Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

I had to review both a Duff film (sheer horror, and Christian too) and Herbie. They sent writers to a test screenings. Median age: 10.

My GF's niece is 14. She likes new goth stuff. And that's all I know of (literal) kids today and their listening habits.

I like the *idea* of Evanescence, enjoyed seeing them at Webster Hall in '04 or so, but I will probably never get over them sounding to me like a thinner, clunkier, less beautiful, and therefore compromised version of my fave Dutch new age goth-metallers The Gathering. (For thin, clunky, less beautiful, and therefore compromised versions of The Gathering, I prefer Lacuna Coil. Or Lana Lane. Or Lullacry. The last couple of whom kind of suck, so I am obviously a sucker for the sound somewhat. Wish I liked the Top 40 version more.)

I don't think there are any Blink-182 songs I like more than "1985" or "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" except maybe "Dammit" and "Always," but if so its by a small degree.

Also Bonnie Pink, who i got from Edward's blog I think and I seem to remember is Japanese. Perhaps others can provide more info but I'm liking her at the moment.

I want to like our new power-pop overlords in the UK, but the majority of them are in hock to complete shit (Son of Dork and Simple Plan, Rooster and Aerosmith, Freefaller and whatever the fuck it is they're listening to in order to sound that bad). I was hoping that The Faders would have songs as good as "No Sleep Tonight" in their repoirtoire, but it looks like we're never going to hear them now considering how little that and "Jump" sold. Love Bites aren't gonna happen either.

vs.

Country less snappy than teenpop?

Writer: Linda Perry, Stuck in the Throat/Famous Music Corp. (ASCAP)
Produced and Engineered by: Linda Perry at Royaltone, North Hollywood, CA
Assisted by: Chris Wonzer and Andrew Chavez
Pro Tools Engineer: David Guerrero
All Instruments and Programming: Linda Perry
French Spoken Female Voice: Alephonsine de Chambure
Mixed by: Bernd Burgdorff for Empire7
Assisted by: Shawn Parker

Agreed "Jump" was nowhere near "No Sleep Tonight" in quality terms.

What about the rest of the album? (Proving tough to find on s1sk this morning.)

Anyway, xhuxk, get 'em to send me a copy! What's this sound like?!

Anyway, are we actually saying they're teenpop? They seem more like a 90s nostalgia act to me. (Although a nice one.)

"Morningwood are an energetic and impressive bunch that have certainly speant lots of time with their Buffalo Daughter, Le Tigre and Breeders records, but not so much as to let in infringe on their own innovative sound and style."
Village Voice

But the Morningwood album also includes more than a few songs that are unnecessarily, even perversely, awful. The next record executive to complain about slumping CD sales should be forced to spend the day playing "Babysitter" on repeat, listening to Ms. Claret moan, "Your mama, mama, mama shouldn't let me baby-sit." At the Bowery Ballroom, she worked overtime to entertain: she brandished a baton; she climbed up to the balcony; during "Take Off Your Clothes," she invited a suspiciously well-prepared woman from the audience to strip onstage. When Ms. Claret sang she often rolled her eyes, and she wasn't the only one.

-- The New York Times, yestiddy

This energetic combination of glam, garage, and new wave has been cooked up by something approximating an all-star lineup of musicians. Morningwood bassist Pedro Yanowitz used to rock it with (Jake) Dylan in the Wallflowers, and guitarist Richard Steel was in Spacehog. The ringmistress of this motley crew is singer/frontwoman Chantal Claret, who has a sexy voice that can go from raspy and husky to over-the-top cooing, and an alluring look, if the album's cover is to be believed. All the assembled players seem to be giving it their all on every track here, and their unbridled enthusiasm is contagious.

What's more impressive, however, is the way Morningwood trips from style to style over the course of the eleven assembled tracks. "Nu Rock" kicks things off with a totally thrashing garage rock sound that wouldn't have sounded out of place coming out of Sweden a couple of years ago. Two tracks later, "To the Nth Degree" borders on disco, or at least dance-pop, ratcheting up the glam factor...um, to the nth degree, I guess. "Jetsetter," meanwhile, is reminiscent of Weezer's "Hash Pipe"-era stuff, and "Everybody Rules" has a jazzy swing that makes me, honestly, think of Gary Glitter.

-- ugo.com

New York Magazine called them "one of the hottest bands changing the New York soundscape," while the Village Voice and Entertainment Weekly offer similar praise.

-- Some college wrapper, seeing New York Mag praise something vaguely rock and roll would generally be a warning to steer clear, much like being recommended through, say, NPR. Maybe worse.

Morningwood, "Morningwood" (Capitol) You can't stop the unflinching rock 'n' roll of Morningwood. You can't even hope to contain it. It's bursting with sexual energy and so much testosterone that you have to hand it to singer Chantal Claret, who can rock out under the moniker Morningwood with the unbridled enthusiasm of Andrew W.K. and unhinged eroticism of Peaches

-- Denver Post

It's amusing that the reviews, including stuff I didn't excerpt from Lex-Nex are all over the place. Business-wise that tells me the label is spending a lot of money on promotion and artificial priming that's not even close to being recoupable.

In any case, that the NY Times basically hates Morningwood is like Rolling Stone "red book" rating. Quite possibly I'd like it.
Impossible to tell really from most of the press which is standard garishly-painted boilerplace.

xpost

And that album cover definitely screamed "teenpop."

He Phoned It In Yeah, Gary G. was the most jazzy of cats when it came to laying down the pitter-patterin' beat. But he's really really really the apotheosis of teenpop (with two meaning of "pop") now.

If Pylon tried to be Scandal.

This does not sound good. That would ruin Scandal. "Goodbye to You" to a G04 beat. Ouch, I'd hurt myself.

Two facts I like: The performers in the group all look the same, and they co-wrote t.A.T.u.'s "All About Us" (maybe the sixth best song on Dangerous and Moving, which is not a problem with the song but rather due to the excellence of the t.A.T.u. album, which Stephen Thomas Erlewine at allmusic described in this way: "As Dangerous and Moving wears on — hell, by the second track — the icy digital sheen of the production starts to grate nearly as bad as the flat, bored vocals of the girls." (I like Erlewine a lot, actually, since his descriptions of why he hates something often give me insight into why I like it; not that I always disagree with his judgments.)

None of the other songs excerpted in the Veronicas' electronic press kit sounded nearly as good (on brief listen) as "4Ever," though there was one that was pleasingly similar to Kelly Clarkson's "Behind These Hazel Eyes."

I did enjoy the Verry sisses' electronic-press-kit clowning, especially Lisa-unless-it's-Jess saying that what she likes about a guy is when he's in bed.

It was in a promo blurb for the Voice's Siren Music Festival 2005, so it's from promo copy, not from a piece of criticism. (This isn't to say that promo copy can't ever be right, or good analysis, for that matter.)

Haven't gone back and read all the Morningwood posts, but I'm confused -- are they being marketed as a teen pop act now, and if so, why? Or are they just on this thread tangentially? They've been bumming around NYC for a couple years, basically Yeah Yeah Yeahs bandwagon jumpers near as I could tell (which is to say, less intereresting than either Scandal *or* Pylon); the one show I saw, while I was DJ-ing between sets at Southpaw in Brooklyn a couple years ago, was completely awful, and very much as Anthony described it, and I said so in a gig-preview blurb I wrote for the Voice's listings section next time they came around: Unrocking garage rock fronted by an embarrassing loud woman who kept trying to hammer into our heads that they were all about SEX and they must be making us REALLY HOT even though, at least to my eyes and ears, there was nothing remotely sexy about either she or their music. They had a vinyl EP out locally at the time with a big pink tit drawn on the cover, furthuring rubbing in their dumb essence before existence we're-sexy-because-we-say-so baloney. Still, they weren't the worst band in town, I guess. Some people seemed to like them okay. I'd say most of the listings blurbs they got in the Voice were neither love em or hate em. Never saw the one quoted above, but yeah, it sounds like an advertisey Siren Festival supplement preview done by the promotions department, not something from the listings section. If they are indeed starting to take off nationally in some even meager way, I gotta say I'm kinda surprised. Jeanne Fury's review of their album (which I haven''t heard) should run in the Voice in the next few weeks....but anyway, back to my original question: What's teenpop about them?