Year In America July 3 and 10, 2008

[koganbot]

Was on vacation, so the Top 40 considerately added only four new tracks in two weeks.

The Jonas Brothers "Burnin' Up": OK song, nice placement of falsetto notes, but Joe and Nick sound even more like goats than they had previously, and Big Rob's rap is dumb and clumsy. Total botch. DEADNESS NOT TICKNESS.

Sugarland "All I Want To Do": First Sugarland song ever to make me perk up. Maybe it works 'cause everything in the arrangement focuses on Jennifer's hard sheen, which stops the "ooo ooo ooos" from being impossibly cute. Should've been even starker, harder, more glistening, but is ALL I WANT TO TICK ('cept tickin' DJ Khaled too).

NKOTB "Summertime": It's summer, and the original post-New Edition all white, all Boston boyband are back as men. Smooth niceness atop difficult offbeats, but strangely unemphatic. TICKLESS TIME.

DJ Khaled f. Akon, Rick Ross, Young Jeezy, Lil' Boosie, Trick Daddy, Ace Hood & Plies "Out Here Grindin'": In here typin', actually, w/ all those names. Akon dampens sounds more often than he lifts them, these days, but today's a good one, real prettiness while a thousand rappers pose, twirl, strut, or bellow, and Weezy sashays in uncredited, boasting and twisting, a regular irregular. OUT HERE TICKIN'.

Comments

Miley

[mcatzilut.livejournal.com]

I can't wait till you hear "Fly on a Wall." I think it's gonna blow you away. (Btw, the PR woman I worked with at Disney claimed that the Jonas album is gonna be bigger than the Miley album, but I heard both and was much MUCH more impressed with Miley. The Jonas album is a lot like Burnin' Up. Which is to say there's a sortof deadness all over. Even when they sound excited, they really sound muted. The only authentic moment happens on the final track about the band member with diabetes, and even that is only momentarily moving and mostly just hammy.)

Re: Miley

[koganbot]

Oh yeah, I've heard one of the live versions of "Fly On The Wall" that's all over YouTube (though I wonder how "live" it is). In any event, it sounds like some old rock-oriented new wave track whose title I've forgotten and I quite like it, really rocks, and I love the raw quality of her throat; she does a good job of being rough without being grating. (Whereas the Jonas Brothers manage to be grating without being rough.) Much better than "7 Things."

Jonases could do well because there are no other boy teenpop superstars (though Jesse McCartney may be building steam again). But they're so mediocre in comparison to old New Kids or *NSync or BSBs that I'd think girl teenyboppers would veer emo rather than wasting their libido on Joe, Nick, and Kevin. Maybe I'm just hoping that their purity rings will hinder sales.

Re: Miley

[(Anonymous)]

There are some new boybands making the rounds. There was a summer concert series called Bandomoneum that featured NLT, V-Club, and the new version of Menudo. NLT's two lead singers are actually pretty good and they have some really catchy songs including "She said I said" which was produced by Timbaland and it got some airplay on Kiss FM in LA.
link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fjTB7Zj5EmU
Menudo also has a new catchy song out called "Lost" but their vocalists aren't nearly as good as the ones from NLT. I hope one of them breaks through so the Jonas mania will calm down.