A Music Post With That Video Everyone Already Knows About

Before I get to that video you already know about, let me start this music post with an artist you may not know about: Matt Alber. The Advocate chose Alber's Hide Nothing album as one of its "music picks" in the Nov. 18 issue. I was intrigued because the blurb called Alber a "dreamy troubadour" who's "reminiscent of Rufus Wainwright—both in the timbre of his vocals and in his gay POV—but with a less prickly disposition." I don't know why they had to pick on my boy Rufus's temperament, but I checked out some of Alber's songs on iTunes Saturday, and I liked what I heard enough to buy the whole album.

My favorite song on Hide Nothing is the exquisite are-we-going-to-break-up-or-not? song "End of the World." You must buy it now from iTunes. You must! The album also includes an "acoustic" version of "EOTW" in which Alber is backed by a trumpet.

I'm also really enjoying the album's opener, "Monarch." Here's a link to the video on YouTube.

 

The comparison with Rufus seems most apt during the beautiful song "Walk With Me." "Walk with me a little closer. Hold my hand a little tighter. Look at me like you love me, baby, and I'll love you back. Yes, I'll love you back." Those aren't particularly complex lyrics, but when Alber's singing them—in a voice similar to, but better than, Rufus's—they sound like the deepest expression of love you could imagine. Alber's pipes are that good.

On a totally superficial level—which is the level at which I often reside—here's a link to Alber's MySpace page, which has a delicious photo of him at the top.

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I first saw the incredibly fun video for Beyoncé's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" on two of my favorite bloggers' sites: Stephen Rader's Are You There, Blog? It's Me, Stephen and Jimbo's jimbo.info. (I can't recall which was the absolute first.) It's fantastic. But you already know that. Hell, the video has already been parodied on Saturday Night Live, which means it's all over for sure.

On Saturday, I bought Beyoncé's new album, I Am ... Sasha Fierce, on iTunes. It came with the "Single Ladies" video, which I'd already bought, as well as the terrific video for "If I Were a Boy." The acting and production values for "IIWAB" are top-notch. I haven't had a chance to listen to very much of the album yet, so I'll review it at a later date.

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Nobody does angry lyrics crossed with jangly-guitar rock better than Matthew Sweet. I think Sweet reached his zenith in that bittersweet genre with "What Do You Know?" on 1993's Altered Beast, one of my favorite albums of all time. "Do you want to tell me something? Open up my world for me, baby. With another stupid lie that gets you by. One of those stupid lies that gets you by. ... So go on shoot your mouth off. Like it might kill the silence. Say you would rather die than see me cry. You would rather die than see me cry. But what do you know that I would want to?"

Not far behind are "The Ugly Truth," "Someone to Pull the Trigger," and "Do It Again" from Altered Beast and "Sick of Myself," "Not When I Need It," and "Walk Out" from 1995's 100% Fun, which I recently bought on iTunes.

I also bought some tracks from Sweet's latest album, Sunshine Lies, based on recommendations in customer reviews. "Feel Fear," "Dark Blue," "Time Machine," and "Burn Through Love" are all winners.

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Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village in the 60's is a CD of covers of folk classics recorded by modern folk and rock artists that I recently imported into my iPod. By far, my favorite song on the disc, which came out in 1999, is Loudon Wainwright III and Iris DeMent's rendition of Richard and Mimi Fariña's "Pack Up Your Sorrows"; it compels you to tap your foot and sing along. But I'm also terribly fond of Jonatha Brooke's version of Simon & Garfunkel's "Bleecker Street," Patty Larkin's take on Fred Neil's "Everybody's Talkin'," and Beth Nielsen Chapman's "SInce You've Asked," which was originally performed by Judy Collins. And I'm diggin' Marshall Crenshaw's cover of the Dylan tune "My Back Pages" and a great instrumental version of "Turn, Turn, Turn."

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I finally found an original version of Sneaker Pimps' trip-hop classic "6 Underground" on iTunes, on an album called Chilled Ibiza Classics: A Decade of Ibiza Chillout. I also recently bought three of my favorite songs from the '80s: Culture Club's "Mistake Number 3," which, for whatever reason, hadn't made it onto At Worst ... the Best of Boy George and Culture Club; Scritti Politti's bouncy "Perfect Way," which I had to buy after I heard it on the digital jukebox at the Dugout a while back; and "If You Leave," the synth-pop classic from the John Hughes movie Pretty in Pink. And I also added one of my favorite Tracy Chapman songs that I didn't already have on CD, "Telling Stories."

Comments

[father tony]

At the DC megaclub, Town, on saturday night, they showed that Beyonce Put a Ring on it video on the giant triptyche screen behind the bar. It was quite wonderfully energetic.