounds and became pretty mainstream.  This 2005 release, “Playing the Angel” from Depeche Mode is quite a departure from their earlier sound, though the synthesizer element and vocals remain.

Playing time for the album is about 51 minutes.  Individual tracks range in length from about 1:42 to 6:09.  Most are in the typical 3-4 minute “radio length” range.

For a fan of the 1980’s Depeche Mode, today’s group takes some getting used to.  Along with the familiar vocals and synthesizer sound, there’s a new edge to the lyrics and a screaming guitar sound that is a very sharp contrast to the Depeche Mode of 20 years ago.  I think I still like the older sound better, but I can appreciate that it sounds “eighties” enough that the band would have a very hard time attracting newer listeners to their music without this modern “grunge” element that is popular in a lot of today’s alternative and hit music.  If you’re not familiar with the band’s sound today, this album might be too loud and edgy for your tastes. For me, it’s pushing the limit.

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Earlier in the year I review The Bloodhound Gang’s CD Single “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo”.  It was definitely a good disc.  Thus it was with some enthusiasm that I fired up this album on Rhapsody and gave it a listen.

This recently-released (September 27, 2005) album is the latest from the group.  It contains the title song of the CD Single I mentioned above as well as a number of other tracks.  Overall it pretty effectively mixes techno sounds with rock and the standard Bloodhound Gang lyrical delivery.

The cover of Hefty Fine, as you can see at the right, pictures a very large and apparently naked man inside a cardboard box, along with a warning to parents that the album contains some explicit lyrics (which it does, and which Bloodhound Gang fans expect).

The album runs a bit under 40 minutes, about 3 of which are silence, and that feels pretty short for a modern release to me.  On the other hand, most of the tracks are quality stuff, so better to have a shorter album with decent music than a longer one full of crap…

The album starts with the track “Balls Out” which starts out sounding a little like a dance track, but picks up.  The lyrics are delivered in a rap-like format for the most part, but the instrumentals feature a strong bass beat and some very jamming guitars.  If you thought the “explicit lyrics” sticker was an exaggeration, this song would convince you otherwise before it’s over.  I think I heard most of George Carlin’s 7 words you can’t say on television in here.  On a 1-10 scale, I’d rate this one somewhere in the neighborhood of a 6, mostly due to the strength of its instrumentals.  The lyrics don’t impress me that much, probably because I’ve grown up enough that it takes more than a stream of 4-letter words in a song for me to get a kick out of it.

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As I’ve said before on this blog, I’ve been a big fan of Cyndi Lauper
since her early MTV days.  Back then, I enjoyed her brashness and
the silly videos she did.  Over the years that followed, I began to
really appreciate her vocal talents and songwriting ability.  When
I heard that she put out a new album (thanks to the Rhapsody music
service), I had to play it immediately.  It’s an entirely acoustic
version of many of her most popular songs, such as “Money Changes
Everything” and “True Colors”.

(This, BTW,
is one of the nice things about Rhapsody compared to iTunes and
Napster… you can play an entire album from beginning to end without
having to buy it first.  If you like it, then you can buy it and
burn it to CD or whatever.  If you don’t, it was covered in your
$9.99 monthly service fee.)

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For my taste, Colin Hay’s recording career has been something of a
rollercoaster.  One album will really impress me, while another
will leave me wondering what the heck he was thinking recording
it.  Within albums, my reaction is much the same way, and that’s
unfortunate.  His voice and sense of humor are excellent, and I’d
really like to love everything he records, but I don’t. 
Surprisingly, “Company of Strangers” is one of his best and
most consistent albums (at least of those I’ve heard).  The
songwriting is generally great, his vocals are on the mark, and I have
at most minor nits with the instrumentals.

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I’ve been a fan of Gwen Stefani’s and No Doubt’s for some time. 
I have a weakness for women whose voices sound sort of sweet and
innocent but who are willing to sing strong lyrics with a bit of an edge
to them.  Juliana Hatfield (of solo and Blake Babies fame) is
another such artist.  Thus, when I saw that
“Love.Angel.Music.Baby.” had come out, I was immediately
interested in it.  After listening to it a few times, I’ve come to
a couple of conclusions about it.

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This review has to start with a couple of admissions.  First, I
happen to think Cyndi Lauper (especially in her later albums) is an
underrated songwriter and performer.  Most people think of
“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” and dismiss her as an 80’s pop
culture icon (which she was, but she’s a lot more than that).  Some
of her later ballads are sung with great emotion and are among the
best-written songs I’ve ever heard.  On the other hand, I really
HATE remixes, especially when they’re done solely to try to make
“danceable” a song that was never intended to be dance
music.  So I approached this album with a mix of excitement and
fear… excitement that the “rarities” would be more of
Cyndi’s great songwriting and fear that the remixes would suck, as
remixes tend to do.

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If you’re not familiar with them, the Bloodhound Gang is known for some
rather raunchy lyrics, delivered with a healthy dose of humor.  The
CD single “Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo” is no
exception.  The single features three variations of the same
song.  The first is the “straight” version they
presumably recorded in the studio.  Second comes a remix by Jason
Nevis (which to my ears is barely different from the original). 
Third is a very different remix that gives the song a kind of
“outer space disco” sound.

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My musical taste would probably be described by most people as
“very eclectic” or “unfocused” or simply
“weird”.  My music collection includes the likes of
Morrissey, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Annie Lennox, The Beatles,
Willie Nelson, Conway Twitty, Beethoven, Bach, AC/DC, and others you
wouldn’t expect to see on the same shelf.  But the further toward
the musical fringes you get, the less likely you’ll find me listening to
it.  For example, metal that gets much heavier than AC/DC is not
something I care much for.  I pretty much hate jazz altogether, and
I wouldn’t listen to Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, or James Taylor if
you begged me.

When I first encountered the name of the
band “Death Cab for Cutie”, I pretty much dismissed it
offhand.  With a name like that, I figured, they’re probably some
kind of goth-metal-punk band that sounds like a room full of industrial
equipment going at full tilt.  I’m big enough to admit I was
wrong.  They sound nothing like that.  In fact, they remind me
a lot of the alternative bands I listened to on college radio in the
80’s and 90’s.  I felt very much at home and comfortable with them,
almost as if I’d been listening to them for years.  Their latest
album is “Plans” and was the first Death Cab for Cutie album
I’d ever heard.

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