Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 5,400 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 5 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

What’s your favorite Christmas song?

Jon Huntsman’s daughters have released the semi-political dance/parody track of the year! This makes Cain Train look like shit.

I . . . I just don’t understand who thought this was a good idea.

I am happy though that with Herman Cain’s campaign exploding more frequently than a fireworks factory with lax fire-safety, there’s somebody else here to pick up the insanely misguided reins.

Also, really Huntsman girls? You exclude Rick Santorum from your diss track? You didn’t have anything to say about the man who compares homosexuality to bestiality, and hates single mothers? Also, Herman Cain’s pizza? THAT is what you sing about. TIGHTEN IT UP, GIRLS!

I’m pretty sure everybody has heard this song and seen this video, but it’s the Monday before Thanksgiving, so I think we all need a little pick-me-up to get through these last hellish days before vacation.

I gotta say, that guy’s got moves. If you mute the track, he’s a pretty good approximation of me when I get bored while standing around (but my moves are a little fly-er)

Let’s look at this song objectively as we can, starting with the “pros”: It was written by Brett McKenzie, Jason Segel and Amy Adams have both proven in past roles that they’re not completely tone deaf. and apparently both Feist and Mickey Rooney sing on it.

and now the cons:

For what appears to the movie’s major theme (its the only song on the soundtrack to have a full cast reprisal), I just don’t think its all that great. It doesn’t feel like a Muppet song, it feels like an attempt at a shitty showtune, but everyone knows Book of Mormon did that way better. I will give the Mickey Rooney cameo a big plus though, I fucking love that guy, and if you don’t you’re a damn liar.

Now, granted, I could now set up a poll and be like “Which is better, this or ‘Rainbow Connection’” but that is a waste of everyone’s time, because Rainbow Connection would win hands down. Instead, I am gonna set up a poll between this song and the worst song from the original Muppet Movie.

Now, I’m sure I just started a whole new debate, but leave that for the comments.

For anyone who has never seen them live, you are missing out. Their live shows have so much enthusiasm it just makes the songs that much better. I feel like if it were possible to have a complaint, its that the songs flow so well into each other on their album that when they finished a song it almost felt like they were stopping each song part way through. I don’t think that’s really a complaint though.

Here’s a little taste for everyone who missed it:

(via chilixx)

Always late to the party, here is my favorite track, “Foregone”

While I loved the whole EP, and I hope that their Demo “I 4 U and U 4 Me” makes its way onto a future album, if this were a reality competition, and I got to pick one eliminated challenger to participate in the finals (even I’m not following this metaphor anymore), it would be “Foregone,” it just does such a great job bridging the feel of this The King is Dead with the sound of some of their older tracks.

You can see the original posts on Paste, Vulture, Rolling Stone, Stereogum, and The Huffington Post.

Their cover of the far too long and not very good cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Row Jimmy” remains unreleased

For those of you who don’t know, I love Damon Albarn. To me, the man can do no wrong, and I will listen to basically anything he puts his hands on. His new band, Rocket Juice and the Moon, is no exception. This time around he’s playing with Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist, Flea and the man who created afrobeat, drummer Tony Allen. Name issues aside(he admitted he didn’t pick it, and doesn’t enough care to change it) this is yet another fantastic offering from Albarn. Its exactly what you would expect from him, in that you would never expect it.

You can listen to all the tracks from their live performance now on their YouTube page, but here is the perfect taste:

I’ll admit it, before I googled him, I had no clue who Tony Allen was, but my god is he a fantastic drummer, and definitely the driving force in the band’s sound. I’m also happy to see that despite the fact that The Red Hot Chili Peppers haven’t put out a good album since By The Way in 2002, Flea hasn’t lost his skill as a bassist.

Thoughts? Opinions? Leave ‘em in the comments.

Hey, remember me? I’m that guy who used to write on here sometimes, well now I’m back.

What draws me back you ask? Well, close personal friend/musician Lou “Retarded Baby” Guberti has asked me to review his band, The Blues Bonanza‘s new EP, Sludgehammer. At first, all I could think of was the last time Lou asked me to review something, but then I also remembered I love telling people my opinion.

SO HERE WE GO AGAIN!!!!!

To start things off, let’s listen to a track together:

Marty McFly

There are definitely some hurdles for me when it comes to listening to Sludgehammer. The biggest by far is Lou’s voice.  Now I’m not saying it’s a bad voice or anything, I just find myself giggling uncontrollably every time he starts singing. Unless you know Lou, you probably won’t experience this problem.

Another hurdle is, this isn’t my style of music. I don’t know what makes a . . . hard rock? (I dunno, its not metal) band good. What I can say is that there is definitely some Queens of the Stone Age flair in their songs, so if you like those guys, definitely check this EP out.

In the end, this album is definitely a freshman effort. It sounds like it was recorded in a basement, and while the band as a whole are technically proficient, everything is pretty formulaic. The solos sound more like scales or fingering exercises than real solos (which probably won’t be an issue if you see them live), and the songs get a bit repetitive at times.

THE FINAL VERDICT:

In no way is the album perfect, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t enjoyable. There’s a tongue-in-cheek quality to the whole album (probably most visible in their track “The Bro Song”) that really makes me smile. Also, the tracks are fucking catchy. If you were cool enough to listen to “Marty McFly” back when I told you to, its probably still stuck in your head, and will be for another hour or so. The Blues Bonanza may not be the voice of a generation, but I’ll take this over Katy Perry any day.

I was originally gonna develop a new ranking system based on Fonzie, but it would take too long explaining that there is only 1 Fonzie, and nobody can be as perfect as Fonize, so the best score a person could ever get is 0.99 Fonize, and the scale is exponential, but if I did do it, these guys would get 0.45 Fonzie. Make of that what you will.

Can’t get enough of my snark? Make sure to follow me on twitter @LetterstotheTV

You know when you hear something that hits so close to your softest innards that you feel like you’ve been suckerpunched and liked it? And like you kind of want to feel it again? Guys, I haven’t been this excited about an album in SO LONG. I think Merrill Garbus might be brilliant, but god is it hard to listen to a lot of her songs in a row. I promise you won’t hear another album so challenging but so rewarding for the rest of the year. Ready? Let’s go.

Garbus’s first album under the tUnE-yArD moniker was BiRd-BrAiNs, a self-released series of experimental pop tunes featuring ukulele, her impossible voice, and a delay pedal. On her second album, w h o k i l l, (out today on 4AD)Garbus dumps the minimalism for all the noise, noise, noise, noise she can muster. When you’re not clutching your head, you’ll be hand-to-heart, swooning. You’ll take a dance break to ponder the start-and-stop nature of every song. The horns and drums are clipped while Garbus’s voice simmers and roll and howls like a furious tea kettle, and without warning she’ll slip into an easy trill as gentle as early morning birdsong. She has as much in common with Michael Jackson as Vampire Weekend or a chipwave band, but she is thrillingly intelligent and self-aware.

She’s weird. Her music is fucking weird. But there’s so much to it that I’m absolutely enthralled by. I want to be her! Everything is deeply personal and yet strongly political. Garbus herself explained it in an interview with the Village Voice last year; after spending time in Kenya, she struggled because “I feel a great connection to Africa, and yet I have no right to speak Swahili, which, at that point, I did. I have no right to be myself, to let out any of the things that were inside of me.” But again as an American, she acknowledges the baggage associated with her connections to Africa and her African influences: “I think the whole point is that we borrow from Africa, but we also, as Americans, steal from Africa, and that’s something I want to stop, and we need—economically and socially and politically, we need to deal with those aspects, because music is not isolated from all of those things.”

Yes! Fuck yes! How can I be myself when my best self is caught up in the actions of so many others, ESPECIALLY political action that I oppose but can’t change? I struggle with that on the regular, and if Garbus has any advice, I am all ears. Total dreamboat, am I right? She displays an awareness and sense of justice uncommon in pop music, and the breadth of feeling in her work astounds. The New York Times compared her voice to Aretha Franklin and Yoko Ono, but for more contemporary parallels, I’d give her M.I.A.’s furor and Nellie McKay’s cheek.

On “My Country,” she rages in a way that I think many young people can identify with, questioning her own identity as an American when there’s so much associated with that historically and presently. “My country ’tis of thee/ sweet land of liberty/ How come I cannot see my future within your arms?” she asks, then “We cannot all have it/ now why is there juice dripping under your chin?/ When you have something, why do they have nothing?” Other songwriters have grappled with these internal conflicts of identity and capitalism and privilege; it’s just not usually so danceable!

“Es-So” explores gender performance, and possibly prostitution, with Garbus singing in the most carefree timbre that she feels free, despite “babies crying” and “do-or-dying” then asking, “I gotta do right if my body’s tight—right?” And has there ever been a more succinct concession to the establishment than “I run over my own body with my own car”? Garbus subsumes her most elemental self to politics, consumption, convenience, capitalism, global corporatism, war in the Middle East, all embodied in that great American symbol. (The second-best was definitely Lisa Simpson’s plaint, “I know all this focus on thinness is unhealthy and anti-feminist, but that’s what a fat girl would say!”)

“Gangsta” is tUnE-yArDs’ “Paper Planes,” the joy of expression clashing with the anger inherent in the song. “What’s a boy to do if he’ll never be a gangster… what’s a girl to do if she’ll never be a rock star?” Garbus asks, diving again into that space between our internal desires and our external expression of self. Over sirens and gunshots she repeats an ominous threat to would-be gentrifiers: ”Never move to my ‘hood, ’cause danger is crawling out the way.” Yet, over and over she admits that her protagonists will “never make a sound” if you do.

After that three-song onslaught, Garbus steps back slightly. She began by politicizing the personal, and seamlessly transitions into personalizing the political. “Don’t take my life away!” she pleads on “Bizness,” the album’s first single. The next track “Doorstep” is an outright fucking abuser of a song. Garbus has stripped it completely bare, leaving little more than her voice and the saddest story of all, summarized right to the gut with the one-line chorus: “Policemen shot my baby as he crossed over my doorstep.”

Ok, the album is definitely front-loaded, with the best songs giving way to others that are merely very, very good, but I think that’s a deliberate move on Garbus’s part. Either you’re in or you’re out for tUnE-yArDs. After years of open mics and street performance, she knows she has to grab the listener and keep them attentive until they “get” what she’s doing, and that’s just how she lays out this album.

Bookending her album with songs that I suspect are more autobiographical than the others, on album closer “Killa,” tUnE-yArDs writes her feminist anthem. “I’m a new kind of woman/ I’m a new kind of woman/ I’m a don’t-take-shit-from-you kind of woman,” she growls over a meta chorus calling itself “something that will soothe you.” Counting the tongue-in-cheek breakdown where Garbus laments “in this day and age” not having more  male, black friends, then devolves into talk about yuppies in their natural habitat or something, “Killa” feels like at least three songs held together only through force of personality, and fortunately, Garbus has more than enough to go around.

She has talked about wanting to be “physically moved” by music, and the importance of performing even her intimate lyrics, her indelicate and unseemly vocals alone on stage to serve as a model other women in music. If I could find more words to describe why I can’t stop listening to tUnE-yArDs, well, I’d be using them to write professionally.

And if that’s not enough to love, she produced the Thao and Mirah album also out today AND she wrote a song about Top Chef!