Van Halen – Long Version Trailer from Van Halen on Vimeo.

Can the best Van Halen frontman bring it like he did in the early 1980s? Just reading that sentence over, the likelihood seems very low. Tickets are expected to be $60+. David Lee Roth left the band in 1985 and Sammy Hagar became the face and voice of the band, with Eddie and Alex. Eddie’s son Wolfgang, 20, will play on bass.

I met Julio, one of Ms. Sariñana’s concert promoters, Sunday at a friends house and my ears perk up whenever I hear a name I haven’t heard before. Then I heard her husky voice dominating a playful pop beat and wanted others to know more.

Sariñana is already a success in her home country, Mexico. She doesn’t look manufactured (even though she was a child actress); you’re catching someone who’s just here and there to enjoy the music. Sariñana, lives in Mexico, sings in both English and Spanish and seems comfortable in her bilingualdom. She’s been around for about 3 years, since her debut Spanish-language album Mediocre in 2008.

Website: XimenaMusic.com
Twitter: @XimenaMusic

Their fifth studio release, Re:(disc)overed is a celebration of sorts for the polyglot band’s 10 years in music, and if someone’s gonna let them do it, well heck they’ll do it. They’re auspicious beginnings demand nothing less.

“We chose some that may be unexpected to some just so we could push the Puddle envelope a bit,” said PoM’s lead guitarist Paul Phillips.

He said the new versions of the songs were more tribute than reinvention. “Our goal in interpreting these songs was to pay more tribute rather than reinvent,” Phillips said. “These are all classics that are perfect in every sense, so who are we to mess with that? We just wanted to represent them in their true form and add a little of our sound to them. We cut everything with very few takes and tried to keep it very live like those old seventies records.”

The new album includes: AC/DC’s “TNT,” Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” Elton John’s “Rocket Man,” Billy Squier’s “Everybody Wants You,” Stevie Nicks/Tom Petty’s duet “Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around” (which Puddle Of Mudd recorded with BC Jean), Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” Free’s “All Right Now,” Bad Company’s “Shooting Star,” James Gang’s “Funk,” Led Zeppelin’s “D’yer Maker,” Neil Young’s “Old Man,” and the first single, The Rolling Stones soulful classic, “Gimme Shelter.”

Wes Scantlin said winnowing down the songs to the final cut brought out the wrinkles, in a way.

“As I’ve become an adult, I’ve realized that I have become my old man,” Scantlin said. “I seem to have inherited the same traits as him, whether they are good or bad. I’ve been listening to that one forever and now I’m living it.”

Puddle Of Mudd have scheduled five shows where the first half of the show they will perform songs from re:(disc)overed followed by the favorites:

July 23 – Webster Theater, Hartford, Connecticut
July 24 – Northern Lights, Clifton Park, New York
July 26 – Hampton Beach Casino, Hampton Beach, New Hampshire
July 28 – Starland Ballroom, Sayreville, New Jersey
July 30 – House of Blues, Cleveland, Ohio

Some information provided from a news release

On top of the unsettling feeling of not being sure for a little while whether the singer was male or female or something in between the overall sound is too light and too inconsistent.

Released May 23, Torches has all the signs of drool-worthy goodness; fun cover art, unafraid to use weird instruments and even more strange rhythm breaks. But I couldn’t shake the feeling they were trying too hard to achieve something that, as of now, is beyond them. The importance of being earnest is not to come across as too earnest.

Someone in this band (Mark Foster) likes to tell stories and’s good at it. It’s easy to gain more respect for the band just reading the lyrics. (Perhaps only reading the lyrics?)

“Pumped Up Kicks” is, by increment, the best tune on the CD. It may be coincidence that this song seems to have had the simplest recording history – recorded, mixed, produced and performed by Mark Foster. Just has a nice lazy beat throughout telling the tale of a modern day teenage cowboy with revenge on his mind. Tells those with the pumped up kicks “you better run, better run, faster than my bullet.” It’s the most pure sound. There’s whistling.

There’s whistling?

That’s followed by the mess of “Call It What You Want.” Too many styles trying to do too little. Seems like it might be a dance tune, a nice little keyboard riff, some annoying beeps in the background which begin to take on too much earspace. Then it opens in a chorus of voices and the crack in the wall of sound causes the whole thing to crumble. I DID still find myself bobbing my head a little, as I did on several others – but I had long since tuned out of caring about the song.

Still, it ends with wise words:

If I don’t conform to what you were born into then you run the other way. / You say, ‘Now what’s your style and who do you listen to?’ Who cares? / Well that rat race ladder-climbing fake-face smile’s got nothing on me.”

“Don’t Stop” starts promising but then buries itself under layers – and those incessant beeps, as if their robot overlord was in the studio having a fit. I honestly had trouble getting past it and chipmunk giggling in the background just, obviously (should’ve been obvious) is unnecessary for the muse in music.

But I kept on listening and it came back to the voice. Being able to sing means letting those pipes rattle and not clog them with 401 different effects to remind us that it’s not just auto-tune that can kill a buzz with buzz.

“Waste” is Muzak lounge music. “I Would Do Anything For You” is the hackiest slackjaw love song going. “Miss You ” is another highlight, where one sound sticks around long enough to make a pleasant, lasting impact. And the rest of the CD comes to a lazy, shrugging end.

It seems as if we’ve been caught in a Ross changing room. Each song tries on a new jacket, looking for a style it can’t find. And you can smell the desperate hope for a worthy destination without a plan for how to get there.

Foster The People out on tour now. They tackled Coachella (without having released an album) and will hit Lollapalooza in August. I missed my chance when they were in Tempe, Arizona. I’d be curious how they sound live. Tell me.

Official website: FosterThePeople.com – Main members: Mark Foster, Vocals, Guitar and Synth. Mark Pontius, Drums. Cubbie Fink (?), Bass.

Tracks
Helena Beat
Pumped Up Kicks
Call it What You Want
Don’t Stop (Color On The Wall)
Waste
I Would Do Anything For You
Houdini
Life On The Nickel
Miss You
Warrant
Broken Jaw

If it wasn’t for one thing, I would think this band represents the second coming of Jesus. Well, his support band.

“It’s A Good Thing” has an insanely catchy opening riff, that instantly sends your mind spinning into “Who is this?” territory. Not so much that Choo Choo sound like anyone, but that they sound like they’ve been around long enough to produce milkshake-smooth-n-tasty music.

They sound like you should have heard of them. Bonus, no one you know will have ever fucking heard of them.

Lush, layered, with an accomplished steady crunchy pop sound, I refreshed as I listened. When I breathed, their positivity stood right over me, stiletto heels stomping holes through my skin to let the music enter more quickly. Less surreally, this foursome from Switzerland catches your ears and won’t let go – expanding your listening habits like a double-zero earlobe gauge.

It’s the vocals that seemed to let down the side.

While everything from the guitars to Lili’s keyboards is infused with energy, Dan Joerg’s vocals don’t fit perfectly into the fun. (They don’t seem do last names by the way) His voice actually do work much better in the more relaxed-tempo, “The Sun” but generally, in place of the expected supersonic and technotronic his voice has ironic and laconic. It’s slow where your body wants to dance.

Again, I’m new to this band. I’ve heard four songs, total. (“It’s A Good Thing”, “The Sun”, “We Go” and “Bits+Pieces.”) The found Soundlust.com via Like.fm and saw that I reviewed Cage The Elephant and thought we might dig them, too. I really do. I wanna hear more. And so do you because if you don’t you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.

Look out for an upcoming review of the rest of Choo Choo’s second album, Cannes, (Chop Records nope, it’s not in English) released earlier this year.

Win a song download:

Other acts include Lynn Anderson, Don Edwards, Dave Stamey, Waddie Mitchell, Johnny Rodriguez, Michael Martin Murphey, and Josh Gracin, Belinda Gail, The New Pioneers, Clint Walker, Rollie Stevens (also now the festival organizer), Robert Fuller, Rocin’ M Wranglers, Waddie Mitchell, Jon Messenger, Johnny Western, and Rusty Richards.

Tons of kids and teen fun too, as well as chuckwagons, log home show, poet and songwriters, a cowboy race, mountain man rendezvous and the tradition of 9th Cavalry Buffalo soldiers and TV and movie performers.

FestivalOfTheWest.com – presented by Real Country, 96.3. Tickets are $25 each (separate from festival entry cost)

Islington O2 Academy saw the final night of the “Prog 2.0 tour” come to London, with rising stars Touchstone topping the bill.

On record at least, openers Enochian Theory are a prog-metal act with a nice line in atmospherics, and have been compared with the mighty Opeth. But tonight’s performance suffered from a very poor mix, with overpoweringly loud drums drowning out the guitar and bass, losing a lot of the subtlety. While they’re clearly talented musicians, their songwriting and compositional skills have yet to reach the level where their music can survive that sort of treatment from the soundman. Saying that, I certainly wouldn’t write them off, and there’s a lot of potential for the future.

Jurojin were a very different beast. They started as a straightforward four-piece prog-metal act, up to the last few numbers when they were joined first by a tabla player, then by virtuoso violinist Anna Phoebe. At that point they morphed into a kind of folk-metal-world music fusion that sounded like an utterly different band from what we’d heard at the beginning of the set. Like one or two other prog bands at an early point in their careers, their music goes off in many different directions, and they need to pick one and run with it. The last part of the set was genuinely exciting, and that feels to me like the direction in which they ought to go.

As for Touchstone, well, they were the band everyone came to see, and their tight high-energy performance delivered in spades. Their hugely melodic mix of progressive rock influences with a powerful hard rock sound has been steadily gaining them a following over the past three or four years. As for most of the last year and a half, the setlist drew heavily from their second album Wintercoast with a few selected songs from their earlier Discordant Dreams, including a great version of “Being Hannah”, a song I don’t think I’ve heard live for a while. As always, Kim Seviour makes a great frontwoman and visual focus for the band, completely transformed from the shy girl I first saw supporting The Reasoning four years ago.

Without wanting to downplay the importance of the rest of the band, the one thing that was very obvious this time was how much Moo Bass’ playing dominates the sound. From the machine-gun riff of the title track of “Wintercoast” onwards, his bass both drives the rhythm and acts as a principal lead instrument, leaving Rob Cottingham’s keys and Adam Hodgson’s lead guitar to add colour to fill in the sound. Like Panic Room the weekend before, with performances like this they seem destined for far bigger things.

While I’d hardly say the O2, with it’s overpriced beer and often indifferent sound and atmosphere is a favourite venue of mine, this was certainly the best gig at this venue I’ve seen to date. With the tour promoted by Classic Rock Presents Prog, attendance was very good indeed, with over 250 through the doors. And nice to see Porcupine Tree’s Steve Wilson in the crowd.

We hooked up with them about a year ago. Not in any official way, but they put us front and center of one of their handful of music channels (actually 5, yes) to follow and pay attention to. There’s no money changing hands either way, I just want these guys to succeed. They’re growing, they’re refining what they do – and they listen to what you’ve got to say. In the meantime, visit our profile there and check out what’s going on. Bonus, Like.fm founder Chris’ musical tastes are almost as varied as Soundlust’s.

PS – hello all new Like.fm listeners who clicked through and found us. We’re on Twitter and on Facebook, too. Our YouTube channel coming soon.

Radiohead self-released an album again. People are again calling it the model of the future and thebestthingeverohmyGod.

OK, but what about the music?

“Lotus Flower” and “Feral” are The King of Limbs two best songs. At least on first and second listen, so take that for what it’s worth. These two have a sound that make them accessible. While this is not a barometer for musicianship, I’ve never given a band “bonus points” just because they’re famous. If they sound good, they’re good. If they sound like they’re following a trend and phoning it in; like they have no passion or vision – or skill – they’re the opposite of good.

In that vein, Radiohead sound like any other band just getting started, an idea that comes ripe with the positive, the negative and the irrelevant. And yes, Yorke in the Lotus Flower video looks like he’s trying to become the album title. Go with your bliss, man.

A fuller, more informed, review comes later.

This tune comes off the highly-anticipated release Collapse Into Now from the Athens legends. Due in April.

Listening to Michael Stipe – as I have not for a long time – is like seeing your cousin who you used to play with everyday decades down the road and it looks like he’s been run over several times while trying to get across.

This entrant into the American trubadour warble-off is a slow, pleasant, slow, weepy beseeching, mournful, slow song. Did I mention slow? I think anytime you start your song off, “The kids have a new take. A new take on faith,” you’ve entered geezer territory. “The kids” !?!?!?

Now saying all that, I’ve listened to the song dozens of time and there’s a quality in the song that prevents it from dying a quick death. In the story which seems to be about a soldier coming home from war realizing home is forever changed, it’s not too hard to figure out that this same battle-scarred voice carries the song. Still, it’s more soul crush than Orange Crush.

Unfortunately, hearing Stipe made me think of how half the people I like will sound when they’re crooning and in their 60s. It’s a horrific thought. Oh, my heart.

Band Website: REM HQ