Friday, August 29, 2008

Greatest Album Title Ever!



Soulwax's reworking of The Chemical Brothers "Hey Boy Hey Girl" is too fresh to be included on last year's remix collection but Different Is Dangerous point toward where the track can be downloaded for the price of an fake email address. Check it out even if you already bought the version that amazon sells by itself for $1.94 individually, on a single that brings you two tracks for $1.42, to solve the mystery of the seven second time difference between the two versions.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Kinda I Want To

A rather complete blog entry pointed me towards this clip of a local news story from the 80s covering Trent Reznor's early band Exotic Birds. His new wave history is hardly secret, the demo that got him signed to record Pretty Hate Machine did feature a song that was pure pre-acid house New Order, but seeing Reznor before the dark fashion demands of the industrial scene took over his image is a bit of a surprise. The fun starts about one minute in:



: Makes you wonder what Reznor could do if he ever started making upbeat music. Hopefully it would be along the lines of "Discipline" from this year's free NIN album The Slip:

Saturday, August 09, 2008

The Human Shopping Mall

Mike Huckabee was the last person I ever expected to hear talk about a musician whose work I appreciate but he was filling in for Paul Harvey this week when he announced the death of Robert Hazard. The brief mention on the radio segment said that you might not know his name but you knew Hazard's work because he had written Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun". Actually I do know the name and really love his cheeky take on materialism "Escalator Of Life" which used to get frequent spins on Live 105 back in the station's Steve Masters glory years. Let's give it a listen:



: Hazard slipped off my radar in recent years but continued to write and record changing up his style going singer/songwriter with occasional country leanings also finding time to work with the school of rock which resulted in this charming video last year.