There's a Fire Starting in my Heart

Adele has the kind of voice that all her contemporaries on the pop chart would kill for and couldn’t come close to with all the auto-tune in the world. But let’s face it; her debut album was a bit of a bore. The music she was singing over was so bland it might as well have been Musak. And so when the first single off her sophomore outing, Rolling in the Deep was released it instantly became her best song. The voice remained unmistakable, but production went to another level thanks to Paul Epworth (Florence + The Machine) with opening strumming of a guitar which adding a driving bass drum a couple lines later and turning into a full on foot stomping clap along by the bridge. Even her phrasing gets betters, when she says, “Don’t underestimate the things that I will do” you can’t help but believe her while chills go up your spine.

And that sophomore album 21 (she is keeping with the age of when she recorded the record theme from 19) continues the promise of Rolling in the Deep. After the album kicks off with the first single, it goes straight into Rumor Has It which could have been the most haunting song from the girl group era of the sixties. Then out of nowhere the song slows down for a even more haunting piano accompanying part before picking right back up again.

Aside from Rolling in the Deep, Epworth helped write two of the best songs on the album. I’ll Be Waiting opens with an Elton John flair on piano before being joined by some horns and is easily the most fun you will have listening to Adele and listening to the song makes you wonder why she doesn’t go up tempo more often. He Won’t Go starts off with the beat and piano riff from The Roots version of Dear God before morphing into a soft rock R&B song from the eighties without managing to sound cheesy.

Rick Rubin, who produced four of the tracks, goes for the less is more approach he took when guiding Johnny Cash’s American records. Don’t You Remember and One and Only are the songs on the new albums most reminiscent of her previous album. And where Rubin made an art of picking cover songs for Cash, having Adele cover Love Song by The Cure with an acoustic bossa nove twinge just doesn’t reach the highs she had when she reworked To Make You Feel My Love by Bob Dylan on her last album which is the only advance 19 has over 21.

Song to Download – I'll Be Waiting

21 gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.

Previewing Blue-Collar Dogs

George Washington owned a dog, ten in all, Abraham Lincoln owned two of them himself. In fact the seventeen last presidents had a four legged friend to keep him company all the way up to Bo who currently resides in the White Dog House. But tonight on Nat Geo Wild, the channel will premiere a show that highlights dogs that go even further than being the best friend of the Leader of the Free World.

Blue-Collar Dogs follows dogs are more than man’s best friend but help their owners do some tough jobs. And tonight starting at 8:00 Nat Geo Wild will air three straight episodes starting with Canine MD. Sure we are all familiar with Seeing Eye dogs for the blind, but some do even more than guide their owners. Watching a dog open the refrigerator , grab a Sprite, give it to his owner with a degenerative muscle disease, then close the door is a sight to be seen. And the medical field is also putting a dog’s nose to good use by having them sniff out cancer and one dog that helps her owner by predicting her blood sugar crashes.

At 9:00 is Border Hounds which views like the best dog segments from Border Wars on its sister station but goes deeper into the training that goes on to making a drug sniffing dog. And the “Don’t Touch My Junk” guy may want to skip this episode because one of the dogs smells something a suspect’s crotch area as we get to see an agent go in and fish it out of the hiding area. But the best visual is a dog training to be dropped out of a helicopter getting strapped to an agent’s back and repelling down a six story structure (as seen above).

Rounding out the night is New York Police where dogs are trained to protect the world’s busiest city by sniffing out bombs, which they did to keep the scene safe during the Times Square Bombing attempt, attacking criminals in the subway, and as part of a search and rescue squad. Some of New York’s finest four legged officers went down to Haiti to find people stuck in the rubble after last year’s earthquake. And how New York is it that even police dogs need to be issued credentials just to sniff for bombs at the US Open tennis tournament? The most interesting part of the episode doesn’t even take place in New York, but across the river at a woman’s prison in New Jersey wear inmates actually help train puppies to become bomb sniffing dogs and even lives in the inmate’s cell. Check out a clip of that below:

Puppies Behind Bars