Keb Mo is very good. If you really want quality for your dollar, I suggest Blues music. "The Complete Robert Johnson" is a good place to start. Anything by: Elmore James Albert King Howlin Wolf Freddie King B.B.King Albert Collins Magic Sam Just to name a few. Also, anything by Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix or The Beatles is a must for any collection.
This is somewhat embarasing, but the most addictive album I have gotten in the past year is: Heroes and Villians - Music Inspired by the Powerpuff Girls. It has new songs by old favorites Devo and Frank Black of the Pixies, a song by Japaneese Kitsch Queens Schonen Knife, songs by super-retro Elephant 6 recording artists The Apples In Stereo and Bill Doss of Olivia Tremor Control as well as some cool songs by bands I have never heard of. It is all held together with a Powerpuff Girls plot, and some brief speech between songs. I highly recomend it. It's cool.
No, I don't like Creed either... and "Drops of Jupiter" entered the realm of "suck" long before it entered the realm of "overplayed." Which is a shame, because Train has done some good stuff in the past. What happened?
Another great album, if you ever liked any 70's 'Glam Rock' like David Bowie, T.Rex, and Iggy and The Stooges, or modern 'Brit-Glam' like Placebo or Pulp is The Soundtrack for Velvet Goldmine. There's a great review for the album from AMG, better than anything I could write, so I'll just steal it. Glam rock was all about style as substance, finding truth through image. Todd Haynes realized this, constructing Velvet Goldmine, his ode to glam, as a hallucinatory experience where the surface means as much, if not more, than the underlying meanings. Which means, of course, that Haynes' view of glam was based on the artier inclinations of David Bowie and the sinister cabaret and full-blown dementia of Brian Eno-era Roxy Music. Bowie refused to have any of his songs in Velvet Goldmine, possibly due to the anti-Bowie slant of the script, and the filmmakers squeezed their way out of a potentially fatal situation by hiring Shudder To Think and Grant Lee Buffalo to write Ziggy soundalikes. They work smashingly, as Shudder To Think's "Ballad of Mawell Demon" captures the sweeping ballad feeling of "All the Young Dudes," while Grant Lee Buffalo's "The Whole Shebang" is an uncanny recreation of Hunky Dory's skipping vaudevillian pop. Their contributions stand out on the Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, which is primarily devoted to songs from the era, either in their original incarnations or in newly minted covers. It's actually a risky move to stand Roxy Music's classic first single "Virginia Plain" next to a wealth of Roxy interpretations by the Venus in Furs, yet their recreations are stunning, enhanced by Thom Yorke's remarkable imitation of Bryan Ferry's vocals. Similarly, the Iggy Poptribute band, Wylde Ratttz do an admirable job with "TV Eye." The other covers don't fare as well, yet the other new songs are first-rate (particularly Pulp's stomping, horn-driven Slade extravaganza "We Are the Boys") and all the original recordings are terrific, highlighted by cult items as Eno's fantastic "Needle in the Camel's Eye," T. Rex's "Diamond Meadows" and Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel's British hit "Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)." The soundtrack, like the film itself, may be more of a collection of moments than a coherent experience, but those moments are pretty spectacular.
Am I the only one that finds it extremely ironic that a service like Morpheus that provides availability to download pretty much everything (of course, warning the whole time that you could be infringing on copyright when they know full well that they are just Napster II) including copywritten works has this disclaimer on their site... <i>Copyright © 2001 MusicCity Networks™ All rights reserved. MusicCity Networks, the MusicCity.com logo, and all other trademarks, service marks and trade names of MusicCity Networks appearing on this web site are the property of MusicCity Networks, Inc. Morpheus is a trademark of MusicCity.com. MusicCity Networks does not condone copyright infringement. Please see our Policy section for further details.</i> So, I assume they would vigorously prosecute anyone who infringed on <b>their</b> copyright, right?
