There have been a couple of videos that have caught my eye lately so I thought I’d give them some love since the death of Musical Television left a void for a forum on the art form. If you are interested in buying the video through iTunes, click the title link (where available). If you are interested in buying the song, look for a link in the analysis.
It is weird that after two decades of Rick Rubin produced albums, that a long lost song from Johnny Cash that he recorded in the early eighties sounds as if it could have easily has been an outtake from one of the American albums series. The dark music definitely fits in with some of his later music videos.
Tt is easy to compare Broods to their fellow Kiwi Lorde (teenage singer, same producer) and their first official music video also take look at suburban youth, but Broods take a more romantic look with what seems to be the New Zealand equivalent of McLovin and Hit Girl.
After Avicii had a smash hit with the folk infused EDM track it was only a matter of time before another producer would do the same thing. Australian DJ tyDi (yes, that is how he stylizes his name) is the first to try and not surprisingly it sounds very derivative. The post-chorus bites the cords from Philip Philips’ Home (which itself was a complete rip-off of Mumford & Sons). And just like Wake Me Up, I hope that Dia Frampton eventually releases an acoustic version of the song.
In my youth I hated country with a passion, I believed that just listening to it would lower ones IQ. Then in college I was listening to a Dave Mathews Band live album and heard an amazing version of Long Black Veil, a heart wrenching tale of a convicted murderer who won’t clear his name because he was with his best friend’s wife. Since I was not familiar with the song and cracked opened the liner notes to learn more about the song and saw it was written by Johnny Cash and had to check out the original. After that I became a huge Cash fan and softened my stance on the genre as a whole (though I still find a majority of mainstream country IQ reducing). Below are both versions that should find their way to your iPod.
Asides from my yearly countdown, I rarely talk about mash-up even though I am constantly search for new interesting combinations of songs. Here is one that topped my list of Best Mash-Ups of 2006 list which is unlike your standard mash up which typically takes the vocals from one track and puts it over the music of another one. On his version of God’s Gonna Cut You Down, DJ Schmolli takes the Johnny Cash vocals, but instead of one song to put it over, he stripped down four different songs to one part to create a new instrumental. The backing track included the drums from Led Zeppelin’s When The Levee Breaks, the bass from Beastie Boys Sabotage, the guitar from Ted Nugent’s Cat Scratch Fever, and the lead guitar from The Beatles Come Together. To download the complete product, head over to Mashup Town.
I am not a big fan of posthumous albums. They almost never work because it is missing what every album needs, the artist vision. This is the main reason why I am most likely going to pass on the upcoming Jimi Hendrix release next week. But the thing about the two albums the followed the death of Johnny Cash is they may be more a Rick Rubin album as much as Cash who has been in bad health threw much of the recording adding only his voice, and three songs of which wrote to the final two album.
Released last week on what would have been seventy-eighth birthday, American VI: Ain’t No Grave is a fitting end to the career of the Man in Black and doesn’t stray at all from the previous American Recording. Cash and Rubin pick songs that manage to sum up Cash’s life of where he has been and where he was going. But unlike the previous albums where the duo choose some songs aimed at reaching a younger demographic with songs like Nine Inch NailsHurt or Personal Jesus from Depeche Mode, the most recent cover is Redemption Day from Sheryl Crow’s 1996 album, the next dates back to 1970.
The highlights bookend of the album. Ain’t No Grave (Gonna Hold This Body Down), featuring The Avett Brothers on banjo, footsteps and chains, almost matches God’s Gonna Cut You Down from the last album in its chilling effect on the ear. On the other end of the spectrum Aloha Oe, which dates all the way back to 1977, plays as a heavenly tune, with a ukulele taking the place of a harp, where you can see Cash finally in a well deserved white suit and you can’t help to believe when he delivered the line, “until we meet again.”
Johnny Cash released his final album earlier this week (I assume) but due to my Olympic obsession I haven’t gotten around to give it a listen yet. So I thought I would highlight a song by Cash that some may have missed. The Wanderer is an odd song. Stuck at the end of U2’s eurotrash album Zooropa yet sung by the country icon who had been trolling in obscurity for most of the previous decade (the song was recorded a year before Cash hooked up with Rick Rubin that resurrected his career). And yet it all worked.
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