Rolling Teenpop 2006 Thread

"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?

If "Boyfriend" is teenpop, then "Nth Degree" - the single - is.

If they're getting marketed as teenpop, that's because they're on a major label and they don't know how else to promote them.

They've been on late night shows and such. Has anyone gotten a promo copy? Could you tell what market they were leaning toward? I know the song's getting played on the radio somewhere or other, I just don't know what kind of stations.

They're a group with roots in the NY scene that inspires audience stripping, dude!

Conveying information != repeating marketing strategy

I'd be a little more impressed if they actually claimed to be influenced by Ashlee Simpson.

If anyone wants to present evidence that Morningwood is being marketed as a teenpop phenom, we can continue discussing them, otherwise we can leave them behind all happy and stuff.

This is pop music, not stem cell research. I had a question, the reasoning which led to I've gone into -- twice. The band appeared to me to be marketed as teenpop instore. Nothing more. I was curious so I asked a question this thread. Da, verstehen Sie?

It seems to have worked - the disc came in at #6 on our weekly sales chart, 2nd highest chart debut for the week (behind Bleeding Through).

I'm listening now and... Well gosh, I think I love the band so damn much I don't much care if they're contrived or not. But I'm a sucker for female-led fuzzy-guitar power-pop bands (The Sounds are another one).

I think it's odd that the Veronicas are launching in the UK with "Everything I'm Not", which I guess IS kinda halfway between "Since U Been Gone" and "My Happy Ending", but with a lot less kick than either.

(And now Launch Yahoo is playing "All About Us," which is quite gorgeous. The video has the girls walking around wan and expressionless, as if they were forced to appear in a Depeche Mode video instead.)

OK, I'm watching Morningwood again, and I don't see how this doesn't dominate MTV. They're posing as Queen, then they're posing as Santana, then they're Kraftwerk, then they're Hole. And the song is more disco-wavy than I'd indicated (but DOR disco rather than British new-romantic disco).

And now Launch is playing Mariah's "All I Want for Christmas Is You"; the song achieves something I didn't think Mariah could pull off: a Ronettes-Crystals sound while Mariah still gets to be her vocal-trapeze-artist self. (I miss that Mariah. The new Mariah seems chastened and subdued in comparison.)

And now they're playing real teenybopper pop - that is, System of a Down's "B.Y.O.B." a song I find witty and catchy with its hammy la la la-la la-la-la-la ooooooo leading into a compelling r&b-ish party break, followed by thrash spinach concerning fascist nations and sending the poor to war. "Still you feed us lies from the tablecloth." I saw this band at the Pepsi Center; I was one of the two adults accompanying a couple of 12-year-olds and a couple of 15-year-olds. I told Naomi (my ex gf, mother of two of them) that I found this song very funny, and she said, "Funny? Frank, the words are very serious." In a serious tone of voice.

Credits: Kelly Clarkson's "Addicted" written by Kelly Clarkson, Ben Moody, David Hodges; Evanescence's "Bring Me to Life" written by Amy Lee, Ben Moody, David Hodges; Moody was the guitarist in Evanescence, is the guitarist on "Addicted" and co-produced it with Hodges; "Hear Me" is written by Kelly Clarkson, Kara DioGuardi, Cliff Magness; produced by Magness who played most of the instruments; Magness produced and co-wrote the more melodramatically fraught-sounding songs on the first Avril album.

The song I hear echoed in a lot of these tracks: Stevie Nicks' "Edge of Seventeen" (not the rhythm accompaniment, but Stevie's melody and her way of singing it). And of course Lindsay Lohan covers "Edge of Seventeen" on her recent album.

Ha! So Frank, you're saying the Morningwood goyl can't sing at all 'cuz Wendy O. sure couldn't even though I liked her. It gets really obvious and desperate on her recordings after Dieter Dirks did Coup d'etat which was the Plasmatics' most metal and probaby their most likely to appeal to teens. Hey, now maybe I'd like Morningwood, although I still don't know if there's someone like Richie Stotts in the band. No one wore a nurse's uniform on the cover.

I bet you could play "Concrete Shoes" for tweeners and a some of them would like it. That song never aged.

At one point she had points for being beaten by cops -- maybe in Scranton or Detroit -- who took exception to her being onstage with her bosoms covered only by whipped cream.