newcritics

Well, almost anyway. Dread Zeppelin. They were a one-joke band, but it was a good joke, wasn’t it?

“Heartbreaker” by Dread Zeppelin courtesy of Youtube.

Here we go again with another shot of surrealism, this time courtesy of The Leningrad Cowboys with The Red Army Choir. You have to see this to believe it, and even then it is hard to reconcile with reality.

Just in case you missed Part I.

I woke this morning to the sad news of George Carlin’s passing. I’ll leave it to others to chronicle his career and analyze his impact on the world of comedy and our culture. What I’m interested in at the moment is setting the record straight. George Carlin did not mellow as the [...]

I’m not kidding.
Watch.

It was quite unexpected when my brother walked into rehearsal one night way back in 1979 and announced that “Steve Miller” had a new record out that blew him away. He told us the name of the song was Is She Really Going Out With Him, and that it rocked hard with great lyrics. Back [...]

[From the archives. Originally posted at my place January '07.]
Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly is a modern musical masterpiece. It is a quintessential concept album, never wavering from the theme of a teen-aged boy’s (and a maladroit jazz geek at that!) fantasies circa 1960. Part autobiographical, the album captures the essence of the late 50’s [...]

Shrunken Heads
Ian Hunter
May 2007
The single most important release in 2007 for me was Shrunken Heads by Ian Hunter. You can read my original post on the subject here, or better yet, just go buy it.
This man has paid his dues. He’s seen good times and bad times. Listening to this [...]

When will we learn? When will we have had enough?
XTC released arguably their quintessential record in 1982, titled English Settlement. It included the song Melt The Guns that rings in my ears every time the news breaks informing us of another senseless public shooting by a lunatic.
There are too many guns [...]

I loved the comedy of Mitch Hedberg. He was sort of like a hip version of Steven Wright. His jokes were often obtuse and esoteric. Or they were stupid, depending on your perspective. At times his delivery was unprofessional – he’d stumble on a line or laugh as if he were [...]

Sunday. Like too many others these past twelve months, I was in the Atlanta airport. Minding my own business, but a prisoner. A captive to television stations I don’t want to watch, and canned music I don’t want to hear. ( I could rant for days about being force-fed music and [...]

Led Zeppelin is announcing a reunion concert in London to benefit the Ahmet Ertegun Education Fund. Too bad that even in their prime their concerts sucked like an Oreck. Zeppelin were the only band ever to have had the pleasure of being blown off the stage by Grand Funk. The sound of [...]

Steely Dan. Just hearing the name conjures up all sorts of superlatives in my mind. Fantastic songs with interesting and unique chords and chord progressions, lush and expansive arrangements, slick yet inspired instrumentation, immaculate state-of-the art recordings , literate, obtuse and hilarious lyrics (often derisive, ironic and even sarcastic character studies [...]

Hear Music, the record label owned by Starbucks has recently announced that Joni Mitchell will release her newly recorded album Shine in September of this year following in the footsteps of Paul McCartney. This has come as a shocking disappointment to some of her fans. Not this one.
Let’s face it. We boomers are [...]

Shrunken Heads
Ian Hunter
May 2007
If you still believe that George Bush and his buddies are on the right track and you have the entire Journey catalog on your iPod, you’ll hate this record. If, however, for the last 5 years your emotional state has been on a wheel that rolls from outrage to disbelief to [...]

I’m going to say right out of the gate that I’m a fan of Fountains of Wayne. Like many others, I was vaguely aware of them for some time, mostly due to the fact that co-founder Adam Schlessinger was the author of the wonderful title track from Tom Hank’s “That Thing You Do.” My [...]

On the 40th anniversary of Sgt. Peppers…
It’s Friday. The end of a long week, with a buncha long weeks in the wings. Maybe YOU had Monday off, but I had to fly to Houston. I’ve been out of gas recently when it comes to blogging. Tom in a (I guess) Pirsig [...]

Funny thing is, I once hated Joni Mitchell. Back in 1974, when Court and Spark was released, and Help Me found its way to the play-lists, I didn’t understand the song. I was 16. Didn’t understand the sax part. Didn’t understand the lyrics, the production, nothing. The first few notes of that song would send [...]

Note: Neddie Jingo wrote an excellent post about B. Kliban back in January of this year. That was my introduction to this wonderful site. I thought I’d share this bit off fluff that I wrote over at my place back in May of ‘06.

I was in the mood for some B. Kliban [...]

I was in NY all last week. My mother had passed away expectedly after a long bout with dementia. We got the call 12:40 AM EDT Easter Sunday. Did the 18 hour drive in a big rented van on Tuesday. Attended the wake on Wednesday, funeral Thursday. The 18 hour [...]

A few years ago, I noticed that people started to talk about Nick Drake. I had never heard of him. I thought he was a new artist. It was odd, because his name began popping up here and there. I went to All Music guide and read this. From the AMG entry:
“He [...]

If you’ve had the pleasure of seeing the BBC sketch-comedy program Little Britain, you already know that it is the funniest show of that genre to come along since Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Little Britain is the brain-child of Matt Lucas and David Williams, and it took a couple of episodes for me to realize [...]

When Mark David Chapman pulled the trigger on that coldest night in December 1980, he robbed the world of a visionary who seemed to finally be at peace with his own inner demons. John Lennon’s anger had largely dissipated and was being transformed into a dignified wisdom. It was indeed a tragic turn of events, [...]

I realize Kevin Gilbert doesn’t do it for everyone, but some readers here have commented that they liked his remake of “Kashmir.” I’ve decided to post some of his other remakes for your listening pleasure, and to demonstrate that “Kashmir” was no fluke.

I think this was recorded in 1994. [Links to listen are at the end of this post.] The call had gone out for Led Zeppelin remakes for the planned tribute titled “Encomium.” At the time, Kevin Gilbert was working with Sheryl Crow and the Tuesday Night Music Club. He was respected as a genius by [...]

Humphrey Bogart is my personal, all-time favorite “Best Actor.” Before I knew who he was, I heard his name, I saw him depicted in Warner Brothers cartoons, and I heard his voice impersonated on sitcoms, variety shows and TV commercials. Humphrey Bogart was (and still is) the quintessential movie star.

For my birthday this year, The Viscountess bought me the entire Star Trek original series on DVD. We have been watching the episodes in their original broadcast order, averaging about 2 or 3 per week. There are 70-some-odd episodes, and we want the experience to last. It has been perhaps 10 years since the program [...]

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan was released in 1963. I was 6. My older brother went off to Viet Nam in 1966 and returned in one piece in 1967. He was a big fan of Dylan. I was a big fan of my big brother. He played the guitar and turned me on to [...]

Paul McCartney’s Every Night has got to be one of my favorite songs from his post-Beatle catalogue. Never mind the the silly lyrics. The beautiful melody, the sparse arrangement (original version found on McCartney,) and the sentiment are all perfect. Matthew Sweet does it some justice. This track appears on the mixed-bag [...]

[This is my first post here at New Critics. I originally posted this over at my place back in November of '05, but I thought it was as good a place as any to start.]
I was introduced to the music of The Allman Brothers Band in about 1972, after the year-apart [...]