The top ten of the 
Billboard 200:
1. Katy Perry - "Teenage Dream" - 192,000 (debut)
2. Fantasia - "Back To Me" - 117,000 (debut)
3. Eminem - "Recovery" - 98,000 (down 15%)
4. Usher - "Versus" - 46,000 (debut)
5. Little Big Town - "The Reason Why" - 42,000 (debut)
6. Kem - "Intimacy" - 30,000 (down 59%)
7. Justin Bieber - "My World 2.0" - 29,000 (down 3%)
8. Randy Rogers Band - "Burning the Day" - 29,000 (debut)
9. Ray LaMontagne - "God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise" - 28,000 (down 57%)
10. Devil Wears Prada - "Zombie" EP - 25,000 (debut)
Further down:
16. Arcade Fire - "Suburbs" - 21,000 (cume: 250,000)
19. Usher - "Raymond v Raymond" - 20,000 (up 57%; cume: 1,037,000)
27. Sufjan Stevens - "All Delighted People" EP - 15,000 (debut)
36. Ra Ra Riot - "Orchard" - 10,000 (debut)
• Overall album sales in this past chart week (ending Aug. 29) totaled 5.12 million units
• Digital track sales this past week totaled 19.88 million downloads
Additonal sales data via MTV and Yahoo.
Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier (EMI)
For the first five minutes of the opening track on Iron Maiden's 15th studio album The Final Frontier, you'll be checking the player to make sure the music is indeed being made by Iron Maiden. "Satellite 15...The Final Frontier" takes its own sweet time reaching the familiar gallop of classic Maiden territory, which makes the moments leading up to it strangely unsettling.
That slow burn is prevalent throughout The Final Frontier. It's their longest album to date and their most progressive, and for that reason it may a bit off-putting to fans hoping for a return to their '80s form. The thing is, the band is more popular now worldwide than they were during the '80s, and they got that way by staying true to their own rules and by not spending too much time looking back.
Continue reading "Iron Maiden - The Final Frontier" »
It breaks my heart to leave the city. I've got a lot of great reasons for leaving, but it's still a sad day.
You might not realize that Glorious Noise was actually conceived and born in Michigan. Many drunken conversations at a dumpy Victorian apartment on Portsmouth Place in Grand Rapids throughout the late 90s led to our humble launch on February 6, 2001. By that July I was living in Chicago along with most of the other founders of the site.
I love Chicago. It's a great city for people who love music. I remember before I moved here, visiting a friend and flipping through the Reader wondering how you even decide what to do when there are so many great shows happening every week.
Glorious Noise grew up in Chicago. Despite the fact that our contributors are scattered around the globe, we've always been a Chicago site. Attitude-wise, if not necessarily regionally focused. The Chicago attitude is straightforward and unpretentious, smart and direct, opinionated and funny. We're tough, but we've got heart. Approachable to strangers. Even the prettiest girls in Chicago eat hotdogs and drink beer. What more could you want in a town?
Continue reading "Leave the City: On Relocating GLONO HQ..." »
Video: Mavis Staples + Jeff Tweedy - "Wrote A Song For Everyone" Acoustic
This is one of my favorite CCR songs. Shoot, it's one of my favorite songs, period. The way John Fogerty's lyrics tackle hugely complex subjects and make them personal, while acknowledging his inability to communicate with the person he loves, is heavy and perfect. It's no wonder Jeff Tweedy picked up on this song: it essentially encapsulates the entire theme of his own masterpiece, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. What took Wilco a whole album to say, "Wrote a Song for Everyone" does in under five minutes. Even if you can write songs that connect with thousands of people, it's still tough to be honest with the people you love.
Saw the people standin' thousand years in chains.
Somebody said it's different now, look it's just the same.
Pharoahs spin the message, round and round the truth.
They could have saved a million people, how can I tell you?
There are only two songs written by white folks that take on the subject of slavery and handle it in an effective way. This one and Bob Dylan's "Blind Willie McTell." I hope Tweedy gets Ms. Staples to do that one on their next collaboration. You Are Not Alone is due September 14 on Anti.
Continue reading "Mavis Staples - Wrote A Song For Everyone" »
Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band - Lick My Decals Off, Baby (Straight)
There's no middle ground with Captain Beefheart, so this review is for those who have already taken the big leap into the man's polarizing body of work and are looking for the next step.
The assumption here is that you started with Trout Mask Replica, the massive document captured by Frank Zappa that's perceived to be Beefheart's crowning achievement. That perception is debatable, but I won't argue its brilliance and I won't fault anyone who chooses it as their first ride on Beefheart's off-the-map journey. It's the first Beefheart album to capture his off-center compositions, a train ride that's piloted by an engineer under the influence of tainted moonshine and too many Howlin' Wolf and Ornette Coleman records.
Continue reading "Lost Classic: Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band - Lick My Decals Off, Baby" »
Video: MGMT - "Congratulations"
These two really aren't the most subtle guys in the world, are they? We get it, dudes: you're afraid Big Music Biz is going to kill your dream/art/vision. This is the third video from this album, and all three have been about the same thing. Nevertheless, this is still a great song and an affecting video. Directed by Tom Kuntz and shot in the Mojave Desert, our heroes follow and nurture a bald Tauntaun as it slowly dies. "Out with a whimper, it's not a blaze of glory..."
MGMT: iTunes, Amazon, Insound, wiki
I often have the same thought when watching war films, especially those that strive to make the horror of war as realistic as possible: How does anyone return from that and conduct a normal life? I'm often reminded of when I went to see The Memphis Belle with my grandfather, himself a retired Air Force man who was a B-17 turret gunner over North Africa. He told me how hard one scene in particular was for him to watch. The squadron encountered German fighter planes and the crew of the Belle watched as planes around them were cut in half by flak, machine gun bullets and crashing German planes that refused to go down alone. These were bombers that carried their friends. My grandpa lived through the exact same experience and saw that very thing happen to his friends. And yet, somehow he was able to go on with his life. It couldn't have been easy and it certainly isn't easy for Roger Sterling.
It's March 1965 and the Japanese surrender is nearly 20 years in the past but for Roger the war is still too close, still too vivid and still too painful for him to simply shake hands and do business with people he was trained to kill and who so many of his friends died fighting. Life goes on and business is part of life but when Pete arranges a meeting with Honda motorcycle company, a company looking to expand to automobiles in the very near future, Roger is simply not ready.
Continue reading "Mad Men - The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" »
I was kidding back on July 7 when I asked if Eminem was the new Susan Boyle. I had no idea that his latest album would actually spend more weeks at #1 than the sweet little old lady who captured every granny's heart last Christmas. But there it is: seven weeks on top of the Billboard 200 chart.
1. Eminem - "Recovery" - 116,000 (down 12%)
2. Kem - "Intimacy" - 74,000 (debut)
3. Ray LaMontagne - "God Willin' & the Creek Don't Rise" - 64,000 (debut)
4. Iron Maiden - "The Final Frontier" - 63,000 (debut)
5. Trace Adkins - "Cowboy's Back In Town" - 50,000 (debut)
6. Lady Antebellum - "Need You Know" - 32,000 (up 35%)
7. Arcade Fire - "The Suburbs" - 31,000 (down 40%)
8. Justin Bieber - "My World 2.0" - 30,000 (down 10%)
9. David Gray - "Foundling" - 25,000 (debut)
10. John Mellencamp - "No Better Than This" - 24,000 (debut)
Continue reading "Sales: Eminem Blows Past Susan Boyle" »
Dreamend - So I Ate Myself, Bite By Bite (Graveface)
If Black Moth Super Rainbow goes down in history as this decade's acid eating purveyors of electronic shenanigans, then the band's biography should include plenty of coverage of how the members themselves possessed talent beyond the walls of analog synthesizers and retrobotic vocoders.
The footnotes should point to the band members' side-projects as proof, and one of the first examples should be Ryan Graveface's part-time gig under the Dreamend moniker. Aside from the wiggy title, which falls in-line with BMSR's own blotter-fueled imagery, there is little that compares to Graveface's more recognized work and even less that will have you worrying about that fact.
Continue reading "Dreamend - So I Ate Myself, Bite By Bite" »
Video: of Montreal - "Coquet Coquette"
Directed by Jason Miller, "Coquet Coquette" is the first single off False Priest, due September 14 on Polyvinyl. It's difficult not to be distracted by the crazy video featuring excessive amounts of gore, cannibalism, and dry humping, but the song itself seems to be a return to more natural instrumentation. Definitely less dancey than the previous few albums, which is odd considering the fact that Kevin Barnes has claimed the new album is "a blend of '70s soul" and "trunk rattling bass" music.
MP3: of Montreal - "Coquet Coquette" (courtesy of Spinner)
of Montreal: iTunes, Amazon, Insound, wiki
