One Out of Every Five Albums Sold Belong to Taylor Swift; Jason Aldean Leads Releases; Charlie Louvin Benefit DVD Seeks Backers

Thanks for the Charlie Louvin link! We don’t have the star power of Allison Krauss but we’ll do what we can. Already raised $750 in the first day, which is well on the way to the $3,000 goal.

strange… I listened through the Taylor Swift album a few times with Zune Pass and really liked it… but when I got my monthly credit allowance for ten songs, I couldn’t find one TS song that I actually wanted to listen to repeatedly. It’s like the musical equivalent of a People magazine-not something that needs to be kept around. Anyway, I bought ten Steeldrivers tracks instead.

I have to say I’m quite impressed with the new Aldean record. Thankfully, as usual, its pandering, unbearably loud lead single is its low point.

The record of the same name sounds like a country-rock take on the Foo Fighters record “There Is Nothing Left To Lose” to me. What I mean by that is that, much like that record, it signals a turning point toward a more melodic and easy to take in direction without feeling watered-down and saccharine in that it has plenty of texture, muscle and edge to it. The louder moments are more harmonic and skimp on the heavy distortion, while the softer moments have more meat to them.

Indeed one of my central criticisms of “Wide Open” was that, when you get past the two brain-hemorrhaging loud rocking singles on the album (“She’s Country”, “Crazy Town”)……….Aldean is hardly that 24/7 chicken-fried metal legend wanna-be that conventional wisdom would like you to believe. “Wide Open” was actually his softest, most sentimentally charged album to date and more often than not sounded like something that could be serviced to Adult Contemporary if not for the traditional country instrumental touch-ups and ostensibly country list-song theme selections.

I think “My Kinda Party” is Aldean’s most realized, representative album to date, that speaks to him much better than “Wide Open” did. He also has never sounded more convincing as a vocalist (and he’s no exceptional vocalist by any stretch, though I also just as adamantly shrugged at accusations he can’t sing at all) here. Nothing original, but it’s an exceptionally produced and accessible unoriginal album.

Actually, Alison & friends did 5 songs, all associated with but not all written by the Louvin Brothers.

And no disrespect to the great Ray Benson and his band, but there are longer-lived niche music acts than AATW.

The Elvis Costello record is fantastic – I can’t recommend it enough. The lead single is a Jim Lauderdale co-write called ‘I Lost You’.

I now like Costello’s last album better than I initially did. I’ve only given the new one a cursory listen so far, but I’m enjoying it.

No one has really said much about the Aldean/Kelly Clarkson duet. Guess we’ll have to listen to their performance on the CMA Awards next week to find out how it is. At least it can’t be as bad as Gwyneth Paltrow, Sugarland and the new ego spreader Taylor Swift.

*facepalm*

Country stars have bene hyping their own success for as long as there have been country stars–and most had no ill effects from it at all.

The thing to remember in comparing “One out of five albums sold” is that there are now a much, much smaller number of albums being sold altogether right now. 20 percent of what?

I understand people were making the upper reaches of the album charts in recent weeks with a few– count ‘em, a few–thousand CDs sold. And if you find a chart that says it includes album downloads, then we’re sort of in an apple and oranges situation for comparisons anyway…