Source: Bounce.com
Niriglis will release its second album, titled New Standard, on May 26. The band worked with such producers as Ken Ishii and Hoppy Kamiyama on the album, and members of Art-School appear as guest musicians. The sleeve design will be done by Groovision, who also did the design for Nirgilis’ single, “Mayonaka no Schneider”.
Source: Bounce.com
Bonnie Pink is set to release her next album on May 12. Pink once again works with Swedish producer Tore Johansson, with whom she’s collaborated since 1998’s Evil and Flowers. Johansson also produced Pink’s most recent singles, “Private Laughter” and “Last Kiss”, which sees an April 7 release.
Source: Bounce.com
Nananine will release its second album Fake Book on April 22. The album — Nananine’s first in a year and a nine months — is expected to contain 12 songs. The Fukuoka City quartet also released a new single, “Stranger Paradise”, on its own 9-Tone label in February.
Source: Bounce.com
brilliant green guitarist Matsui Ryo debuts his solo project meister with an album release in April. According to the brilliant green’s official site, Matsui has been recording in London with a number of UK musicians, including Kajagoogoo’s Nick Beggs, Ride’s Loz Colbert, bis’ Manda Rin and Boo Radleys’ Sice. Details of the album have not yet been determined.
Source: Bounce.com
Supercar will release a new maxi-single, Wonder Word EP, on April 28. Aside from a single mix of the title track, the single will include four new songs. According to the official site, Supercar calls the single “the Answer to Answer“, referring to the group’s recently released seventh album. Tanami Keiichi and Ugawa Naohiro will also do the jacket design for a limited edition first pressing. The band’s web site also announced a vinyl version of Answer will also be released on April 28.
Make no mistake — Audra McDonald has one of those sweet, theatrical voices that doesn’t wear on repeated listens.
In fact, her voice is divine. Clear, strong, practically flawless. It’s the voice of a professional.
Which is why it doesn’t quite work for Happy Songs, a collection of Depression-era music by the likes of Duke Ellington, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin and Richard Rodgers.
McDonald is a veteran stage performer with a few Tony Awards under her belt, which means she’s had some training. (Some place called Julliard, wherever that is.)
On her previous solo album, How Glory Goes, McDonald sang individual songs from musicals without sacrificing their dramatic contexts. You didn’t need to know the whole story to get it, and she made sure you got it.
Somehow, that dramatic sensibility doesn’t translate on Happy Songs.
It’s not that she delivers a bad performance — quite frankly, it’s difficult to imagine she could. It’s not that she interprets these songs insensitively. She sings the hell out of them.
No — these songs need swing.
And swing isn’t something a classical training encourages.
It’s apparent right from the first track, “Ain’t It the Truth”. The song calls for a voice as rough as the muted trumpet blaring in the introduction, but McDonald just doesn’t have that kind of gravel.
“Beat My Dog” finds McDonald close to the kind of grit the album needs, but for the most part, the album is mismatch of message and messenger.
The lustre of McDonald’s voice, unfortunately, is not enough to bridge this disparity. In other words, her training got in the way of her interpretation.
Still, McDonald could sing a phone book and blah to the blah to the blah …
Even if Happy Songs doesn’t quite suite her, it’s still a setting nice enough for her to try.
The world needs Fefe Dobson.
But not in the way her fans nor her record company would like to think.
A young, black girl from Canada, Dobson offers up a bratty snarl that draws inevitable comparrisons to her fellow countrywoman, Avril Lavigne.
Her self-titled debut is an exercise of commercial pandering, a vertible checklist of sonic wizardry geared to milk the lunch money of unsuspecting adolescents everywhere.
Watered-down punk riffs — check. Nasal vocals — check. Token ballads — check. Simplistic assertions of feminine strength — check.
Fefe Dobson is the stuff from which indier-than-thou record store employees have nightmares.
And the world needs her.
The world needs her in the same way it needs asexual gay men on network television, in the same way it needs Japanese girls in dread locks, in the same way it needs Latino guys digging Morrissey.
The world needs her because there just aren’t any black women singing in front of electric guitars. (And what about Res? She hasn’t done anything since her debut in 2001.)
Why does the world need black women singing in front of guitars? Well, why the hell not?
Why shouldn’t one of the best reggae bands in the world come from Japan? Why shouldn’t some white trash dude from Detriot be hip-hop’s most scrutinized star?
Why shouldn’t Ravi Shankar’s daughter scoop up eight Grammys for a lethargic album of countrified jazz? And what’s to stop another cello player from transcribing Jimi Hendrix’s performance of the “Star Spangled-Banner”?
Just because the brand of rock Dobson performs is as disposable as next year’s trend among 15-year-olds doesn’t mean the idea of her is without merit.
Picture it — the screech of guitars, the scream of fans, and above it all, a woman, exploiting her femininity as a weapon in a battle of the sexes, cutting clueless men down to size in the process1.
And she is black.
This color-blind dream could extend to a point where a group of young black men can find themselves tourmates with Death Cab for Cutie.
The world may not be ready for a black woman slinging a guitar. Hell, the world can’t accomodate more than one Living Colour, let alone another Pansy Division.
But what the world is ready for doesn’t reflect what it needs.
And it needs Fefe Dobson.
1 See Shiina Ringo in the artists directory.
Souce: Bounce.com
Pop singer Hitoto You releases her second album, Hitoto Omoi, on April 7. The album is expected to contain the singles “Kingyo Sukui” and “Edo Polka”, plus the theme song to the Asano Chuushin movie, “Koohii Tokimitsu”. Inoue Akemi collaborates with Hitoto on the song. A first-run limited edition pressing of the album will also include a DVD of five video clips, including “Morai Naki” and “Hanamizuki”.
When Vernon Reid attempted to drum up support for a Black Rock Coalition more than a decade ago, it was easy to dumb down the idea of “black rock”.
Black guys who play rock music.
There weren’t many who did in the ’80s, and out of that scant number, only Fishbone and Living Colour are still around. (Never mind the fact Living Colour itself broke up in 1994 and reunited six years later.)
But as the band’s 1990 album Time’s Up demonstrated, black rock was a lot more than just black guys sligning guitars — it was about integrating, perhaps even re-integrating, black culture into rock ‘n’ roll.
Living Colour pumps up that notion on its newest album in a decade, Collideoscope.
After starting off with three heavy metallic tracks, Living Colour gets Marvin Gaye sexy on “Flying”. “Lost Halo” mixes a good dose of soul with all that distortion, while “Holly Roller” brings the band a few decades closer to the heavy blues influence of 70s rock.
Reggae works its way into the program on “Nightmare City”, while echoes of George Harrison’s dabbling with Indian music refract on “Tomorrow Never Knows”.
There’s still plenty of straight-ahead, heavy riffs to go around — “A ? of When”, “Great Expectation”, “Sacred Ground”.
But they only serve to underscore what rock music has been missing as of late — a sense of deep history.
Heavy metal may be a few generations removed from the very first combination of country and blues nearly four decades ago, but that doesn’t mean the lineage shouldn’t be traced.
Nor should it mean that it can’t be bridged.
Of course, rock music is an outgrowth of black culture in the first place, so if black rock brings black culture back into the music, what we’re really finding on Collideoscope is the completion of a circle.
It’s rather rude of me to admit it, but the main reason Kelis’ Tasty attracted my attention was because of the Neptunes.
When the people behind the glass have more cachet than the person on the front cover, something isn’t right.
But Tasty isn’t entirely the Neptunes’ show. Given the spectrum of producers who worked on the album — Dallas Austin, Raphael Saadiq, Andre 3000 of OutKast — Kelis herself deserves nods for threading together a tight album from divergent styles.
There’s a bit of something for everyone.
Austin’s rock contributions, “Trick Me” and “Keep It Down”, have been dismissed elsewhere, but both tracks are a nice contrast — like the token rock track Utada Hikaru includes on her albums.
Saadiq offers Kelis the smoothest and sexiest tracks on the album with “Glow” and “Attention”. “Marathon,” in contrast, makes for a poignant conclusion.
If anything, Andre 3000’s “Millionaire” sticks out the most. The eccentricities that powered The Love Below are only slightly toned down on this track, and he pretty much upstages Kelis throughout the song.
The Neptunes, however, provide the foundation over which Kelis pours her raspy, sultry voice. “Milkshake” may be one of those nonsense singles you’d wish would go away, but the belly-dancing slinky-ness (what an awful fake word) makes it difficult to ignore.
“Flashback” and “Protect My Heart” have drawn comparrisons to 80s R&B, against which I can’t really argue either.
Tasty is a smart album, diverse enough to keep listeners engaged, coherent enough not to drive them crazy.
And yet …
Kelis isn’t a flashy singer, which is refreshing in a genre where most singers stash 10 notes to a syllable.
While Kelis has managed to pull together a full album’s worth of strong material, there’s a nagging suspicion a little more flash would push Tasty to another level.
Kelis isn’t Mary J. Blige, but what if Blige worked with the calliber of collborators on Tasty?
The album works regardless, the least of which is a fitting title. Tasty, indeed.