I'm not a big fan of Sarah McLachlan, finding her mostly overly sentimental and over-produced, a deadly combination. There's no denying her voice is beautiful, and I have a few remixes, live cuts, and duets with other artists that get fairly heavy play on my iPod. But a fan? No.

I'm also not a big fan of holiday compilations.

So what the hell am I doing reviewing Wintersong, a holiday CD released last week by Sarah McLachlan? I got hooked on it when I downloaded, in a fit of perversity, her cover of John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War is Over)," and thought it was... gulp... really good. Okay, maybe my brain melts at the holidays, I don't know. Probably that's the reason why I completely lost my senses and bought the whole freaking CD.

And it really doesn't suck. The icy purity of her voice works beautifully with the Christmas standards, such as "Silent Night" and "What Child is This," while also doing beautiful justice to newer holiday songs like the Lennon cover and Joni Mitchell's "River."

So I don't know, if you have to buy a holiday CD this year, you could do a lot worse than the unrelenting prettiness of Wintersong. And I won't tell anyone you bought it.

Note: "Silent Night" from the CD is the free download on iTunes this week, and you can also see videos from the CD on Amazon here.

Indigo Girls
Hometown: Decatur, GA
http://www.indigogirls.com/home.html
http://www.myspace.com/indigogirlsmusic
Thursday, November 9, 2006
Warfield (San Francisco, CA)

I'm not the world's biggest Indigo Girls fan. Their records sometimes leave me feeling very sleepy. But give me a chance to see them live, and I'm there, because they bring some kind of fire to their live performances that their recorded work rarely approaches.

I've never seen them anywhere but San Francisco, so I don't know if it's true, but I've been told by many obsessed Girls fans that they are known for doing their best shows here. I can't quite imagine how they could have been any better than they were at their Nov. 9 and 10 shows at San Francisco's Warfield. (I wasn't at the Nov. 10 show, but a friend who was assured me it was actually better than the Nov. 9 show I attended. She also brought me the handwritten set list from the stage, thanks, Robin!)

Emily came out wearing an AC-DC t-shirt, which amused me perhaps more than it should have. They opened with the country-tinged "Little Perennials," the single off their current album Despite Our Differences. The folky "Pendulum Swinger" followed, which made the fans happy. Neither of those are songs I particularly care for, although I like them a lot more live than on CD. They then went into "Heartache for Everyone" from 2004's overproduced All That We Let In. This song is the perfect example of one I actively loathe on CD but enjoyed tremendously live.

Still, it was "Power of Two" from Swamp Ophelia (1994) that marked the moment the show caught fire for me.

I've got the complete set list after the jump, but the highlight of the show was, without question, "Kid Fears," sung with Three5Human's Trina Meade - this one literally brought the house down. Amy and Emily do magic with their voices. Even if you hate their music, you can't deny it. But that magic got magnified a hundred times when Trina joined them.

The Indigo Girls have incredible musicianship, and have been performing together for over 25 years now. They talk little to the audience, or to each other, but there's a palpable sense of connection anyway. They may be the only band I'd unhesitatingly take friends who mostly only like alt rock to see, because when they're at their best, they transcend genre and just make music.

The venue is good and the sound was mostly great. I could even hear most of the lyrics. But whoever set the drum sound levels should get their ears checked, especially in the second half - it was a mess.

Set list after the jump.

One of my secret addictions favorite music stores is PerfectBeat.com, and they got some hot alternative dance CDs in this week. The best and brightest is the sizzling six-song CD of Moby's "New York, New York" with Debbie Harry singing vocals. A song has to be really good to get me to spend twelve bucks on a CD with six different versions of it and nothing else. This one is.

Moby also released a CD with several remixes of "Slipping Away (Crier la vie)," featuring vocals by French-Canadian chanteuse Mylene Farmer. Same twelve bucks, only four cuts. Hey, it was number one in France. Perhaps my 80s roots are showing, but I liked the Debbie Harry release better.

Basement Jaxx got all screwy wonderful with six remixes of "Take Me Back to Your House," which kind of sounds like Jewel got high with the Scissor Sisters and then went into the studio with Basement Jaxx, I have no idea how else to describe it. It's bizarrely addictive and totally danceable.

All in all, a good week for weird dance music.

The gods of college radio, R.E.M. bubbled up out of the cauldron that was Athens, GA, in the 80s. They got signed to indy label I.R.S. and burst out with one of the best rock albums ever recorded, Rolling Stone's 1983 best album of the year, Murmur.

And I Feel Fine: Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987 draws heavily on Murmur and its follow-up, Reckoning, making it a much more valuable compilation of the wonder that was early R.E.M. than 1998's Eponymous - and not just for the choice of material. The sound quality is light years better.

But forget all that, and understand this: Pay the extra bucks and get the Collectors Edition. The second disc is absolutely loaded with demos, b-sides, and live cuts, and all kinds of great material. And then, what the hell, go get the companion DVD, When the Light is Mine... The Best of the I.R.S. Years 1982-1987 Video Collection, too - lots of stuff there I've never even heard of before, let alone seen.

These discs are absolutely golden for old fans (even if you already have most of it), and those who want to understand R.E.M. in the days before the line between "indy" and "mainstream" got blurred.

Complete CD and DVD track listings under the jump.

I've never watched any of these talent/reality shows, like American Idol. I'm not so much on the television watching.

But there was a time I was hopelessly addicted to a campy, intoxicating show called Xena: Warrior Princess, starring former Miss New Zealand Lucy Lawless in the title role.

I knew Lawless (Battlestar Galactica) could sing, since XWP had several musical episodes (I told you it was campy), so it makes sense that a B-list celeb fest like Celebrity Duets might include her. It pairs entertainers not known as singers with musical legends - usually code for "has-beens," and there are a few of those, but many genuine legends as well, including Smokey Robinson, Patti LaBelle, and Gladys Knight.

It's not hard to see where a show like this could suck. It's hard to see, in fact, how it couldn't. And if you're sitting there thinking I'm going to tell you it doesn't suck, you're wrong. Because it sucks so massively it's causing a disruption in the space-time continuum. It's sucking at Olympic levels. It's sucking like the last sucky thing in the galaxy.

Are you getting the picture?

Let me give you an example, much as it pains me.

Actor/comedian Hal Sparks (Survival of the Richest, Queer as Folk, stupid VH-1 series I Love the 70s, I Love the 80s, and I Love the 90s) and Dee Snyder (Twisted Sister) singing "We're Not Gonna Take It." The sheer badness of this duet is, frankly, indescribable, although that won't prevent me from attempting to describe it for you. Sparks is notable for having been called "too white" by Celebrity Duets judge Marie Osmond earlier in the show, and when Marie Osmond thinks you're "too white," honey... you're too white. Not just to sing Motown, which he tried to do, not just to sing, but to GO ON LIVING.

But I'd rather see him singing Motown every day for the rest of my life than have to live through his duet with Dee Snyder again. It was tuneless and soulless and horrifying. He was wearing too much eyeliner, and in his case, any is too much.

And I must not be the only one, because despite much diligent searching, I can't find video of this nightmare performance on YouTube or anywhere else people upload these things.

I can, however, show you the following:

Lucy Lawless singing a pretty crappy song, "Footloose," with Kenny Loggins, but when you look that freaking hot in a fringed mini-dress who the hell cares?

Lucy Lawless singing "Oooh, Baby Baby" with Smokey Robinson - she looks like a trashy Vegas showgirl instead of a Warrior Princess, but just ignore that and think about the fringed mini-dress. I did.

As soon as someone uploads it, I'll show you Jai Rodriguez (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy) singing "Lady Marmalade" with Patti LaBelle. She can still sing like some kind of goddess even though her wardrobe needs serious attention. And Jai looks like a debauched paperboy. Just listen but don't watch, because vocally? They owned me.

In the meantime, here is Jai singing "Still in Love With You" with Gladys Knight. It's almost as good. It might be better since you don't have to close your eyes during it.

And seriously, don't watch this show. Just don't. Not even the Warrior Princess can save it. Just look for her parts on YouTube.

Do you ever like a song and feel like some kind of alien infection got into your brain or you wouldn't? Kind of like falling in love with someone you know is bad for you, or maybe more like eating junk food, I don' t know.

I fell in love with "Sleepwalking" by Maria Lawson. Big old schmoopy pop song. She's a British singer who won some kind of hideous reality TV competition thing, the type of show I'd rather swallow ground glass than watch.

And then, less distressingly, I stumbled on one called "Love Burns" by California indie band Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, a not-new-but-new-to-me song, that I can't seem to stop playing.

And I recently got some of my beloved old Dead Kennedys' songs into digital format and have been blissing out reliving my misspent youth and thinking "Holiday in Cambodia" probably really was the best punk song ever. Except for "Nazi Punks, Fuck Off," that was the best.

Or "California Uber Alles."

I don't know, some of us never grew up. And yet even that didn't inoculate me against big swoony Britpop.

And after seeing a version of "Because the Night" by Bruce Springsteen and Bono on YouTube, I had to cleanse my brain by cranking Patti Smith's original version as loud as possible for several hours. I know Bruce Springsteen co-wrote the song with Patti Smith, but her version owns me. Always has, always will.

Since everyone but me is at Daytona, it's time to write about dance music.

Back in the 80s, in my wild youth, I loathed dance music. My friends and I called it "dance fascist music" and sneered at anyone we knew who danced to it, and rapturously adopted the Smiths' 1986 song "Panic" as our anthem:

Burn down the disco
Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music they constantly play
It says nothing to me about my life....
Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

Of course, we went out dancing every night (I don't believe I got a full night's sleep until sometime in the early 90s), but not even by the wildest stretch of language could anyone contemplate calling what we danced to "dance music." I was researching Johnny Marr's session work for this article, and stumbled over a review of The The's album Infected (which Johnny Marr did NOT play on, in case anyone out there is keeping track), which said something to the effect that despite the "danceability" of the music, "no one could possibly dance to anything this incredibly depressing."

Hell, I used to dance to a song called "Armagh" by a British band called the Au Pairs, that contained the memorable lines, "We don't torture, we're a civilized nation." They were talking about Great Britain and Northern Ireland, but gosh, someone oughta cover that song for today, ya think? But back to dancing. Yes, I danced to "Infected" (still the greatest anti-romance song ever written), but I never, ever danced to actual 80s dance music.

So what happened to change all that?

My friend JD told me that it wasn't me that changed, it was the music. He said that 80s dance music really was just that bad, and dance music today is really better.

Another friend speculated also that the music changed, but his reason was that the drugs changed. He says that I only like "post-ecstasy" dance music, despite the fact that I gave up all my Wicked Ways at the age of 24 and have never done ecstasy on the dance floor, or off it.

My personal theory is that both those things are true, but probably the most important change in dance music had to do not with drugs but with technology. Modern dance music is very much about technology, both in its original conception and recording, and in the endless phenomenon of remixing that characterizes it as a genre. Dance music today, whether called by its rightful name or by its marketing alternative, "electronica," is simply more interesting, more layered, more complex, and more inventive than dance music of the 80s. It's also far more diverse. And at least in this country, incredibly unpopular. Which may also be part of why I like it now. I love an underdog.

I had to laugh at JeffB, who wrote in his post-SXSW music blogging frenzy that he did now and then like some dance music, naming the Chemical Brothers and Moby as examples. I didn't laugh because that's not dance music, but because it's dance music with street cred; hardly anyone is going to think you're disco trash because you like the Chemical Brothers or Moby - and I like them, too, but I also like honest-to-god-divas-of-the-dancefloor dance music, like Kristine W and Suzanne Palmer and Deborah Cox, who between them are responsible for three, count 'em THREE, of the most played songs on my iPod, Kristine W's "Fly Again," Suzanne Palmer's "Show Me," and the Hex Hector remix of Deborah Cox's anthem "Absolutely Not," which helps put the "fem" back in "feminism" and is thus a big hit with me.

There are some real problems with the way dance music is marketed, one of them being the fact that most dance CDs are six versions of the same song remixed six ways by six different producers and costing twelve bucks. The number of songs I like well enough to pay twelve dollars for six versions of is, let's be frank, very small. I have "In the End" and "Rapture" by Iio - two songs that are so good they make me dizzy, anything and everything Narcotic Thrust has ever done in any and every remix anyone ever made of their songs, and the remixes of "Stupid Girls" by P!nk, because as I think we've already more than established, I LOVE HER. That might be it, other than a bunch of 99 cent-dance-song-CDs I've picked up in the clearance bins.

Speaking of 99 cents, that brings us to the single thing that might well change all that: iTunes, where you can, for one penny less than a dollar, buy just one version of the song you like. At least half my purchases on iTunes are dance music, and they don't even have a very good dance music catalog (although for recent releases it's not too bad; it's just not very deep). Suddenly I can have almost every dance song I want for one-twelfth what it used to cost me. Sadly, this seems to mean I am spending ten times more overall on dance music; I have to think they had that in mind when they came up with their pricing strategy.

Budget aside, the days are over when I sneered at dance music. Now I'm a believer. And in the words of P!ink (did I mention that I love her?):

If God is a DJ life is a dance floor so
Get your ass on the dance floor now...

Before everyone comes back from Daytona and I'm in BIG TROUBLE.

New feature at club.kingsnake: CDs, DVDs, books, and magazines in our store. Everything's hand selected by our editor, Melanie Martinez, so if you have suggestions for her, contact her here!

I haven't had the time to listen carefully to these new indie releases, and while I can usually form my opinions based on the shallowest of criteria quickest listen when it comes to dance music, most indie/alt recordings deserve more attention. And yet, there are still only 24 hours in a day.

I'm not sure about Hallelujah Sirens. Their new CD is Dirty on Purpose, a Mogwai-ish sophomore effort released late last month. They tend to grab me because I'm a sucker for that chiming guitar thing, but the music is maybe a bit drowsy. It's all about the interweaving vocals and the guitar special effects and although it's more focused than their first album, the title of that previous release sums up how I feel about this one: Sleep Late for a Better Tomorrow. Which isn't a bad thing. Just, you know, drowsy.

I'm not a Belle & Sebastian fan, but I can't resist B&S proteges Camera Osbscura, whose third CD, Let's Get Out of this Country, was released in June. Chimey guitars (yeah, I'm fucking predictable, bite me), pretty vocals, and an air of enchanting poppiness infuse the recording. They also dabble in a kind of country-ish thing on a few cuts, most notably the standout track "Dory Previn." I don't really think this is as sweet as it seems at first, but then again, it might be.

I'm sort of morally opposed to concept albums, although in my younger years, I wore through three copies of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis when they were still Peter Gabriel's bitches. But usually when I hear a band is doing a concept album I want to just hide my eyes and cover my ears. And mabye The Early November felt the same way, because I've heard they almost broke up several times while writing and recording their massive three-disc concept CD The Mother, the Mechanic, and the Path. This story of a boy's troubled relationship with his father, and his subsequent troubled relationship with his own child is getting great reviews and I guess I'm just cranky and irritable because it's not working for me. They do, though, put the "rock" in "indie ROCK," definitely not a pop moment in sight. Keep my bias in mind and maybe give it a try.

We all love things we shouldn't. Junk food, reality TV, cars that get really bad gas mileage.

So don't hate me when I tell you that "Don't Feel Like Dancing," the Scissor Sisters' homage to really terrible bad dance music of the 70s, is the most fucking gloriously badly good song ever.

Stereogum is streaming it... listen here. And don't blame me, I couldn't help it. They're a fucking force of nature.

Joining our staff is the UK's Dawn Porter.

From Dawn:

I discovered the joys of metal whilst in the States, and bought the love back to the UK with me in 1999. Bad Religion, Life of Agony, Downset, Madball, Type O Negative, Agnostic Front, Biohazard and Sepultura were getting big here, but I was already two steps ahead.
Nowadays my purchases are mostly metal, or more specifically misery metal as my mate calls it. If I do an iPod shuffle you'll certainly get some Staind, Alterbridge, Tantric, Cold, Incubus and Puddle of Mudd. But hey, you can still get all of the stuff from my past mixed in with that too. Life is supposed to like a box of chocolates, mine is a bit like a box of rattlesnakes! Read on!

Kallipalooza
Friday, July 14, 2006, 7 PM
Lawrence, KS

Forget Lollapalooza, if you're anywhere near Kansas City/Lawrence, KS, this weekend, be sure to check out Kallipalooza.

Kalli Sanders is the daughter of our staff director at kingsnake.com, and she's been severely ill for the last year. She's undergone repeated surgeries and hospitalizations, and had to leave her full time job as a social worker. Needless to say the financial impact on Kalli and her family has been tremendous. So a bunch of Kalli's friends have gotten together and teamed up with the hottest indy bands in the region to put on a benefit they've dubbed Kallipalooza.

Bands featured include:

Gourmet Mushroom X (possibly the loudest band in Kansas)
Froyd
The Lonesome Hound Dogs
The Gleaners
Music Row

For more information and tickets, visit Kallipalooza info.

I'm kind of a sucker for cover songs. There are songs I hate in their original version, that I love as a cover song - and of course, there are approximately four hundred million examples of the reverse, because, you know, bar bands. Wedding bands. Bad tribute bands. Shit, GOOD tribute bands. I'm just saying.

But still, I'm a sucker, like I said. So here is a totally bizarre collection of some of my favorite cover songs, from the "Just Covers" playlist on my iPod. I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg, and I haven't actually refined this into a top ten or anything. I did skip multiple tracks by the same artist, but otherwise this is the first ten I got when I shuffled the covers playlist.

Ten Random Cover Songs from my iPod:

1. Gloria by Patti Smith
She is as a god to me. This is why. Well, this and all her other music. But seriously... what she does with this song is almost impossible, and quite possibly illegal in South Dakota. "Jesus died for somebody's sins, but not mine."

2. Where the Streets Have No Name/Can't Take My Eyes Off Of You by the Pet Shop Boys
OK, so.... the Pet Shop Boys' "You Were Always On My Mind" routinely makes it onto "Ten Best Covers of all Time" lists, and it's good, it's really good. But I like this one better, a strange electro-dance version of the U2 classic mixed up with the old 60s pop hit. I've heard Bono really liked this, and so do I.

3. Lola by The Raincoats
Genderfuck to the nth degree. You can take the girl out of punk but you can never really get the punk out of the girl.

4. Sisters of Mercy by Sting and the Chieftans
This is from a tribute to Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen called Tower of Song. This, and Peter Gabriel's cover of "Suzanne," are the standout tracks, but it's all good.

5. Helpless by kd lang
It was this or her cover of "What's New, Pussycat," but I went with this even though it was a big hit and you probably already heard it. But covers don't get any better than this, a great Neil Young original, a great cover, and one of the greatest voices ever. Her entire album of covers of songs by Canadian artists, Hymns of the 49th Parallel, is the only kd lang album I really like. Although if I weren't doing this randomly, but had been able to go in and pick and choose, Roxy Music's version of Young's "Like a Hurricane" would have been here instead.

6. Take Me to the River by Talking Heads
I've seen this once or twice on "Top Ten Cover Songs" lists and I don't know why it's not on all of them. It's scorching.

7. Hurt by Johnny Cash
I don't know, I was scarred for life by his cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," although I love the Marilyn Manson version, but this cover of Nine Inch Nail's "Hurt" is devastating. In a good, someone please just leave me here in a darkened room in a fetal position sucking my thumb kind of way.

8. I Fought the Law and the Law Won by the Clash
Yeah, here's that 80s thing again. I can't help when I was born. I can't help loving the Clash. I can't help it that I ummmm kind of put this song on continuous replay while I clean the house sometimes.

9. Man in Black by Marc Almond
This is on a UK compilation for an AIDS organization called the Terrence Higgins Trust. It's a tribute album to Johnny Cash called 'Til Things Are Brighter, and it features a huge number of really good and really strange things, of which in my opinion, this is the best. If you can find it on Ebay or somewhere, you should get it. Other artists include Michelle Shocked singing "One Piece at a Time," Cathal Coughlan doing a kick-ass cover of "Ring of Fire," the Mekons' version of "Folsom Prison Blues," Tracey and Melissa Beehive's deadpan "Five Feet High and Risin'," and I don't know, it just gets better and weirder all the time.

10. Everytime We Say Goodbye by Annie Lennox
From the original Red, Hot, and Blue compilation, a tribute to the songs of Cole Porter and also an AIDS benefit album and video. (It was recently re-released on CD and DVD.) It's full of good stuff ... the video for Debbie Harry and Iggy Pop's version of "Well, Did You Evah!" is worth the price of admission alone ... but Annie Lennox's "Everytime We Say Goodbye" is particularly gripping. The video for this track was supposed to be directed by British filmmaker Derek Jarman, who was at the last minute unable to do it because he was dying of AIDS. Lennox chose to film it standing in front of a blank screen with home movies of Jarman's childhood being projected on her face. "Every time we say goodbye, I die a little."

Someone better post some thrashy hard assed cover songs now, because I am such a fucking girl sometimes.

Country legend Johnny Cash died almost three years ago, leaving behind a wealth of unreleased material recorded prior to his death. This is the fifth in a series of albums of this work, produced by longtime Cash collaborator Rick Rubin.

American V: A Hundred Highways is the final volume in this series and was released on July 4. From the Amazon.com review:

The ethical questions surrounding this final album in the American Recordings series are as unavoidable as they are, ultimately, peripheral. While the vocal tracks were recorded in the months just prior to Johnny Cash's passing in September 2003, the arrangements weren't undertaken until two years later. And though producer Rick Rubin had become a trusted friend, the Man in Black wasn't around to approve or disapprove, let alone guide, the final sessions. However, if the pure power of these recordings doesn't quiet the skeptics, nothing will. With Heartbreakers Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench and slide guitar session pro Smokey Hormel on board (all three of whom appear on earlier Cash albums), along with guitarists Matt Sweeney and Johnny Polansky, the sound is stately and acoustic, but rarely staid, even as the dynamics of earlier recordings in the series are absent. Instead, the songs have a measured, elegiac intensity, the sound of musicians choosing their notes carefully and making just the right choices.

P!nk
June 27, 2006
The Fillmore (San Francisco, CA)
http://www.pinkspage.com/

I've tried to approach this like a good reviewer and write a balanced, objective, factual review of P!nk's concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco. But I can't, so I won't.

Why fight it? I'm just a fan and much of that is not just because I like her music ... because I do like it, but that's really all, I like it, I don't love it ... but because I like HER. I like her attitude, I like her brains, I like the way she tries to get the little girls to THINK, I like her sneer and her sass and I like the way she looks in a rock and roll can-can girl skirt and motorcycle boots, I just fucking like her.

Other than some minor sound mix problems and a few equipment glitches, the show was great. If you didn't like her when you went in, you'd probably love her when you left. She focused on her best-known and most popular songs, particularly those on her newest album I'm Not Dead (review), including "Stupid Girls" and her new single, "Who Knew." She ripped through bouncing renditions of "Trouble," "Just Like a Pill," "18 Wheeler" and other stuff from her back catalogue.

She sang a shorter second set, in the guise of an encore, of some of her slower stuff, including the crowd-pleaser "Dear Mr. President."

She chatted with the crowd, which worked really well in a venue the size of the Fillmore. The sold-out crowd was only about 20 percent teenagers, although they made up most of the fans down in the front.

So I loved it. She's great. Sue me.