Rolling Country 2006 Thread

Well, actually...Freaky Friday must be over now because the Kirchen album's sounding a lot duller to me today than it was a couple days ago. Just kinda stodgy and slow and colorless, and the title track doesn't really kick all that hard after all, and why the hell would anybody want to slow down "Devil With a Blue Dress On," come to think of it? So right now, I'm on the fence, but maybe it'll kick back in, or maybe it won't. What basically keeps happening is, well, it's in the five-disc changer now with the Game (clunky rap voice, ocassionally tasty and tasteful retro-soul backup, sounds very Dr. Dre a lot of it no matter what Dre's involvement was or wasn't, but I never gave much a shit about Dre give or take a couple songs so I doubt I'll have much more patience with this thing), Yabby You (who sounds warm and dubby and greater than I would have guessed), Borat (just saw the movie, which was slightly disappointing though still frequently hilarious but maybe the disappointment was just that it had been built up so much by so many people, but at any rate i also just realized today that the soundtrack is a compilation, and track #7 is beautiful, and i think it's by o.m.f.o. but it's hard to tell because there are not the same number of titles on the cover as tracks on the cd, since some of the tracks are just snippets of dialouge and stuff, so you can't just count down to the seventh title, which is "grooming pubis", and also "o kazakhastan" which ends the movie sounds more like laibach than most of the national anthems on laibach's own new album) and joe gruschecky (ex of the iron city houserockers, and his new album features bruce springteen on a few tracks and while i have no doubt that this album must blow out of the water that springsteen seeger covers album which must be the most boring idea for an album of the year even though i didn't listen to the thing since life is too fucking short, but gruschecky is still not writing them like he was in 1980 or 1981 and his band barely rocks at all, dude really needs to befriend kenny aranoff or somebody, though sometimes there's some passable drama in joe's oily sobersided sincerity and the guitar buildups in a way that a couple of the tracks like "safe at home" for instance might sound decent in a "rescue me" episode or perhaps a scene from "the wire" with mcnulty fucking up again), and oftimes when a kirchen song comes on i think it's gruschecky by mistake, which is frankly not a good sign.

and the more I hear of the new Intocable album Cruce de Caminos a.k.a. Crossroads the more I fall in love with it. Johnny Lee Rosas might have the best voice in America, because it's not quite perfect but DAMN he delivers the goods. hilariously, when they do a "pop" version of huge hit single "Por Ella," it lays on the country signifiers so thick that I think maybe they actually consider modern country to be the real sound of "pop" in the U.S. but sadly for y'all, it's all in Spanish, so you won't really care about it. (P.S. I am an asshole tonight.)

The Game and Gruschecky now replaced in the changer with Fairyland (French-I-think metal band on Napalm) and new Ying Yang Twins.

"One More Day" on the Kirchen album does have a nice Dock Boggs era white country blues feel to it, I guess. And I do like the Arthur Alexander cover. So I haven't written the thing off quite yet.

I've been considering springing for the Intocable CD, actually. I probably won't mind the Spanish of it if the tunes are catchy enough.

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work to get through...(What do they think they are, a hip-hop group or something?) (I hate great values!)

Kirchen's "Hammer of The Honky Tonk Gods" title cut kicks (or at least "signifies kicking") in a Junior Brown kind of way, I guess. There's something sorta deluded about it -- half of Nashville rocks harder; hell, Kellie Pickler might rock harder -- but it's not bad.

kirchen's record has the same faults as his show i saw this fall. he's real good for about two songs. his supposedly awesome guided tour of pop where he interpolates all the licks he knows is actually pretty great, but seemed empty even with a couple beers in me. you kind of wish he'd go johnny guitar watson and write more songs about more interesting and perhaps raffish reality. the songs blur in my mind. the curse of reverence and "americana" and all that, but he's been at it for a while just like nick lowe, who used to write about more interesting and raffish reality but now is a very good genre artist. we all love arthur alexander, man. (i love nick lowe, but the last record of his i found remotely interesting was "party of one," which is what, 1990?)

(Hey Frank brought the album up! I guess I should put all this on the world music thread too. I'm not sure what it has to do with country, though yeah, there's a twang in the music now and then, and didn't one of you guys vote for Gogol Bordello in a Nashville Scene poll once? This CD belongs on a shelf near them, Kultur Shock, Balkan Beatbox, etc, unless like me you file in alphabetical order.)

And my new maybe-favorite on Kirchen's CD is "Skid Row in My Mind."

ha ha, for me it was labour of lust in 1979! (though i guess i gave nick the knife or whatever a fairly mixed review for my college paper in missouri when it came out, a few years later.)

ghostfinger, a nashville (actually murfreesboro, tn.) band, does really cool country-rock pastiches. the singer sounds like jagger or arthur lee or some white guy trying to be soulful, and it's mostly funny. they get doleful and sometimes the rockers don't quite work, but "moon" alternates sections of fake-rock and country-rock quite effectively. can't make out what it is they're exactly trying to express, but get the feeling they're a bit more than the usual history lesson. it's been a good year for nashville pop bands--lone official, the features, ghostfinger and i guess lambchop, too, have all released good records. certainly, lone official's "tuckassee take" made my no depression top 20 new releases.

and i have to say that i've listened to neko case's record (which also made my ND list) as much as i have anything this year; the songs are better than i initially thought, and she sustains a *mood* throughout that sorta skirts desolation--the line about driving past the beautiful flooded fields resonates as they say with my experience. and it's one of the great records in 6/8, a time signature she manipulates savvily and which suggests, i guess, the timelessness (or the immersion in memory) she's going after.

So this Dixie Chick flick, Shut Up and Sing, is playing in town. Should I go? That whole brouhaha seems like decades ago.

did the ND Ballots go out already?

Do we know yet if the Scene poll is dead? Is Himes gonna do it elsewhere? I mean, he's got the rolls...

And I know this has been chattered about elsewhere, but I never got a clear answer: what's to become of Pazz n Jop?

New George Strait album Twang. The First single "Living For The Night" is so classic. Any thoughts?