Song of The Week

Static X.  Push It.  Outside of that, I got nothin' this week.

Song of The Week

Once there was a phenomena known as the Spice Girls.  They were an all-girl group that conquered the world with a big selling album, a stupid movie and...they pretty much went away.  One band member married a famous soccer (Football to you non-Americans.  Silly non-Americans; calling a game where you kick a ball around with your foot "football".  Don't you know football is that game where the ball is carried by your hands?) player and the rest had varying degrees of solo success.

What some of you might not know...or at least you here in the states, was there was another all-girl band that came out at about the same time called All Saints.  They didn't have quite the impact in the USA the Spice Girls did and I don't know why.  Maybe it was because they weren't as gimmicky as the Spice Girls and hence did not have the same sort of hook.  Maybe the market here in the states couldn't sustain two girl bands.  I don't know.  I do know is I liked the All Saints singles better than the Spice Girls.  One of them was Black Coffee:

Song of the week

Well, not sure what to talk about next, honestly.  I am sort of wrapped up in my trying to get my first episode of Retrophilia finished.  I do have one more Study In Evil in me but that is going to be a ways off

In the mean time I still love doing my songs of the week.  And this week I thought I would choose a song from one of my favorite albums of all time: Styx, Pieces of Eight.  I give you....Lord of The Rings!

Song of the week

Way, way back in the day I used to game with a guy named Dave.  Different Dave.  This was the old Dungeons & Dragons days when Dave K was DM.  The other Dave, Dave M, was a massive Heart fan.  Heart was to him what Kate Bush is to me.  So I learned a great deal from him during that period and some of his heart fandom rubbed off on me.  At one time I think I owned every Heart album on cassette tape.

Yeah, this goes back that far.

Passionworks was Heart's seventh studio album, it was the first with new band members and came right out after Private Audition.  Private Audition, by the way, is a horrible album.  It's so bad I can't name a single song from it.  Passionworks, on the other hand, has some sweet, sweet tunes, among them this one, Sleep Alone.



To me, this is the beginning of what I feel is Heart's best era, the trio of their albums I like best; Passionworks, their title album, and Bad Animals.  After that they got too...poppy?  Is poppy a term?  Whatever.  I just thought crap like All I Want To Do Is Make Love To You was too syrupy.  Granted, The Night is a good tune but overall for me the album after Bad Animals, Brigade, is largely forgettable.

Song of the week, other stuff

Man, writing part two of my Sex, Religion and Politics trilogy of articles has proven to be a monumental pain in the ass.  If writing about politics without alienating anyone is this tough I hate to think what discussing religion is going to be like.


I will admit when it comes to picking up on stuff I am usually the last one to know.  Case in point: Archer.

Archer is an animated series on FX about a spy organization called ISIS and it's most notable agent, Sterling Archer.  Who is a womanizing alcoholic and who just happens to be the son of ISIS' owner.  While some of the humor is a little gross I find the stories to be pretty damn funny. And I am impressed by the way the writers are able to insure the characters skirt the line between insufferable and likeable.  I checked season two out of the library and have been watching season 4 on FX.

Another series my friend Dave turned me on to is Danger 5.

Danger 5 is about an elite group of agents fighting the Nazis during WWII...At least I think it is during WWII.  There is this sixties vibe coming off the series, from the soundtrack to the way things are shot.  So...are the producers suggesting in this world WWII has lasted until the sixties?  Are they just shooting the series to make it feel like a sixties television series?  Am I over analyzing it?

I suggest you check it out.  You can watch Danger 5 on Hulu for free.

So...Song of the week.  I am in a nostalgic mood this week and I was thinking about songs I just don't hear on the radio any more, not even on classic rock stations.  There was a band called Rainbow, or Ritchie Blackmoor's Rainbow.  Blackmoor had been a guitarist with Deep Purple and Rainbow was very much his project.  He hired and fired maybe a dozen people or more and the band had four front men: Ronnie James Dio, Graham Bonnet, Joe Lynn Turner, and Doogie White.  While the band saw their greatest success with Turner as the front man, my favorite Rainbow song is Bonnet's Since You Been Gone:

Song of The Week

I am a huge fan of The Beatles, and the only reason I have yet to put them up on Song of The Week is my difficulty in picking out which Beatle song.  After giving it some thought the answer became obvious.  Working third shift at hours in which most sane people are sleeping, there is one song that obviously fits me.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you A Hard Day's Night:

Song of the week

There is this guy, Bruno Mars.  And a while back he released this single called The Lazy Song.

I really, really hate that tune.  And I can't say as I'm crazy about the music video either.  And yes, I saw the alternate video starring Leonard Nimoy and even that was not enough to get me to sit through that song.

So I am channel chasing and came across Mtv2...or 3...whichever one still shows music videos.  And there was this pretty good video/song playing and imagine my surprise when I discovered it was Bruno Mars!  So the guy has a notch in both columns with me now.

Song of the week

Every Sunday night I listen to a radio program called The Sideshow.  Hosted by Nikki Sixx of Motley Crue fame and Kerri Kasem, daughter of Casey Kasem.  It is a heavy metal show and while I am not into all the tunes on their top twenty I often do come across some music I like. Take Volbeat, for example.  Danish rockers, Volbeat has been around since 2001, battling in the music trenches to finally get some recognition over on this side of the pond.

Song of the week

Back in the nineties there was this song, Tubthumping, from a band named Chumbawumba.

Wow.  I really hated that song.

That being said, I was watching Todd In The Shadows last week (Todd has a great show at That Guy With The Glasses: One Hit Wonderland) and he was discussing Chumbawumba.  During the review he played a clip of Chumbawumba's other hit single, Amnesia.

And I really wish this is the one that got airplay here in the States.

Song of the week

So, let's talk covers.

For those of you who don't know, Peter Gunn was a television series about a private detective.  It is famous more for it's awesome theme song than for the show itself.  It was covered by the Blues Brothers for their movie back in 1980 and then in '85 it was covered by The Art of Noise featuring Duane Eddie on guitar.

And if it was not for Duane Eddie's guitar work I think this would have been a disaster.



Admittedly this version is not for everyone, but I like it...

But not as much as the Blues Brother's cover.

Song of the week

Before last Thursday I did not know this guy existed.  I was channel chasing that morning, came across VH1 (VH1 shows music videos early in the morning: Jump Start) and this was playing: Gary Clark Jr., Ain't Messin' Round.

And I seriously dig everything about this song.

Song of the week

Well, I finally have an article in the works.  I can't say I am exactly happy regarding the circumstances of the article's inspiration but if life gives you potatoes you make vodka, right?  I should have it up by Saturday, maybe sooner.

In the mean time, one of my favorite U2 songs.  A pity it is wedded to a mediocre movie. :/

Song of The Week

Billy Squier's Don't Say No is one of the best albums ever recorded.  It has songs like The Stroke, My Kinda Love, Lonely Is The Night, In The Dark and Two Daze Gone.  It is one of the best rock and roll albums ever pressed to vinyl.

Now, that being said, my favorite Billy Squier single is not on Don't Say No.  That song is Everybody Wants you, from his follow up album, Emotions In Motion.

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Tim Burton gets lots of flak these days, mostly because of his Alice In Wonderland and Dark Shadows movies.  And there are those who aren't fans of his Charlie and The Chocolate Factory film, either.  I think it is because he has fallen into a rut...or the ruts had always been there and they became glaringly obvious when he fell flat on his face three times in a row.

But I still think Burton has it in him and from what the guys at Friday Night Fright Flicks have to say about Frankenweenie this is true.  Burton just needs to stop hiring Johnny Depp and he needs to stop writing stories about misunderstood weirdos.  Okay, yeah, the kid in Frankenweenie seems to be much of the same type but at least it was a role Depp couldn't play.

Anyway, this week's song is from Burton's second foray into animation (after his Frankenweenie short, that is), The Nightmare Before Christmas.

Song of The Week

What Halloween themed song of the week...thing...would be complete without Marylin Manson?

Song of The Week

You can't talk about shock rock or horror rock without discussing the man who to my mind practically invented the genre: Alice Cooper.  My aunt owned Welcome To My Nightmare on vinyl and I had no idea what the hell I was listening to.  It was not my Dad's Beatles, that was for sure!

I love the fact that Alice got Vincent Price to do the introduction to this song, The Black Widow:

Song of the week

As we approach the Halloween season I thought it might be fun to find a few horror based songs for SOTW to lead up to it.  Our first entry is from Rob  Zombie, Dragula:

Song of the week, other stuff

To my pleasant surprise, I was actually able to knock out a second Star Trek, The Animated Series review.  The first one took me some eighteen months to write, this time just five weeks.  I don't know if I will be writing reviews of other televisions series.  One of the reasons I chose TAS is not many people talk about it.  Somewhere down the line I am thinking of doing something along the lines of Manly Movies, talking about old action films like The Dirty Dozen, Ice Station Zebra, The Magnificent Seven, or...

If I continued to do internet reviews I would rather target flicks other internet reviewers are not talking about.  Really, there are so many interpretations of Michael Bay's Transformers at this point that no one needs to hear another one from me (Although I do confess The Cinema Slob's take on it made me laugh.).  I love the Bourne movies but so much time is spent on the protagonist agonizing over who he is and all the people he killed.  They are good movies, but I also relish the escapism of good old fashioned action films.

Now, on to the song of the week!  I am not going to pretend this song is ground breaking, earth shaking, trend setting, or even great, for that matter.  However, the song has been stuck in my head and unlike, say, Call Me Maybe (Which radio stations here in the Metro Detroit Area simply love), I don't mind it being there.

I give you the Swedish duo Icona Pop and their song I Love It:



Hmmm.  Nikki and The Dove, Nero, and now Icona Pop.  My musical tastes seem to be sliding more towards electronic pop these days...

Song Of The Week

When it comes to Van Halen fans you have three camps; those who prefer the David Lee Roth era, those who prefer the Sammy Hagar era, and those who find merits in both.  I fall into the first category and when I heard that Roth had left the band I had been a little depressed.  Their cover of Pretty Woman was one of the first videos I had seen on Mtv, their concert videos for Unchained and So This Is Love received lots of airplay.  1984 was a massive album for me; I played that cassette to death.

But then I heard Sammy Hagar had joined the band and I did not feel so bad.  I actually preferred Sammy's voice over David's and I figured this was the best of both worlds.  I tuned in when their first single together, Why Can't This Be Love, was played on the radio and I thought it was fantastic (and it is still one of my favorite Van Halen songs). 5150 is a great album, one of Van Halen's best.  It was not until OU812 came out that the honeymoon was over and Van Hagar soured for me.

So for SOTW I choose what I think was "Van Hagar's" best effort, Why Can't This Be Love:

Song Of The Week

Rush.  Man which album to choose?  Which song?  I was a fan starting with Moving Pictures (which is not to say I did not like any of their stuff before then: Closer To The Heart from A Farewell To Kings is a great tune.) up thru Presto and then...Well, I just stopped digging what they were laying down.

I think it is a crime that radio stations (at least the ones where I live) do not play a wider variety of Rush songs. They play nothing later than Signals, which came out in '82.  Radio stations suck when it comes to airplay; they consider some music to be "classic", in which case classic rock radio stations will give the songs airplay.  And other radio stations will only play current music released in the past couple years.  Everything else falls into limbo.

Anyway, the song today is Show Don't Tell: