Hope everybody enjoyed the weekend. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming, the continuation of Round One of Montauk Madness. Our next matchup: Coldplay vs. The Shins.
This is an interesting one because Coldplay started off as a hip indie band not unlike The Shins before they blew up into a stadium band and thereafter became terminally uncool.
‘Rise,’ the final track on Selena Gomez’s quite-good 2015 album Revival, commits one of my cardinal musical skins — the spoken-word interlude.
It serves as a bookend to the album’s opening moments, also spoken by Gomez, so I see what they were going for. But I can’t think of a song by anyone, ever, where that has worked for me.
‘Suitcase Song’ is a delightful track from Disc Two of Nellie McKay’s 2004 debut album, Get Away From Me. McKay’s blend of jazz and pop and her throwback vocal style earned this album a ton of critical acclaim.
She has worked pretty steadily since, though I lost track of her after her sophomore effort, Pretty Little Head. She has released four more studio albums and delivered an award-winning turn on Broadway in The Threepenny Opera.
Closing out this first week of Montauk Madness, we have the fifth matchup from Round One, pitting Lucinda Williams against Garbage. Folk rock vs. industrial rock. Organic vs. electronic.
As much as I like Garbage, particularly their first three albums, this is another easy pick. Ideally, the first round should be easy, though peeking ahead I see a couple of hair-pullers on the horizon.
I haven’t had a difficult choice to make through the first few matchups in Round One of Montauk Madness, and that won’t change today.
Peter Gabriel faces off against Josh Rouse. An art rock pioneer against a prolific but low-profile indie singer-songwriter. While I love Gabriel’s So — a bona fide classic — and enjoy tracks from his other solo records, he hasn’t consistently impressed me the way Rouse has.
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