About This Site
Each month I select 20 songs (10 songs twice a month) that I am either hooked on or am curious about. Most of the music I select are rock, hip-hop, R&B and pop songs.
My song selection comes from 20-30 CDs I get from various sources each month, as well as recommendations from iTunes and Amazon. I also check out the charts in US, UK and Japan.
Lil Mama had a hit with “Lip Gloss” last fall, and was on Avril’s remix version of “Girlfriend” and recently she can be seen on America’s Best Dance Crew show on MTV as one of the judges. This song, as it’s produced by T-Pain, sounds a lot like all of his other hits, “Low”, “Cyclone” and “Kiss Kiss” which should suit the club well. In the music video, Lil Mama has a dance off with Chris Brown which looks pretty cool. Her debut album is finally going to be released at end of next month.
I had never heard of these guys before, until I caught the middle of this song on the radio. For the first 10 seconds or so, I wondered if it was the new song from My Chemical Romance as it sounded like it could fit on their Black Parade album. After 10 more seconds, I realize that the vocal was slightly different, but the style was quite similar. After a quick search on the internet, I discovered that a couple of their songs (including this one) is available for free download on
Purevolume website.
After selling tons of her last album, Confessions On A Dance Floor, she is back with a new album (to be released in end of April). But first we are given this single featuring Justin Timberlake and Timbaland. 50 Cent used their help for
“Ayo Technology” which I thought sounded weak, but Madonna does a better job as this song is addicting. As this song suggests, her new album is supposed to be dance-oriented like Confessions album, but with more “urban” feel to it. It would be interesting to see if she can repeat the same success with Hard Candy.
This was a free single on iTunes a few months ago, and now it’s starting to get airplay on rock stations. This New York band, MGMT consists of just two guys (I wonder how they will sound live), and they will be playing at Seattle’s Chop Suey next month as well as at Summersonic (big summer festival in Japan) this August. Actually, their entire album is really good. One of the most solid album release of the year thus far. I’m looking forward to their live show.
I don’t listen to country music, but somehow I know some names, and I thought I knew her as a country musician, so I dismissed her debut CD and didn’t even bother listening to it (I later found out that there is a country star named Rodney Atkins, so I must’ve been thinking of him). But after seeing this video on VH1.com, I had to check her out. Her vocal sounds similar to Jenny Lewis of Rilo Kiley. Some of you may recall seeing her (and her band) on
American Express commercial (YouTube) where they realize that their rental car is too small to fit all of their equipment and they need to rent a bigger SUV instead.
PlayRadioPlay! is a one-man band from Texas (hence the album title). And that one man is still a teenage kid. He plays all of the instruments and produces all of his track on his computer. After the producers discovered that he had a strong following on his Myspace page, they signed him up. He is currently touring with Yellowcard and Secondhand Serenade, which I will be seeing next week. It would be interesting to see what kind of live show he will put on (will he have a band?). Kudos for mentioning Seattle in the song.
The Presidents are finally back with the 6th album. They’ve been playing in Seattle once or twice a year, here and there (most notably during the Presidents Day weekend a couple of years ago), but finally they have some new songs. This single is a fun, catchy poppy song, which they are so good at. They can be seen at Sasquatch Festival at the Gorge this summer.
Secondhand Serenade is a one-man band, similar to Dashboard Confessional, the singer-songwriter, John Vesely mostly plays acoustic slow rock. His songs do actually sound a lot like Dashboard.
Shirley Bassey is now Dam Shirley Bassey. She is most famous for recording, “Goldfinger” for James Bond film in 1964. At least in the US, she is popular for that song, but in the UK, she is Britian’s most successful female chart artist of all time with over 30 hit singles. This, as you may know, is a remix of Pink’s hit single. But you wouldn’t think that in the first 30 seconds (sounds like it could be Batman’s opening music), and then a minute into the song, the music bust into James Bond style. It’s a cool dance track that makes you want to drive really fast like… James Bond. This entire album, which consists of mostly cover songs, actually has that James Bond feel. If you like that stuff, it’s worth checking out.
I was disappointed with Snoop’s new single, “Sensual Seduction” (or called, Sexual Eruption on the album) as it didn’t sound gangsta enough. I give him credit for trying something new, but it didn’t sound cool enough. His next single, “Life of da Party” had Too Short and Mistah FAB featured, but that didn’t sound that great either. After going through the entire album, I realized that there were only a couple of tracks that I liked, and this was one of them. The beat is very familiar Neptunes sound featuring Pharrell. For those of you that live outside of the US, Snoop now has his own reality show called “Fatherhood” where you get to see how he raises his kids. On one of the shows, his son wanted to learn how to play soccer, so Snoop called Beckham to come and help, and Beckham agreed to come. I was amazed that Snoop and Beckham could understand each other with their accents.
This small local bar band in Japan, called Tiernan, was picked up on Tokyo's popular station, InterFM's morning show. The lead singer, Laurier Tiernan is from Canada, and along with ex-US Navy bassist and Japanese drummer they have been slowly gaining popularity in Japan. Something about this song is really catchy. Tiernan sings "Arnold Swarchenegger will be President of the United States...." and the consequence of that. Their songs can be purchased on their former
label's website.
The quality is not that great, but you can see them perform this song at What the Dicken's (one of my favorite live houses in Japan):
Live performance of Tiernan's "End of the World" Here is their myspace link:
www.myspace.com/tiernanband
Usher’s previous album, The Confession was a big hit, and his new album is supposed to be released in June this year. The first single featuring Young Jeezy is already a #1 hit. In a recent interview, Lil Jon stated that he was working on Usher’s song, but was taking extra time on it because he wanted to make sure that it was going to be as good as “Yeah” which was indeed a huge hit.
Lil Mama had a hit with “Lip Gloss” last fall, and was on Avril’s remix version of “Girlfriend” and recently she can be seen on America’s Best Dance Crew show on MTV as one of the judges. This song, as it’s produced by T-Pain, sounds a lot like all of his other hits, “Low”, “Cyclone” and “Kiss Kiss” which should suit the club well. In the music video, Lil Mama has a dance off with Chris Brown which looks pretty cool. Her debut album is finally going to be released at end of next month.
Embodying the rags-to-riches rap dream, Jay-Z pulled himself up by his bootstraps as a... 