Turn it Up – Rebecca Black – “Friday”
It’s the greatest single since “Good Vibrations.” Never has an artist captured the imagination and spirit of an entire generation like Rebecca Black has with “Friday,” bringing themes to the public eye like “fun” and “partying.”
Not only has she accomplished all of this in a pop song you can’t resist, she’s done it all so artfully by mimicking a robot – thus making a profound statement about how we rely on technology for said “fun” and “partying.” And we need it to know what day comes after Thursday. If you haven’t taken to the comments section of The Echo site yet, feel free to blast me a new one. Happy pre-April Fool’s Day, folks. Here are the real reviews.
Turn it Up – Death Cab for Cutie – “You are a Tourist”
Death Cab for Cutie’s still changing, but their evolution has been so seamless from album to album, some people haven’t noticed. The first release from their upcoming album, Codes and Keys, is no exception.
“You are a Tourist” is a poppy, simple slice of the band you wouldn’t have heard last decade. Vocalist and guitarist Ben Gibbard sounds a lot different in this track, exploring the lower range of his voice, and his lyrics come off more abstract than the near-stories he produced in albums like The Photo Album and Transatlanticism. But the song still has that Gibbard-style wisdom in lines like “And if you feel like a tourist in the city you were born, its time to go.”
For the majority of the song, the band has traded out their wondering, plucked guitars in place for some chiming, upbeat leads. Drummer Jason McGerr is on top of his game from the beginning of the track, and proves that Death Cab’s got one of our generation’s best rhythm sections. After the song builds to a climax in the bridge you’re sucked right back into McGerr’s dribbling snare beat and Gibbard’s falsetto, and the latest Death Cab single takes you right back to when you first heard them.
Turn it Down – The Arctic Monkeys – “Brick by Brick”
The Arctic Monkeys were never a band I really “got.” Their first album, Whatever People Say I am, That’s What I’m Not used to be the album that sold the most in its first week on the U.K. charts, but was recently booted off by Susan Boyle. And if that isn’t embarrassing enough, the latest single from the garage rockers off of – and I couldn’t make this up, Suck It and See, isn’t doing much to put them back on top. “Brick by Brick” builds up some anticipation in its 15 second intro of birds chirping and other outside noises, (or something,) only to tear it down with some pretty boring songwriting that is made worse by its gross overproduction.
The song’s got elements of some pretty raw rock bands. AC/DC and the MC5 come to mind, only it sounds like they’ve got all the energy and grit that made them special sucked out of them. The energy that “Brick by Brick” had is buried by compressors and reverb units, taking away all of the things that could make this a garage-rock hit. But with the Arctic Monkey’s small amount of success, it isn’t surprising to see them get the over-done treatment.
