Recently in Music Category

Maroon 5 - Songs About Jane, originally uploaded by Mike Haddad.

I like this album. It shows, because the mean is 4.25. I would love to go on about how it got me through some hard times and how you all should listen to it, but I'm exhausted. Just accept that it did, and that you should.

Avril Lavigne - Under My Skin, originally uploaded by Mike Haddad.

After last weeks post on A Present for Everyone, I went to see what other highly rated albums I had. I realise that scoring gets skewed when the number of tracks changes, but with that in mind I give you my number 2: Under My Skin.

Coming in just under A Present for Everyone which had a mean score of 4.69, Under My Skin has a mean score of 4.66.

On the other hand, I've listened to the songs on Under My Skin a lot more over all than the songs on A Present for Everyone (the play counts here are misleading, since I have more than 1 computer without a linked iTunes library).

Busted - A Present for Everyone, originally uploaded by Mike Haddad.

Today, I wanted to see what my over all highest rated album on iTunes was. Of 13 tracks, I rated 12 songs as 5 stars and 1 song (She Wants to Be Me) as 1 star. So Busted wins. Too bad they broke up, and were resigned to a fate of having the songs butchered with horrible covers by the Jonas Brothers.

I really and truly enjoy the soundtrack from motion picture version of Chicago. I have a strong bias toward the movie version of musicals because they are usually more produced and cleaner sounding. Chicago is no exception. While I could barely bring myself to listen to the OBC recordings of Chicago, I can listen to the motion picture recording start to finish (minus Mr. Cellophane, because I just can't stand that song). It also has a few bonus tracks that weren't in the movie.

Favourite tracks: Cell Block Tango, When You're Good To Mama, We Both Reached For The Gun, and Nowadays.
Tracks I skip regularly: Mister Cellophane, and to a lesser extent Funny Honey

A song I like: Why by Avril Lavigne

Let's talk about Mika, the new UK artist who's trying really hard to make it big here. Nancy's already heard most of what I have to say about Mika, but a few things that happened to day have lead me to decide to try and formulate these thoughts into something solid.

Now you may or may not know that I read Towleroad regularly. So odds are I heard about Mika long before any of you did. I should say read about Mika, instead of heard. I listened to about ten seconds of a clip before realising I hated it and turning it off. I can't even tell you if it was Grace Kelly. I can tell you that what felt like more than a few months later, I recognised his obnoxious voice coming out of Joey's iTunes.

From the beginning I was negatively biased towards Mika. As much as Andy at Towleroad might love Mika because he got this label with a song about how he was rejected by a first label for not being willing to change, I just see a second record label who sees a market for people with image issues who want to see Mika as their saviour. I.e. most of the people I know in Sheridan's Music Theatre Program who don't sound the way they look and then don't have an instantly marketable image. Or, more simply, fags.

The other day I went shopping with Nancy. I cracked and bought Mika's first album out here, something about gay whatever homo rainbow. I might have made that up. But 'Grace Kelly' was an extremely catchy song as much as I hated to admit it. It will randomly pop into my head every once and a while and I'll be stuck with it for a good chunk of the day. Let's just say the album was not like that.

Actually, let's just say that album was a piece of crap. I wish I hadn't bought it. I really wanted the Timbaland CD too, but when I got to HMV I couldn't remember that so I bought Mika instead. I regret it. And today, my regret was solidified.

Tonight, I was listening to the radio as I drove downtown with my mom to pick up my math books from my place. For those of you that don't know Z103, it's southern Ontario's biggest top-40 pop station. It has more than one tower set to 103.5 with a huge broadcasting range. It also runs a show weekdays from 7:00p to 7:30p called Pump It Or Dump It, where they play a song and then listeners vote on it.

Tonight's song was Mika's Love Today. And it was dumped by 97%.

Watch This:

Then This:

I know it's not a Tuesday, but last night was the earliest that I could get my hands on Nancy Silverman's demo album 'Now You Know My Secrets'. I would have been the first person to buy one but Adam had to be the biggest douche bag in the world and cut in front of me. Douche bag.

I had already heard 6 of the 9 tracks on the demo. However these tracks were rerecorded with nicer instruments and equipment, resulting in a much nicer sound. The three new tracks are phenomenal. I don't know how anyone else would be able to get a hold of a copy, but as soon as I do know I'll post it up here.

For those of you not aware of what's going on with the whole Sony Root-kit situation, Boing Boing provides a pretty good summary of it. Originally I laughed at Sony for being dumb enough to think that they would get away with installed malicious software on their customers' computers. Then I realized that I purchased one of the cds listed on the infected cd list: Natasha' Bedingfield's Unwritten.

Not a pleasant realization, considering I guard my computer like my life. Now, the CD itself says nothing about the software and my product number doesn't match the one listed which makes me wonder if the software was only included on newer releases of the cd. The fact that this is happening alone is enough to make me never want to purchase a Sony CD again. I'm just glad that I've had to reformat three times since this happened, and copied my songs off of my iPod instead of from the cds. Sony can bite me. I'm going to see if I can get any money from all the lawsuits being filed.