musical monday

Yeah, I took a few (ten) days off from blogging. As Dick Cheney would say, "So?"

I like music. I have a lot of it. I wish I had more time to listen to it. In my long absence from posting I've acquired several albums. Some are new, some are just new to me. So here, in no particular or coherent order, are some thoughts about the music I'm listening to:

Zooey Deschanel and M. Ward got together and formed themselves a little band, called She and Him. I've always had a soft spot for her (she was brilliantly cast in the sadly disappointing film adaptation of A Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy) and while her singing voice isn't going to blow anybody away, its produced well enough to create an engaging alt-country-50's sound that I'm really enjoying. It helps that they cover one of my favorite early Beatles tunes, "I Should Have Known Better."

If you're into the whole Lily Allen/Amy Winehouse superfad of British female rock/soul vocalists, then you'll no doubt soon be hearing (if you haven't already) music by Duffy (whose single "Mercy" could, sadly, reach "Rehab" levels of overexposure) and Adele, who's a little more mellow than some of her contemporaries. She doesn't impress me all that much, except that during a live set for KCRW last week she ended with an awesome cover of Sam Cooke's "I'm Movin On". You can check out her set here (skip to the end). For me, its up there with KT Tunstall's hoarse but rockin' cover of the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back".

I checked out a couple of artists whose songs have been used in commercials and then get stuck in my head lots. First is Earlimart, whose "Happy Alone" has been featured in the ad campaign for the new season of The Riches on FX. The song has a really strong Aimee Mann vibe, and I'm down with that. The album (Mentor Tormentor) is kind of all over the map sound wise, with "Happy Alone" being a bit of an outlier. I've only been through the album once. The jury is still out.

Next is the ubiquitous "New Soul" from those MacBook Air commercials. It comes from the French/Israeli singer Yael Naim's self titled debut album, which has so far held my interest. A fair number of the songs are in Hebrew, which is not something you hear very much. There's a cover of Britney Spears' "Toxic", which seems to be a popular thing these days. Its made a good first impression as a solid entry to the acoustic female pop genre, but nothing out of this world.

I'm also working my way through albums by James Combs and Cassettes Won't Listen, which were both KCRW recommendations. Haven't heard either in their entirety, but both seem like they might stick around in my library for a while at least.