Author: Dr. Flucke (Page 7 of 7)

Man-about-MySpace: Feist-pod Nano

September 12, 2007 / Dr. Flucke

The new iPod Nano Video commercial is a joke. To me, it just screams “Don’t buy this, because you can’t see anything on my postage-stamp screen!” And don’t take me as an Apple-basher, because I get it. A lifelong Mac devotee, I bought the 5GB iPod, then 15GB, then 40GB, and then 80GB iPods. If there were a 160GB available, I’d eBay my 80-gigger and get one–and proudly sync it to my Mac.

It’s just that, with his “technology magic” act, Steve Jobs is starting to look trite as the late Doug Henning did there at the end. I want a music player, not a Blackberry-Palm-phone-thing. I don’t want my iPod polluted with a bunch of crappy software that half-works. Plus, with the iPod’s well-known battery issues, what, I want to put my grocery list on my iPod so I can burn the battery out faster? Flucke that. And I certainly don’t want videos, because what good is a music video at 14 pixels square? Plus, all I need is to be driving on the highway amongst a bunch of 17-year-old chickie-doo Feist fans trying to watch the damn video on their Nanos when they should be, er, steering their cars and getting out of my way.

The only thing more embarrassing than watching Steve Jobs unveil some incremental upgrade to his iWhateverDuJour is the slobbering “oohing” and “ahhing” of the audience watching him. Pathetic sycophants, all of them. Ugh. Not like Mike Dell has any charisma whatsoever, but at least Dell devotees don’t wilt like wounded flowers when he speaks.

Which brings us to MySpace, which fixes the problem of the iPod Nano Video commercial. No, it turns out, the video is not a poor Busby Berkeley clone production starring a drunken Britney, Nicole, Lindsay, Paris, and their entourages filmed from the balcony at Pure, which it kinda resembles Nano-sized.

(In fact, a quasi-interesting NYT article explains how the singer, Feist, actually wears t-shirts and jeans most of the time and took something of a chance donning the blue pantsuit for the video–in my opinion, to great effect.)

iPod devotees hipped to Feist via the commercial (and not our own Mike Farley’s review from months ago) can’t go to her own site, which she says was overrun by porn spammers.

In fact, the 30-something Torontonian’s MySpace is the place to go to check out her act, at full size. Before you go, here’s that video the iPod Nano does a great job of not showing on the TV commercial:

Pop

Man-about-MySpace: The Ultra Twist

September 5, 2007 / Dr. Flucke

Ahhh, the joys of fuzzed-out garage punk. Guys paying homage to 1980s postpunk retro maniacs like Mudhoney who themselves were paying homage to 1960s do-it-yourselfers like the Sonics. While such a swirling mishmash of influences might sound complicated, it’s really not. Think lo-tech. Think basic rock. Think pre-Sgt. Pepper.

It’s rock, unvarnished, and it’s awesome. Energetic hard-bashed drums, guitar with distortion turned to “11,” little if any keyboards, and no production values whatsoever. Think “Dirty Water” by the Standells. Think “Baby Please Don’t Go” by the Amboy Dukes. Think “Smells Like Teen Spirit” playing over a not-quite-tuned-in AM radio station.

It adds up to The Ultra Twist, an Italian punk band not quite a year old, who features all of the above, and a little (OK, a lot) of punk attitude.

The only high-tech digital artifacts detectable in the Ultra Twist’s Tracks–at least at MySpace sampling rates–is the deliberately added vinyl-like hiss and pop at the beginnings of the tracks. It’s a cheap trick, but hey, it shows the world where their priorities are, somewhere far south of Nelly Furtado’s quality control standards. And it’s good.

Warning: Flag-waving Amur-kans aren’t necessarily going to agree with all their sentiments–although, scratch that: Polls indicate that even staunch patriots are parting ways with our president, and the band’s anti-Bush rant is classic punk: An instrumental punctuated by three words. Albeit three incendiary words, to some folks.

Most punk fans would find it hard to disagree with The Ultra Twist’s main anthem, “No Beer No Fun,” so the band offers an opportunity for us to all set politics aside and mosh until our noses bleed, and our sinuses are finally cleared of all that Furtado. Anyway, dig the tunes and no, don’t adjust your speakers–it’s supposed to sound that nasty.

Artists, Get to Know, Rock

Man-about-MySpace: Fats Hammond

August 31, 2007 / Dr. Flucke

One of New England’s best kept music secrets is Fats Hammond, a group featuring two Hammond B-3 organs bashing out some of the funkiest soul-jazz on the planet.

Before you go thinking for a second that Fats Hammond, in their standing Tuesday night gig at the Dodge Street Grill in Salem, Mass., puts on some sort of high-faluttin’ academic jazz clinic, go listen to their tracks uploaded to The Space: It’s pure soul grease, laden with more fat than the pub’s fish & chips. Dirtier than the floor around the beer stand behind home plate at Fenway Pahhhk.

Sometimes, we’ve been told, the drummer from the Trey Anastasio (Phish) solo band knocks off early–he works behind the bar at Dodge Street–and sits in with the band, and the jams go deep into Wednesday morning.

Fats Hammond ringleader Ken Clark (back to camera) wheels in his 400lb B-3 every Tuesday
and jams with another B-3 playa and the band.

Artists, Jazz

Man-about-MySpace: Tim Halperin

August 28, 2007 / Dr. Flucke

Ben Folds used to awesome. In concert, he still is, a consummate entertainer, and MySpace-aware fans point to his October 2006 live MySpace concert–requests only, the site’s first such event of its kind–chronicled on the Live at MySpace DVD as evidence of that.

But on the studio recording side, many of his fans are right to feel his songwriting has become almost too serious, his lyrics too jaded, to bear. Gone is the insouciance of the Ben Folds Five of the 1990s, the light drama of “Emaline,” the innocently poignant “Brick,” the simple chords . . . the subtle aspects of Folds that are gone and replaced–at least for the moment–with heavy-handed songs like “Bastard” and “You to Thank,” two back-to-back cuts on Songs for Silverman that sound like classic Folds pop but are so bitter and whiny that they just leave one cold.

Tim Halperin

Enter Tim Halperin, a TCU student and Folds devotee.

In between classes and other pressing needs that hamper the fun of dorm-dwellers (like having a television too small to read the score of the football game he and his pals are watching, chronicled in his “Life in the Dorm Room,”) this guy records whimsical piano-pop loaded with the delicious chordal curlicues we Folds fans love to hear.

These low-budget productions mean that his voice, piano, and songwriting skill must carry the day in cuts like “Nice to be Free” and “Mary.” They aren’t encumbered by effects and rich sonic backgrounds behind which the singer-songwriter can hide. It’s just his voice, his piano, and very basic backing tracks. Halperin’s vocals and piano playing stand up to the test.

And perhaps that is what is missing from Folds’ layered, heavily produced studio creations of today: That low-budget innocence of his 20s. Halperin’s stuff, while perfectly original in its own right, recalls the Naked Baby Photos era of the Five. Go give him a spin, and if you want his cuts on your iPod, go to his Garage Band page and download away. He claims he’ll let us know when a CD’s coming out; we’ll hold him to that.

Get to Know, Pop

Man-about-MySpace: Pac-Man fever

August 22, 2007 / Dr. Flucke

Welcome to the first of a series of blog posts featuring great stuff spotted on MySpace Music. It can be good, bad, and ugly. Or, as we’re about to explain, worse.

The NFL’s investigating whether or not
Pac-Man’s shield logo infringes on league trademarks.

Poor Pac-Man Jones. He goes on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel to share his side of the story–translated loosely, in a few words, “I am not really remembering what Mr. Commissioner Goodell told me about keeping my nose clean. What was it he told me, again?”–and yet he just can’t seem to hold on to the headlines to save his life, because Mike Vick’s antihero PR machine is outflanking him at every turn.

But he persists.

Following in the steps of pro sports miscreants-cum-rappers Jim “Punky QB” McMahon, Allen Iverson, and Ron Artest, Pac-Man’s livin’ da streetz life with his National Street League rap label, a collaboration (coll-abortion?) with producer/henchman Spoaty. The raps are about–you guessed it–spending lots of money. “I spent a hundred grand all in one night!” they sing on the almost completely mindless “Yah Nah Mean.”

Just like Pac-Man allegedly did in Vegas last winter after the NBA All-Star game, when the most notorious of his myriad suspicious activities went down. Witnesses claim Pac-Man took nearly that much money into a strip club and was “making it rain,” euphemism for throwing dollar bills around.

Anyway, maybe if you’re a big rap fan and someone like Pac-Man is singing about poppin’ rubber bands off bundles of $100 bills, he comes across with some sort of street cred. Unlike a lot of rappers setting their stories to a rump-thumping beat, you know for sure that Pac-Man’s living his. The music doesn’t sound very good to us, but give Pac-Man some time. If he pops a few more rubber bands and buys some serious studio time, Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson prove that throwing the best technology at a recording really can help make a big hit, no matter what you’re starting out with. Of course, if he’s making records, that means he’s not working. And if he’s not working, the Titans certainly aren’t passing out more rubber-banded bundles of Benjamins.

Get to Know, Rap