Music Report

Welcome to the South by Southwest edition of The Music Report although I will reference that festival little if at all, it just happens to be contemporaneous this week.

Melody Gardot’s story is a bit of a downer. She was hit by a car at age 19, an injury which still requires her to walk with a cane, wear dark glasses because of sensitivity to light and experience severe pain, so she knows what she’s talking about when she sings the blues. Her doctors recommended she adopt music as a therapeutic tool to rebuild her neural connections after her head trauma. She did them one better and became a lauded jazz vocalist in her native Philadelphia and beyond.
http://www.melodygardot.com/

I’d like to give a shout out to a band whose bassist waited on us for dinner last night at McCoy’s in the Orlando International Airport, Poverty Branch. They are more legit than that introduction would make them sound having played the main room at the Knitting Factory and with an album on iTunes. Their image borrows stylistically from Panic at the Disco but their music is much more subdued although not without the angst.
http://www.myspace.com/povertybranch

Our old friend Teren Delvon Jones aka Del the Funky Homosapien has a new album called 11th Hour that has been called “a tight and ruthlessly efficient 48 minutes of boasting.” Self-produced, and perhaps not his best work, 11th Hour harks back to Del’s early work almost 15 years ago. The album includes “surprising turns of phrase and the occasional flair of free association” but, stylistically, we find little original
http://www.amazon.com/Eleventh-Hour-Del-Funkee-Homosapien/dp/B0013FSV7U

I’d be overstating the quality of the BLK JKS music if I were to say that they were the best thing to come out of Africa since the human race but perhaps not by much. These group plays a distinctly afrocentric style of music yet a relatively accessible one for us crackers. Their sometimes-psychedelic, dub-inspired tunes may draw a great deal of attention from DJs and others in the wake of their appearance on the cover of Fader magazine.
http://www.blkjks.blogspot.com/

On the music video scene, we’ve got the video for the first single, entitled “Run,” off the new Gnarls Barkley album The Odd Couple. Catchy song that continues the tradition they set out with “Crazy” and the rest of their first album, perhaps the video is most noteworthy for its Justin Timberlake cameo, vintage wardrobe and throwback dance moves.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=29581750