42 OF 'EM

There is nothing wrong with your day that this video can't fix.

BABYMETAL

THE YEAH YEAH YEAHS

How come nobody told me about this awesome video until today?

CORDUROY - MOTORHEAD

This is seriously the worst cover (of anything, by anyone) I've ever heard. Witness the atrocity.

SURFING IN SLOW MOTION

RONNIE DUNN

This guy used to be half of Brooks & Dunn, an ultra-cheesy pop-country duo I never had much time for. This is a single from his first solo album, and it's pretty powerful stuff.

F.E.O. (FRIDAY EVENING ORANGUTAN)

I don't know if Friday Evening Orangutan will become a regular feature or not; I just know that this particular orangutan knows how to keep cool, right down to never sharing your cool-keeping device with anyone else, no matter how much they beg. Get your own washcloth, Junior.

HOW DO YOU SAY "PANTS ON THE GROUND" IN YORUBA?

This video, for the song "Bling Bling Panda," by Lágbájá, is pretty awesome. It's a hip-hop/Afrobeat track criticizing Nigerian youth for copying their American counterparts with their gold teeth and flat-brim baseball caps and designer jeans and Ed Hardy-lookin' shirts, when what they oughta be doing is hanging out by the fire in brightly colored robes and beating the drum. Why, in the old days...

I don't know if they have lawns in Nigeria, but this dude would surely be telling these kids to get off his if he had one.

Check it out.

POSTED WITHOUT COMMENT

Almost any guess as to who this is directed at is likely to be correct.

PAINTING ON WATER

I'll see your Bob Ross and raise you this Turkish guy.

SADE

I haven't had time to really delve into her most recent album, Soldier of Love, but it's not like she's gonna make a bad one, right? And I missed the tour when it came through, but I saw her in '93 and she was fantastic.

SUFFOCATION

Why? Because Suffocation are awesome, that's why.

SUDDENLY I AM FILLED WITH HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

The yoke of cultural oppression has been thrown off at last. I thought it would never happen in my lifetime.

LA BOMBA FIZZLES

I'm so disappointed in Bomba Estereo. I really liked their debut album, Blow Up (AMG review) and pre-album singles like "Corinto" and "Huepaje," but their latest single is terrible.

Let's chart their descent.

Here's the video for "Huepaje":


Now here's "Fuego," from Blow Up:


Pretty great, right? A hot mix of cumbia, hip-hop, electronic music and punk rock rawness. Now check out their latest clip, "Ponte Bomb":


The video itself is entertaining enough, if more than a little MIA-damaged, but the song is awful, starting with the fact that it's a bilingual cover of Technotronic's "Pump Up the Jam." And I never thought I'd type the words "doesn't do the original justice" in reference to "Pump Up the Jam," of all things, but seriously, this cover is just weak, from the crappy keyboard sound to the lame lyrics. All it's really got going for it are the muppets and people in furry suits.

IT'S PRONOUNCED "IKE," NOT "ICKY"

TROUBLE FUNK

Live in the UK, 1986:

THEY DID IT ON PURPOSE—AND I'M GLAD THEY DID

Every Metallica fan knows that the band's fourth album, ...And Justice for All, sounds extremely thin and crunchy, with almost no bass. The story's always been that then-bassist Jason Newsted's parts were turned down because they were hazing him. And that would have been one of the most horrifying examples of self-sabotage in the history of music...except that the album fucking rules.

That's why I don't like stuff like the YouTube clip above, or the bootleg ...And Justice for Jason, where some douche overdubbed his own bass parts onto the songs. See, I think the long, intricate, prog-thrash songs on AJFA work better without bass. I think the thin sound is a big part of what makes the album great—what makes it my favorite Metallica disc.

Those songs don't work as well live (as listening to Live Shit: Binge & Purge proves) because they need that edge. I think when they play Justice songs live, the bassist (whoever it happens to be at the time) should unplug, or walk offstage, for the duration. Thin and fierce—that's how it's supposed to sound.

INTERVIEW WITH THE MELVINS

I interviewed Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover of the Melvins backstage at New York's Webster Hall on Friday night, an hour or two before they went onstage opening for one of Isis's final shows. Here's the video.



The show was terrific; the Melvins' set was like one long drum solo punctuated with the occasional guitar riff or shout from Osborne. Opening act Totimoshi was a heavy power trio, somewhere between '70s blues-rock and '90s noise-rock. And Isis sounded really good, too, playing a tight seven-song set that touched on all five of their studio albums. I'll have a longer review tomorrow on the Village Voice site.

TOM PETTY

I bought Tom Petty's 4CD Live Anthology box a couple of months back (I saw it in Target for $22 and couldn't pass it up), and it's fantastic. The songs were recorded at shows in 1980-83, 1986-87, 1993, 1995, 1997, 2002-3 and 2005-6, and the band is so damn tight, even with a change of drummers, that it could all be one epic gig.

Now I've heard a few songs from the forthcoming album Mojo (out 6/15), and it appears the live-rock fervor has hit Petty in a big way, because the album was recorded live in the studio, with everyone playing in one room. I admire the cussedness of that; I like that Petty has stopped caring about anything but making records he's happy with. It's obvious to anyone who gives it a moment's thought that he's not gonna have a Top Forty hit, and I like that it's obvious to him. He's made a record that his existing fan base—folks who admire rock music as a craft—are gonna respond to, and he's gonna support it on tour. He's got a circa-2010 merch strategy for the record and the tour; if you buy a ticket, you get a digital download of the album on the day of release, and when the tour's over you can download eight live tracks. I think it's working; a lot of tickets to a lot of shows are gone already. (If I want to see him in New York—and I do—I'm gonna have to round up a review assignment from somewhere.)

I've only ever listened to one Tom Petty album, Full Moon Fever, all the way through. I really don't need to hear the cranky-old-man routine he cut loose with on The Last DJ. But his greatest hits disc is pretty much unassailable. And as demonstrated in the video above, the band kicks ass. I think I'm gonna buy his new album.

FELA, 1971