Four words: Daft Punk does disco, as in ’70s disco. Some might think ’70s disco is redundant, since that’s when disco was big, but the hip club kiddies know that there bands making disco music today. Hell, what’s Hercules and Love Affair if they’re not a disco band? (Answer: they’re totally a disco band.) Love the stop-motion photography. It reminds us of that video for Hilly Michaels’ “Calling All Girls,” and we can’t help but be happy whenever that song comes to mind.
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RIYL: Kenna, Muse, The Killers
The press release for Quiet Geist, the new album from Northeastern electronic pop quartet Herra Terra, dared to name-check two big D’s that will get us to instinctively request a review copy like a Pavlovian dog: Depeche, and Duran. Silly us. We’ve seen this before, it’s almost never accurate, and as it turns out, it wasn’t accurate here, either. But in their defense, that’s probably because they knew that comparing it to Kenna’s New Sacred Cow would just leave people scratching their heads.
The funny thing is, we’ve heard quite a few artists lately who have taken inspiration from Kenna’s first album, the joke being that no one bought the record, but everyone seems to have heard it. And we’d bet dollars to donuts that Herra Terra could play the album start to finish at their next Halloween show, if leadoff track “Ejection Seats” is any indication. The songs are better arranged than they are written, which is not to say the songs are poor; it’s just that the music doesn’t stand above the nifty shifts in tempo or the slow builds, both of which anchor “You Were the Accelerator.” There is also the matter of singer John Paul Tonelli’s voice; It’s too muscular for the kind of music the band plays. That might sound like quibbling, but show us the last synth-driven band with a butch singer. Still, there is potential here. When the songwriting catches up with the band’s sense of atmospherics, they could be dangerous. (The Mylene Sheath 2010)
Herra Terra MySpace page
Click to buy Quiet Geist from Amazon
RIYL: rabies shots, “The Human Centipede,” being punched in the genitals
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Carlos Santana has claimed for years that he gets his artistic marching orders from the angel Metatron, but after listening to Guitar Heaven, even some of his staunchest fans may be forced to admit the possibility that Carlos has been dipping a little too deeply into his stash of Santana DVX — either that, or Metatron is actually a vengeful ghost who hates Santana, classic rock, and the record-buying public.
Equal parts cynically commercial and shockingly misguided, Guitar Heaven takes a dozen classic rock tracks and turns them into Golden Throats-style shotgun blasts of unintentional comedy. The idea of Santana recording glossy, lukewarm covers of “Whole Lotta Love,” “Smoke on the Water,” and “Bang a Gong” sounds senseless enough, but Metatron’s plan for the album – subtitled The Greatest Guitar Classics of All Time – came with a fiendish twist. Each of these unnecessary covers, you see, comes bundled with a vocal cameo from a singer who, in most cases, has absolutely no business performing the song in question.
Time and again, unstoppable chutzpah meets immutable rock ‘n’ roll classics. Chris Cornell wails all over a limp “Whole Lotta Love.” Chris Daughtry clenches his teeth through a neutered version of Def Leppard’s “Photograph.” Rob Thomas – Rob Thomas! – steps in front of the mic for “Sunshine of Your Love.” Nas and Janelle Monae collaborate on the clattering horror that is this album’s take on “Back in Black.” (Sample line: “Carlos on the guitar, relentless / Makes me visualize the clubs when they spin this.” Really.) Gavin Rossdale adds nothing to Santana’s sax-frosted arrangement for “Bang a Gong.” Jacoby Dix of Papa Roach is somehow allowed to sing “Smoke on the Water.” So on and so forth. Perhaps no album since the Shaggs’ Philosophy of the World has presented such a stunningly ill-conceived and consistently outmatched union of performers and material.
About the only thing here that makes sense is Joe Cocker showing up to lend his still-strong vocals to “Little Wing,” which suits Santana’s style and Cocker’s voice so well that you wish they’d done an entire album together. It wouldn’t have made Clive Davis’ eyes light up, but at least it wouldn’t have included Pat Monahan of Train singing Van Halen’s “Dance the Night Away,” or Scott Stapp – Scott Stapp! – dropping a deuce on “Fortunate Son.” If you happen to see Metatron, please punch him in the kidneys for us. (Arista 2010)
RIYL: Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, hunting and killing Billy Ray Cyrus
Bill Hicks has become the trendy name to drop of late when talking about influential comics, and while it’s irritating to see Hicks become a hipster icon, the simple fact is that it’s better late than never for Hicks to find a larger audience, hipster cred or otherwise. Truthfully, it’s not surprising that Hicks didn’t find a larger audience during his lifetime; his material, while rooted in truth, was sardonic and mean. He spoke at length about pornography and fantasized about being an angel of death. He also brewed up material that a million comics wish they had thought of. Using terminally ill people as stuntmen in movies? Genius. Unconscionable, but genius.
This four-disc set (two CDs, two DVDs, one download card) tries valiantly to create some order from the chaos that was Hicks’ brain, saving the political material for Disc 2 and using Disc 1 to talk about everything else. A chronological sequencing probably would have worked better, for two reasons: it would give the unfamiliar a better sense of how Hicks’ material evolved, and it would get the listener more excited as they go through it simply because Hicks is playing to bigger and bigger crowds. Several of these tracks are marked ‘Previously unreleased,’ but many of those are just different versions of bits that appeared on the albums Ryko issued in the late ’90s and early ’00s. There really isn’t a duff bit here, and they even had the balls to include “Worst Audience Ever,” where Hicks ran into a particularly stoic crowd in Pennsylvania, and made sure they knew it.
Fans will want this collection for the DVD material. Disc 1 contains some early (as in 1981, when Hicks was 19 years old) routines, mostly recorded at the Comix Annex in Houston. Hicks was still finding his voice during this period, and for a show in Indianapolis in 1985, it looks as though Hicks’ new idol was Steven Wright, as he delivers his material in a monotone voice. (He’s also wearing a news boy cap, just like his friend Sam Kinison.) The material he had written then wasn’t great, but it’s still interesting to see what stuff he went through before he settled on talking about Jimi Hendrix cutting Debbie Gibson in half with his cock. And speaking of Kinison, one of the two Houston gigs from 1986 literally screams Kinison, from the constant yelling to the trench coat. The money piece from Disc 1 is the poolside interview with Hicks from 1988, where he speaks of Kinison’s permanent banning from a local comedy club, inspiring the birth of the Outlaws.
Disc 2 features the rare “Ninja Bachelor Party,” a delightfully silly 30-minute martial arts spoof film Hicks shot over a period of eight years, along with a series of bootleg clips of Hicks in Austin in the early ’90s. The bootlegs are just that, shot from the back of the room and frequently out of focus, but it also features the best material on either DVD, and it’s fun to see the Relentless and Arizona Bay material acted out. It doesn’t quite serve as the definitive collection of Hicks’ work, but it’s not called The Definitive Collection. It’s The Essential Collection, meaning it’s all must-own stuff. Just be prepared to seek out the rest of Hicks’ essential material. (Rykodisc 2010)
Click to buy Bill Hicks: The Essential Collection from Amazon
RIYL: Cameo, Zapp, Hall & Oates
If you’ve ever flipped the collar on an Izod shirt, owned a pair of Bugle Boy jeans, or purchased Hall & Oates’ Rock ‘n’ Soul, Part One on cassette or vinyl, Chromeo is your custom-built funky time machine – a synthy, vocoder-soaked trip to a parallel reality where musical history stopped in 1984. It was a pretty nifty trick the first couple of times around – and their last release, 2007’s Fancy Footwork, earned them a Daryl Hall endorsement and the ironic love of an audience too young to remember Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down – but most tributes to dead genres wear thin pretty quickly (see: Darkness, The). So it would be a mistake to expect similar results from their next album, right?
Maybe not. Business Casual doesn’t really add anything new to the Chromeo formula, but it doesn’t really need to – whether or not you believe P-Thugg and Dave 1 are serious, they’re really good at recreating that early ’80s vibe, to the point where you might find yourself wondering if you requested “The Right Type” on your local Top 40 station 25 years ago. Everything, from the buzzy synths to the soulful-but-not-too-soulful vocals, sounds like it’s being beamed in from a giant boom box on the planet Atari – and more importantly, the songs are as clever as they are catchy. It’s ultimately a fairly empty exercise, and if you’re old enough to remember when this sort of stuff was originally being made, it probably seems more than a little ridiculous to be witnessing a revival of something that was regarded as inherently disposable even when it was popular. What’s sillier, though: the idea of a band intentionally mimicking yacht soul, or the fact that Lil Wayne’s “Lollipop” spent five weeks at Number One?
In the long run, it’ll be interesting to see where Chromeo takes this; even the artists they’re imitating moved on eventually, never to return. But hey, if they can deliver three albums that do this much with such a paper-thin gimmick, there might not be anything they can’t do. Break out the velour and pass the cocaine. (Atlantic 2010)
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