Blog Posts by David Marchese

Earlier this week, a colleague asked me to guess who Billboard had just revealed as having the top-selling album in the country. Taylor Swift? No. Bruno Mars? Uh-uh. Nicki Minaj? Wrong again. The correct answer was Cake. Cake? Yes, Cake. The long-running and irony-infused Sacramento band whose previous studio album, 2004's Pressure Chief, had peaked on the chart at No. 17. I like Cake fine - the band's deadpan cover of the disco classic "I Will Survive" will, fittingly, live forever - but the biggest selling band in the country? I didn't see that coming. (In fairness, the band hit the top spot by selling fewer copies than any other artist since Billboard has been keeping records.)

Cake though are far from the first left-field No. 1. Below are five other albums that, to me, anyway, were surprise chart-toppers. (I've limited my choices to albums released during the Spin era, from 1985 till the present.) Let me know what you think!

1. Various Artists, La Bamba

No. 1 for the weeks of

Over at SPIN.com we recently listed the 30 Biggest Concerts of 2010. I was fortunate enough to see a handful of the shows myself. In other cases, I saw artists on the same tour for which SPIN selected an individual show. From that list of 30, I've picked my top seven.

7. Hole at Stubbs, Austin, Texas, March 20
I was down in Austin for SXSW, covering the festival for the first time. I caught dozens of bands and no frontperson came close to matching Courtney Love for pure rock star attitude. She goaded the audience; sang herself ragged; commanded the stage. 2010 didn't quite turn into the comeback year that many predicted for Love, but at this show she more than held up her end of the deal.

6. Pavement, Coachella, April 18
Touring again for the first time in ten years, Pavement could've shown up onstage and whistled Schubert lieder and I would've loved it. Thankfully, on the two nights I saw them on their reunion tour, every element that makes me love the alt-era icons—the humor, the

There's been a lot written about Captain Beefheart's musical and cultural legacy since his sad passing on December 17-about how his surreal, skronking music opened up new avenues for rock to clatter down; how his off-beat, wholly original lyrics and forceful singing set standards for musical avant-gardism; about how he truly and completely kicked hard butt as a personality and artist. All true of course, but I'd like to share a thought about why Captain Beefheart mattered so much to me: I didn't like people who didn't like him.

I remember burning a copy of Trout Mask Replica, Beefheart's best-known album, from my friend Adam when I was maybe 16-years-old. It was hard to warm to-aggressive, off-kilter, weird. It was probably two years before I could listen to the album all the way through, my ears finally having grown accustomed to music that didn't sound like some version of the Beatles or Black Sabbath. It promptly became indispensable-and a key resource in the battle between Us and

David Lynch is one diversely entertaining dude. He, of course, directs wild, surreal feature films (Blue Velvet is the best; Lost Highway the most underappreciated). He wrote a great pocket-sized book of advice and aphorisms, Catching the Big Fish. And last July he released Dark Night of the Soul, a spooky, catchy album he put together with producer Danger Mouse. But even the keenest Lynchophile would've been hard pressed to predict that the Montana native would release "Good Day Today," a shimmering, pulsating dance single which finds the 64-year-old charmingly singing, "I wanna have a good day today" in an electronically altered voice.

Released in conjunction with the eerie, bluesy "I Know," "Good Day Today" will be followed in January by a set of remixes of the song commissioned by electronic label Sunday Best.

Speaking on the phone from his office in Los Angeles, Lynch gave us the lowdown on this lovely little turn of events.

Did you have any experience with electronic dance music

This past Wednesday, I saw Swedish indie-pop singer Lykke Li perform at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan. It was a great show, Li's voice vacillates between trembling heartache and feminine bravado just as wonderfully live as it does on record. She's grown as a performer too. The last time I'd seen her, at Coachella in 2009, she seemed uncomfortable having so many eyes on her. Not anymore. She banged on drums, played the kazoo, cast bat-like silhouettes with her long black cape, sang with passion -- she was great. I only wish I hadn't been so distracted by the overly amorous couple in front of me who spent most of the show apparently trying to scratch each other's tonsils with their tongues.

Look, I have no beef with public displays of affection, but people at concerts are squashed together. It's uncomfortable to be stuck next to a duo that's all but getting it on. So, with that in mind, here are my top three breaches of concert-going etiquette:

1. Unreasonable making out. Please, kiss

Bruce Springsteen has been plugging The Promise ­­- a collection of previously unreleased songs from the sessions for 1978's Darkness on the Edge of Town ­- pretty hard. To support the album's November 16 release, Bruce gave interviews to the New York Times and Rolling Stone. He popped up on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, performing a couple songs from the compilation and even appearing in a bit (dressed as his 1975 self). In October, HBO aired a feature-length documentary about the making of Darkness. I could be spacing, but it sure seems like there's been a much heavier PR push then the one that accompanied the 30th anniversary reissue of (the better-known, better-selling) Born to Run five years back. In a way, that disparity makes sense. The backstory of Born to Run is sorta standard-young upstart breaks through. Darkness, though, only surfaced after Springsteen extricated himself from legal issues that had prevented him for releasing any new music for two years. The latter album

My personal listening habits are predictably reactionary. If I get deep into noisy post-punk, eventually I'll swing back towards tuneful Top 40. If I spend a bunch of time with bass-heavy R&B, I'm bound to before long wind up in metal's trebly embrace. A couple weeks ago, I was way down deep into folky stuff — lots of acoustic guitars and earnest, twangy vocals. So I'm now on a serious synth-pop kick. I think I'll linger here for a while, though, mostly because of Diamond Rings.

The work of Toronto musician John O'Regan, formerly of indie rockers the D'Urbervilles, Diamond Rings' debut, Special Affections, has four or five of the catchiest choruses I've heard this year. With their cycling, melodic keyboard lines, metronomic, propulsive bass parts, and slightly chintzy drum machine patterns (the rinky-dinkness of which keeps things on the sympathetic side of arch), the music calls to mind '80s synth-pop acts like OMD, Human League, and Duran Duran. O'Regan's deep voice is reminiscent of

My favorite moment of the annual CMJ music festival, which concluded not long ago in New York City, was one I shared with just a handful of others. In the back room of a dimly lit, slightly shabby Brooklyn space called the Cameo Gallery, Denver, Colorado's the Chain Gang of 1974 were getting ready to play. There were maybe seven people in the audience, so only a few more than were performing—never a good sign.

Nor a definitive one, thankfully. The band played their funky, synth-driven rock—sort of a LCD Soundsystem-Beck-Duran Duran hybrid—as if thousands were watching them. Even better, they sounded as if they deserved the attention. The show was wonderful.

This mostly had to do with frontman, Kamtin Mohager. Switching between bass, keyboard, cowbell, and guitar, dancing (well!), and singing in an attractive breathy croon, he was as charismatic a young musician as I've seen in a while. It takes guts to go for it as a performer, especially when the conditions aren't great (i.e., the