I haven’t checked in with the multi-talented Kurt Schneider in awhile, but recently his latest one-take pop song cover found its way to my inbox.
In this clip, Kurt directs Macy Kate and Ben Kheng as they lip-sync their own version of Taylor Swift’s ‘Bad Blood’ while traversing two floors of a Singapore hotel. It’s most impressive how the three of them pop in and out of the frame through some fancy footwork.
While this year’s new releases have been a bit underwhelming, I did manage to discover one album I really love — a record released in mid-2014 that has picked up steam this summer due to its infectious lead single.
That album is WALK THE MOON’s Talking is Hard, a modern pop juggernaut packed with 12 inventive, hummable gems. The one you’ve no doubt heard is ‘Shut Up and Dance’ but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
Kacey Musgraves’ sophomore release, Pageant Material, didn’t disappoint me the way the other albums featured this week did, but it doesn’t quite live up to her excellent debut.
Musgraves has been hailed as country’s biggest blend of artistic talent and commercial appeal since Miranda Lambert, so expectations for this album were high. And she smartly side-stepped them, delivering a more low-key, traditional album rather than aiming for some sort of statement record.
Between 1997 and 2003, Stew released six albums (half under his own name and half under the moniker The Negro Problem). Every one of them is excellent — in fact, his first two solo albums were named as the best of their respective year by Entertainment Weekly.
Then he disappeared.
Well, that’s not exactly true. Fans of the New York theater scene might have caught him performing a couple of autobiographical musicals during the past decade, winning awards and eventually performing both on Broadway and in a filmed performance directed by Spike Lee.
I’m catching up with a few new releases this week. I’ve bought nine albums in 2015 and posted songs from six of them, so here come the remaining three.
Unfortunately, the trend so far this year is disappointment, or at least new albums that don’t live up to their predecessors.
That’s certainly the case with My Morning Jacket’s Thee Waterfall, the band’s first album since 2011.
