My musical radar...quick hits...

A bunch of cd's checked out of late...quick hitters on all of them...sorry, I've been kind of bad about posting what music I'm listening to...I tend to check out so many things from the library that it's often tough for me to keep up with all of it...

Grabbed this one for the Wilco song "Burned" which hasn't been released on any of their albums. It's an odd mix cd of covers of songs of the time ("Sunshine Superman" by Jewel, "Season of the Witch" by Luna) that generally are pretty crappy and of the times songs "Do You Believe in Magic" by the Lovin' Spoonful and "Kick out the Jams" by the MC5. Nothing to see here for the most part unless you like crappy covers. The Wilco is a cover of a Neil Young song. The original was better, but that's no surprise as a great deal of Wilco's attraction is Jeff Tweedy's words.

Go out and catch this film if you haven't done that yet. It's a roughly 90-minute shot of hilarious animation. It's technically in French the whole time, but there isn't any dialogue through probably the middle 95% of the movie. Some little bit of subtitled speech at beginning and end of the film. The rest of the story is told through music in true old cartoon-style. The movie is hilarious and touching. That being said, the songs here sort of lose their way without the matching graphics. The one song that got some airplay "Belleville Rendez-Vous" is quality stuff and an entertaining listen, but the rest is a good movie score that I don't think holds up without the matching film. Get the movie, crank the stereo with the movie sounds, and leave the music to the movie.

There was a small sliver of time when the Fugees ruled the world. "Killing Me Softly With His Song" was everywhere on the radio. "Fu-Gee-La" had just left our ears, and Lauryn Hill, Wyclef, and Pras were going to be everywhere for decades. They would rule the radio world. It's been a decade since they put out their second album, and now we hear rumors of a third. In the meantime, Lauryn Hill put out her first solo album, and it cleaned up all over the Grammys and sold millions. The album is incredibly well made, and it's not my kind of music. I liked the cover of "Can't Take My Eyes Off of You". Disappointingly, I can't grab "Do-Wop (that thing you do)" for school because it isn't clean. That's pretty much the whole reason I checked out the CD.

When I was fresh out of college, I worked a summer at WISU in Terre Haute - at the time, a jazz and blues station. One of my favorite songs to play during my six-hour shift was "Sing, Sing, Sing" from this soundtrack. Another was "Flat Foot Flugee" a little later on the disc. I remember the album fondly, but it turns out that the cd skips back and forth between kicky jazz numbers in the big-band/Louis Armstrong tradition and very quiet, very slow movie music. I grabbed a few songs but left a number more ungrabbed.

I've been trying to get a quality jazz selection on the computer at school, and in looking through the greatest jazz artists and albums (from allmusic.com one name and one album came up over and over again: Django. So I grabbed this six-disc set of the complete Hot Club of France 1936-1948 sessions that turns out to be some pretty wonderful music, real quality party stuff. The sound quality is - compared to modern ercordings - woefully scratchy and hissy, but that's to be expected considering that the it was recorded some 60+ years ago.

I used to own this - back in the day of the swing revival, it was right next to my Mugsy's Move and Zoot Suit Riot. Thankfully, in retrospect, the high water mark of the swing revival was reached right about the time of Swingers - a movie that I like less and less the more I see it, and Vince Vaughn is just a gigantic jerkhole in that film. Sorry, I digress. This album is pretty good, solid, revival swing. It's not going to go down as an all-time classic, but it's fun. It'll be on the school iTunes.