Utada Hikaru is really being productive. She’s set to release a new single in February, so says Bounce.com. I wish I knew that before I placed my order for Shiina Ringo’s Heisei Fuuzoku — I could have killed two birds with one pre-order. No details have been published about the single.
I wonder when she’ll start working on another English-language album. I was definitely critical of her US debut, but it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t welcome another English album from her. If anything, it would be terrific if she could parlay the maturity of Ultra Blue into it.
Cocco is set to publish a new book titled 8.15 OKINAWA Cocco on Dec. 21, so says Bounce.com. Unlike Cocco’s first forays into publishing, this picture book is a photo album of her Aug. 15, 2006 concert in Okinawa. The performance was the fourth installment of her Okinawa GOMI ZERO Taisaku Ikusa campaign, which aims to raise awareness of the litter problem plaguing the island’s beaches.
Photographer nanaco took photos the performance, a preview of which can be found on her website. Cocco provides poetry to accompany the images.
Cocco and nanaco collaborated previously on a CD/book combination titled The Bird. Cocco wrote lyrics for nanaco, who worked with Dr.StrangeLove’s Takamune Negishi and Osada Susumu on the musical portion for the book.
Aside from my brother, my family isn’t much to collect music. They consume it, certainly, but they don’t possess my level of … compulsion.
My sister would sometimes buy CDs, but when the allure of a particular album wore off, it would eventually find its way onto my shelf. One such inheritance was Always by Pebbles.
This album was a big R&B hit back in the early ’90s, right around the time ’80s college rock began its transformation into alternative music. I viewed Always with a fair degree of condescension back then, and I kept hold of the album as an inspiration of what not to do with songwriting. I’m so glad I’m over that phase of my life.
I’ve collected and lost a lot of music in the last 20 or so years, and the things I let go didn’t have much of a hold on me anyway. So I’m not sure why I spent time looking for some of that stuff this morning while I did some Christmas shopping.
I’ve been listening to some best-of collections of R.E.M., Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Replacements. In the spectacularly-off chance I might find some Replacements on eMusic, I did a search for the band. Nada, of course. But somehow, I started clicking on some random links from that search and ended up on a page for All About Eve. Wow. That’s a name I hadn’t heard in a long time.
I listened to the excerpts of Return to Eden, and it got me thinking of other bands whose music I bought around that same time.
A track from Thorn’s forthcoming album can be heard on her MySpace page. Amazon UK lists the release of the album for March 5, 2007. I don’t see a US date anywhere.
Wainwright’s new album, Release the Stars, is expected in May 2007, and the executive producer on board is Neil Tennant of Pet Shop Boys. How gay.
[UPDATE, 12/20/2006, 23:08] Pause & Play lists Thorn’s album for a US release on March 20, 2007.
There’s nothing incredibly impressive to hear the first time you play Dark Light Daybreak by Now It’s Overhead.
There are no flashes of virtuosity, no stretches of intensity, no trickery behind the sound board, no gimmickry in the songwriting. It’s a guy in a studio with a bunch of guitars, a rhythm section and at times a drum machine.
Now It’s Overhead started off as a studio project for sound engineer Andrew LeMaster, but it’s evolved into a full-fledged band. Dark Light Daybreak sounds like the result of such a development.
The only thing that could possibly reel a listener in is the sense there’s more to music than what the surface indicates. It’s catchy if only because it’s not trying to be.
Used to be, the moment I saw something interesting on Bounce.com, I’d write about it post-haste. My fascination with Japanese indie rock has cooled off considerably in the two past years, so there’s no onus on me to get that first scoop.
Still, it would be good exercise for my waning Japanese skills to pull out a translation now and then. So here are a few Bounce.com headlines that might interest long-time readers.
404 Pi´ikoi St. was a popular address back in ’80s. Located across the sprawling Ala Moana Shopping Center near Waikiki, 404 Pi´ikoi was the antithesis of its behemoth neighbor. The parking lot was marked with potholes, and the building itself had seen better days. It couldn’t really rise to the level of "strip mall".
For a time, 404 Pi´ikoi housed a number of independent music stores — Jelly’s, Records Hawaiʻi and Froggie’s. Before Jelly’s moved in, a local discount retailer named Job Lot aired annoying commercials that turned the address into something of a jingle.
404 Pi´ioki is no more. The property was bought up by developers to turn into the parking garage of a building built in the early ’90s — the Nauru Tower.
I went on a Temporary Residence buying spree because of Friday Night Lights. It’s one of the best shows on television right now, and the soundtrack employs a lot of music from Explosions in the Sky.
You think a show about a Texas high school football team would use nothing but country music, but the moodiness of Explosions’ music makes it a really nice fit. Once I got a hankering for Explosions in the Sky, I couldn’t stop at just one.