Blog Posts by Dave DiMartino

It’s an inspiring week in the world of pop music!

Rocker Lenny Kravitz caused a hubbub this weekend playing his unique brand of rock ‘n’ roll before a bewildered country music audience at the CMA Music Festival!

Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ extended “club gig” at LA’s Fonda Theatre was shut down by fire marshals Saturday night due to overcrowding!

The week’s most-anticipated new release? By none other than up-and-coming rockers Black Sabbath!

And in an ironic twist: At any given moment, one third of the world’s population is sleeping!

Black Sabbath: 13 (Republic) There is a certain segment of today’s rock audience that has ascribed almost mythical importance to Black Sabbath, largely because of their perceived influence in the rise of what we now call heavy metal, and the fact that their plodding simplicity, topped off by the charismatic howling of lovable frontman Ozzy Osbourne, really has no cultural equal. In other words: they rock! This new set, which features original band

It’s been a busier week than I’d like, meaning:

I missed the opportunity earlier today to take a bus trip to Santa Barbara to watch former blond reggae rocker Sting perform all the songs that will comprise his soon-to-come, self-composed Broadway musical—dudes, this is not fiction!

I awoke to a suggestion that Miley Cyrus’s new “risqué” single artwork was one of the biggest music stories of the day!

And, perhaps mostly, we decided to start up a list of musicians we thought were likely to die soon and assign their obituaries so that we could get ahead of the news when, er, that fateful day comes!

All told? Another exciting day in the world on music journalism—a craft that has never been more exciting or more certain to spread joy throughout the world since I got my degree in social media in the ‘80s!

Also: It’s now hip to make stuff up just for personal kicks!

Queens Of The Stone Age: …Like Clockwork (Matador) It’s not that easy to describe exactly what it is that makes the Queens Of

I missed my chance to rave about the new Daft Punk album last week—for indeed that’s when it was finally issued--but rather than write about it I chose to be stuck aboard an American Airlines flight trapped on a Dallas runway due to inclement weather. But it’s every bit as good as you might’ve heard, and of course it is a huge sales success, and this is good.

Coincidentally, in Dallas I was watching an extremely impressive live performance by Australia’s Empire Of The Sun, whose new album, due in a few weeks, is, like Daft Punk’s, one of this year’s very best.

Speaking as the sort of music fan who devoted the prior two weeks to listening to the complete recorded works of Country Joe & The Fish, Country Joe McDonald and Barry Melton—all three, which is the sort of thing a guy like me does when new stuff seems kind of dull—this is a very good sign.

Still, does any of this really make a difference when today’s biggest music story involved a Danish music fan who placed his hand on

photo: FlickrIf the premise behind the Yahoo! On the Road series is to present some of the finest talent available to a series of locations across America, on Monday, May 20, Dallas might've scored a major upset. Twice.

Two stellar bands from Australia — Empire Of The Sun and Gold Fields — were surprisingly, alarmingly, good. And those fortunate enough to pick up tickets for the performance at Dallas's House of Blues saw firsthand that a band's albums, no matter how good they might be, simply can't duplicate the thrill and vitality of a solid live performance.

I’m not sure what it may mean as far as the record industry is concerned, but this week was significant indeed.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the present-day music biz realizes that the buzz on Random Access Memories, the soon-to-be-released album by helmet-wearing French space dudes Daft Punk, has been bordering on the absurd since initial track “Get Lucky” emerged during Coachella weekend.

This morning it was announced that the entire album could be heard for free, streaming on iTunes.

This afternoon, everyone I spoke with who liked music had heard it and had an opinion about it. Most of them liked it.

And next week, when it’s finally available for purchase, many of them will have forgotten about it!

Who says things aren’t getting better than ever?

Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires Of The City (XL) As one of the few record-buying humans who was never deeply attached to or personally invested in the Strokes—and thus felt no sense of letdown by their latest album, which is

There are weeks when one can look at new album release lists and wonder who in their right mind would buy any of these?

This, however, is not one of those weeks.

I don’t know if anyone might’ve guessed ten years ago that contemporary country music would become one of the hottest genres going, but here we are. New releases by Lady Antebellum, the Pistol Annies and the Dixie Chicks’ own Natalie Maines are among this week’s most hotly anticipated albums, and all of them—however far removed they may be from the works of Hank Williams and Patsy Cline—represent where the public’s taste resides at the moment, and that’s not a bad thing at all. Because while each signals a deliberate move forward from the strict traditionalism of what some would call classic country, none are particularly blatant examples of crass commercialism, none appear to be specifically aiming at “crossing over” to pop at the expense of art, and all of them are actually quite interesting.

And then there’s that new Gatsby

They say that rock ‘n’ roll is a young man’s game, but of course “they” are inadvertently sexist—I’m told that chicks rock as well!—and clearly weren’t living in Los Angeles this week, where two of the hottest concert tickets came via private shows by one Rod Stewart (current age: 68) and the Rolling Stones (average age two years older than that of the US Supreme Court).

Unexpectedly, neither artist covered “Walk, Don’t Run” because they dug the fab irony!

But it drove home the point that with occasional exceptions, the old-school rockers, the ones whose careers were well in bloom ages before MTV came to be, still generate the most personal excitement among their fans. Which couldn’t be better illustrated than this year’s rather dreary Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall Of Fame Awards, largely celebrating a batch of post-MTV artists well past their commercial shelf life—with the notable exception of Rush, never a media favorite, who garnered the most vocal and notable support among observers, perhaps

Last week was an odd one for music fans: The year’s biggest music fest, Coachella, faded out with something of a whimper, overshadowed by, of all things, the surging popularity of a Daft Punk single and a video by the mildly amusing Psy, now apparently back for his second 15 minutes of fame, and what we have now come to call Record Store Day.

To those of use who once spent significant time behind the counters of various record stores, Record Store Day is a bittersweet event. Finding a record store that actually celebrates it is no easy task. Still, this Saturday I did my duty, drove by my local record store here in Sherman Oaks, California, saw a huge line in front of it, decided to come back a few hours later, and finally managed to pick up a single disc—that Universal reissue of the first American Nick Drake album, originally released via Island/Capitol back in the early ‘70s—for close to $30.

I then dutifully filed it away, feeling good about myself and simultaneously wondering