New singing sensation Susan Boyle is back with another great performance. It probably doesn’t match her initial performance that made her into an international sensation, but it was pretty damn good considering the pressure.
Category: News (Page 26 of 136)
Five years after releasing 2004’s career-defining American Idiot, Green Day is back with their follow-up, 21st Century Breakdown, hitting stores today. Does it live up to the considerable hype?
According to Bullz-Eye’s David Medsker, Breakdown is a solid 3.5-star affair — perhaps not the towering achievement that Idiot was, but as he says, you have to “give the band credit … for not shying away from the impossible expectations that have been thrust upon them, and trying their damndest to make an album every bit as massive” as their last outing, even if their reach exceeds their grasp a bit:
The problem is that this time around, that whole reach-exceeds-their-grasp thing comes back to haunt them. The band simply bit off more than they could chew, and had they been willing to pare down the track listing to a more reasonable length (18 songs! 69 minutes!), we could be talking about Breakdown and Idiot the same way that people compare and contrast The Bends and OK Computer.
These sentiments are more or less in line with the qualified praise doled out in reviews from a number of outlets, including the UK’s Guardian (“a little less bold, a little less surprising than its predecessor”), Entertainment Weekly (“The band seem oddly immune to the fact that success … has rendered Berkeley’s gutter-boys-done-good accidental targets of their own ire”), and Popdose (“bucks the current trend of churning out singles in favor of creating deep tracks that beg for repeated listens — and may the gods bless ‘em for it!”)
And what does the band say? Well, watch this Total Assault interview clip to hear directly from the boys themselves:
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Yusuf Islam (a.k.a. Cat Stevens) says that Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” sounds an awful lot like one of his songs, “Foreigner Suite.” So much so that he might actually sue the band.
“The song definitely sounds like it,” he said of his song. “It has such logical chords and the melody has to be what it is…”
Asked during a telephone interview from London whether he would pursue the issue legally, Islam, 60, said “it depends on how well Satriani does.”
U.S. guitarist Joe Satriani has sued Coldplay, accusing the British band of copyright infringement. He claims substantial original portions of his song “If I Could Fly” are recycled in “Viva La Vida” and is seeking damages.
I’m not familiar with the song that Islam is referring to. Does anyone think he has a point, or is he reaching at straws?
If you’re a fan of Fleetwood Mac, then you no doubt got more than a little bit giddy at the tail end of 2008 when the band – still holding strong with the fab foursome of Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, and John McVie – announced that they’d be touring in 2009. Word on the street is that things have been going swimmingly thus far, and the tour will continue to roll on into June; you can check out the current dates rather easily, as they’re right on the homepage of FleetwoodMac.com.
In the meantime, however, if you’re on the fence about whether to go see them or not, take a gander at this clip of Lindsey Buckingham – recorded during a solo performance at Bass Performance Hall, which is available as a CD/DVD combo – as he takes “Big Love” and either makes you wish you could play guitar or makes you never want to pick one up again because you’ll never, ever be able to play it as well as he can.
…and “uncomfortable” is an understatement.
By now you may have heard about Thornton’s interview (along with his band, The Boxmasters) with a Canada’s QTV where he takes exception to the host mentioning his acting career in the introduction. If you watch Thornton during the intro, you can see him shake his head a couple of times. For the first six or seven minutes of the interview, Thornton acts like a petulant child, giving short, ambiguous answers to direct questions. Then he goes off on a tangent talking about a monster magazine contest that he entered as a kid. Finally, around the seven-minute mark, he tells the host why he’s acting the way he is.
Thornton keeps asking the host, “Would you ask Tom Petty that?” The thing is — Billy Bob Thornton is no Tom Petty. Thornton is best-known as an actor who sees himself as a musician. Tom Petty is in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
I feel for the host — he simply introduced Thornton and the rest of the band, and has to deal with pissy Billy Bob for the rest of the interview. He didn’t ask him any questions about his acting career and it’s completely understandable why he would mention Thornton’s history as an actor in the intro to give the interview context. It would be really odd if he just started the interview without mentioning it at all.
Thornton later says that Canadian audiences are like “mashed potatoes with no gravy” and canceled their two remaining Canadian shows after being booed in Toronto.
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