Crushing On

Crushing On: Popdust

August 13, 2011 by krisis

I’ll admit it – I like my pop news. I want my Gaga fix, I love Kelly Clarkson, I snark on American Idol, and I should probably be able to mumble something about Beyoncé to our interns to prove I am not a total oldster.

Yet, the arena of pop news is a bleak place filled with fawning and no-calorie celebrity stories about every popstar’s walk down the street or who they were rubbing elbows with out at a club.

Enter Popdust, launched earlier this year. I first caught wind of it from Twitter album reviewer @1000TimesYes, who is one of my fav Twitter users and one of Popdust’s snarkiest writers.

Popdust obsesses over Gaga, Beyoncé, Glee, Bieber, American Idol, and all other things Top 40 – but it keeps them at arm’s length, remembering that beneath the popularity there is actual artistry to be discussed and dissected. You can almost feel the eyerolls in some of their coverage (especially re: Glee), and they often go meta, talking about why they’re even bothering to talk about the things they’re talking about.

Case and point: their Gaga coverage. When Born This Way dropped Popdust covered it wall-to-wall for a week, running substantive track-by-track reviews, that took Gaga to task for her clunkers. They also landed an exclusive phoner with Mother Monster herself last week – not something most pop blog outlets could say (even if they’re attached to a major media network or print magazine). In the interview they called “Edge of Glory,” her “third best single,” and actually got Gaga herself to comment on what her best songs have been. Amazing!

After the big get I read up on Popdust’s backstory. It’s not as if it was launched by 1000x out of his parent’s garage. It has a major media pedigree, with founders who were EIC’s at Billboard and CEO’s of their own startups that sold for north of $300 million. They completed a $1mill A-Round of financing – one million, for a pop blog! Even if we include all the crazy music and comic books I buy every year as part of CK’s operating budget it is significantly less than 1% of that.

You know what? I don’t care if it takes a million dollars and rich dudes with business savvy to put together a website that takes pop seriously while keeping a tongue firmly planted in cheek. Popdust is my favorite pop news outlet of 2011.

Crushing On: Rad Bromance

August 10, 2011 by krisis

I make no secret that my ultimate musician’s dream is to front an acoustic Madonna cover band that includes a string quartet.

That’s not only because I’m a lifelong Madonna devotee who owns every piece of her sheet music – it’s because all well-built pop music is easy to strip down and translate into other genres, and Madge’s is some of the best-built in the business. I wish more pop was saved from the clutches of perfunctory cover bands to be played by musicians with bigger imaginations and better chops.

Case and point: last night I saw Rad Bromance, an all-male Lady Gaga via hard rock cover band.

They were exquisite.

Gaga’s chugging rhythms and minor key singles make for an easy translation to drop-D riffing, but RB went far beyond that to reconstruct each of her songs into active-rock radio behemoths, with newly conceived drum fills and wicked guitar solos, plus passages of inventive two- and three-part harmony.

In their way, Rad Bromance out-Gagas Gaga. Despite her dressing up each performance with a new concept and choreography, her only major reinterpretations so far have been stripped down tunes at the piano. While stunning, they frequently sacrifice some of her most indelible hooks in favor of dramatic formatas…which is fine – Gaga is riveting enough all on her own.

Rad Bromance is all about indelible moments. They took “Telephone” from verbatim croon on the opening verse into a body moving rap/rock thrash that eclipses the original. “Edge of Glory” and “Hair” were married to the histrionic hair rock that pervades Born This Way, the exact melodies accentuated with extra harmony and guitar solos. “Love Game” didn’t lose its syncopation but was full of chest-thumping kick drum. “Alejandro” became a torch song for metal-heads. Closer “Poker Face” included one minute long unison trio tapping solo – yes, including bassist Brad Bowers.

Most impressive? Rad Bromance is a young band. Rhythm guitarist Dan Geraghty is barely legal to drive, and I’m not sure I could have bought any of them a drink. And it must be said, RB’s lead guitarist Chris Greatti is one of the better soloists I’ve ever seen live – aggressive but restrained at all the right moments. Mike Montalbano is monstrous on drums – I kept checking to see if he had a double kick (results: inconclusive).

That you can see Rad Bromance for a tenner in a bar instead of playing to a few thousand people in Vegas is mind-boggling. The quality and fidelity of their performance is incredible, and they’ll only continue to improve. If you live in the vicinity of Philadelphia and love Lady Gaga’s hooks (even if you don’t like Gaga herself) they are worth a hefty drive to see.

Lady Gaga needs to look them up and plug them into a few tracks on her next tour.

(My suggestion? Have them play on “Marry the Night,” which is practically a Pat Benatar song already, or “Government Hooker,” which screams for a transgressive pounding rock arrangement.)

PS: Catch the band on the remainder of their Monsters Balls tour – 8/11 Strousdberg PA, 8/12 Hamden CT, 8/13 Rockville Centre NY, & 9/2 Foxboro MA.

#MusicMonday: “The Fight” – Sia

August 8, 2011 by krisis

Last Monday I caught Sia at The Trocadero in Philly, and I haven’t listened to anything but her since then.

If the name sounds familiar but you can’t place the music, here’s a hint: Sia was X-Tina’s side-woman on The Voice, and her “Breathe Me” scored the final episode of Six Feet Under

CK readers already knew that Sia’s eclectic neo-70s dance pop LP We Are Born was near the top of my 2010 albums list, and YouTube watchers will know her music videos are all hallucinatory classics, but she also wound up being one of the best concerts I’ve ever seen.

Sia isn’t a note-perfect singer, and she doesn’t move around the stage very much. What she is is a stunning interpreter, and a present, engaging performer who makes you feel like you are sharing a memory with her, rather than just attending a performance. Her dance tracks shook my booty, and her powerful ballads were all breathtakingly riveting.

Here’s a video of her performing We Are Born‘s opening track, “The Fight,” live @ London Roundhouse.

Recommended Listening: “Clap Your Hands,” “You’ve Changed,” “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine,” “Breathe Me,” “Soon We’ll Be Found“

Crushing On: WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin

August 7, 2011 by krisis

If CK frequently seems like bursts of organized, topical posts followed by droughts of randomness and silence … well, that’s because it is.

Not that it’s meant to be that. As CK has transitioned from a personal blog to a blog about my music, Philly, and other specific topics, I finally settled on the perfect mix of posts for the current incarnation. I even made myself an Editorial Calendar – basically, a forward-looking schedule of what content is in which stage of readiness for the weeks ahead. EdCal’s are traditionally a tool of newspapers and magazines, but in recent years they’ve become an important resource for bloggers.

The WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin is a drag-and-drop calendar that lives in your "Posts" screen. It's also my communications-nerd dream come true.

Then I hit a barrier: how would I keep the editorial calendar updated?

It was a barrier I couldn’t overcome with blogging as a part-time exercise, fighting for time against my three musical incarnations and dealing with the new house. Paper EdCals were a chore and got lost. A Google Spreadsheet was great for planning, but I just kept planning and never wrote. Penciling drafts into WordPress was meaningless without some structure, and I wound up with endless lingering drafts since I couldn’t see an overview the lineup of an entire week or month.

I thought, maybe WordPress has an EdCal plugin! It seemed like the sort of plugin motivated bloggers would create. Alas, I searched and searched, to no avail.

I keep re-drafting my own EdCals, but they never lasted more than a few weeks as they were interrupted by actual work and my musicianship. Despite a myriad of ideas for CK, I just didn’t have the spare time to wrangle them, write them, schedule them, and post them.

Then, in an actual work meeting about WordPress during actual work hours, Mel & I were glibly showing off our personal blog plugins to the social team at the office. I showed some of my favorites (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin being primary among them), and the she whipped out WordPress Editorial Calendar.

Screenshot of the quick-draft screen in action, from the WordPress Editorial Calendar Plugin page.

WHAT IN THE WHAT NOW!?

(I may have actually screamed that in the middle of the meeting with our Director. Luckily, he is already well aware of my insanity.)

Yes, about 13 months ago someone came up with a fully-functioning EdCal plugin for WP. Set up a schedule of posts, start a draft right on the calendar, and drag and drop them to your heart’s content. When a post is ready, just move it over to “Publish” status via a dropdown – or, edit it the way you’d normally edit.

Ta-Da – instant blog organization.

Needless to say, the next time I logged into CK I immediately installed the plugin. I’ve been working with it all weekend, and for the first time ever I have a month of planned posts. That doesn’t mean I wrote them all today – it just means I finally have a living schedule of what I hope to talk about and when I hope to say it.

I’m positively aglow about it. I hope you dig my first week of EdCal content, starting tomorrow morning!

Crushing On: Rita’s Water Ice

August 6, 2011 by krisis

Philly is a city full of water ice. As a child in the 80s every block of South Philly seemed to have some mom’n’pop store with a cooler of the poor-man’s gelato at the front.

I remember when Rita’s launched its first few chain locations into Philly proper from their base in the burbs. People were understandably skeptical, since to that point water ice was a strictly homegrown phenomenon, with Pop’s being the major local “brand” with a handful of locations.

I instantly loved Rita’s. Every other water place in town had a white, super-sweet vanilla flavor. Rita’s vanilla was brown, slushy, and had the cloying, nearly-liquory taste of vanilla extract. If I was in the mood for vanilla, I’d demand a trip to Rita’s.

After an entire years sans water ice, yesterday after a dinner date I convinced E that there really was a Rita’s nearby and we needed to find it. Lo and behold, not two blocks into our drive we struck gold.

Gold, and their amazing Juicy Pear flavor.

I’ll always love Philly’s homegrown water ice shops, but as chained franchises go you could do a lot worse than Rita’s.