Quick Hits, Vol. 225 (Partner, Steve Earle, The Chemical Brothers, Beyonce)

The wife and I were just e-mailing about our kiddos' STAAR test results.  Being that she was the Type A, All A's type student, and I was the "did I pass? sweet!" type student, we have different ideas about how the testing stuff should go.  I showed her a few articles about how the STAAR is flawed and testing kids at the wrong levels, and now I've convinced her it is cool to be mediocre at standardized tests.  Winner!

Although, while my actual classroom grades might have been mediocre, I could slay a standardized test.  I freaking loved test day – roll in, finish the test in like 1/3 the time they had allotted, then dick around in the classroom and make sure everyone else knows I had finished long before they were even on the third page?  It was like Redhead-with-Glasses Super Bowl.

Partner - Saturday the 14th.  No clue where I found this one, but its all over the place.  The opener sounds like a track that would be used in the Lego Movie or something - "Fun For Everyone (Minions)" - is a silly ass track that sings about dancing like a Minion.  Catchy for sure.  Vapid without a doubt.  Then "Stoned Thought" is kind of a bluesy rocker that sounds pretty good - but as with the first track, this sounds more like an Adam Sandler/Lonely Islands joke album.  And now that I actually look at the playcount for these tracks - the minions song has freaking 3,069 plays total, and I am probably 20 of those.  "Stoned Thought" has even less.  The "hit" is going to be the third track, "Tell You Off," with a grand count of 11,504 plays as of now.

Leave it to two Canadians to write a jaunty tune about getting so durned upset that you finally tell someone off for their bad actions.  And yes, that is their Tiny Desk, which includes that one track at the start (well, the second song officially).  These two ladies are super odd, although kinda funny.  Don't need to save this EP.

Steve Earle - GUY.  A full-fledged tribute album to the late and extremely great Guy Clark, by a guy who doesn't sound too terribly different from the rough tones of Guy himself.  Which is really the issue with this album - they're pretty straight-forward country takes of the originals, with slightly lesser vocals that depend on growls to cover up for weakness.  The fabulous "Dublin Blues" gets a little more electricity to the guitars and some fiddle work, but otherwise your just singing the same tune.  "Desperados Waiting for a Train" has been done better multiple times.  "The Randall Knife," which still guts me to this day, is significantly weaker than the beauty of the original.  Honestly, just makes me want to listen to the original tracks instead.  "Old Friends" has the top stream crown at 256k.

I can tell Jerry Jeff on there, and I think the lady is probably Emmylou Harris, but I'm not sure who the other guest friends are.  And yeah, I mean, Guy Clark was one of the best songwriters in the business.  These songs are still good, because he was amazing.  And Steve Earle has a cool sound.  So these aren't horrible, but I personally think that Clark's own voice handles these tracks much better, and the new arrangements aren't anything particularly amazing.  So I'll just keep listening to the real deal.

The Chemical Brothers - No Geography.  Yikes.  These guys should have stayed back in the mid-90's.  I'd readily admit to loving Dig Your Own Hole (and to a lesser extent, Exit Planet Dust and that song they did with Q-Tip) but this doesn't move the needle forward at all, and yet is 22 years later.  Most of it is just fine, nothing bad, just more of the same house techno tunes.  But others are actively bad, like "MAH" with its aggravatingly shrill effects.  The top one by streams is "Got to Keep On," with 2.9 million streams (a surprisingly big number to me).

Makes me think of that band Jungle, who came to ACL last year.  The video makes me think of Gap ads from 15 years ago.  Up until everyone gets melted into semen together.  Which is freaky.  I'm good without this album.

Beyonce - Homecoming: The Live Album.  I'd be fully on board with seeing Beyonce live.  I don't know her music at all - like only the biggest of her hits - so listening to this has been a weird exercise of wondering if I am hearing a cover or an original Bey hit.  I literally don't know.  Also, she interpolates a bunch of other songs into her own, as she is going along.  Like, as one example of many possible ones, in "Countdown," after a while, the brass band playing the track shifts from whatever they were playing before into an interpolation of DRAM's "Broccoli," complete with the piano plinking thing from that song, as Bey continues to sing the rest of her song.  Or "Soldier," with the rest of Destiny's Child, where she slides in some Jay-Z and Tupac bits.  "Before I Let Go," second to last song on the album, is the most streamed so far at 3.6 million (which is interesting, right?  Not the first track, or one of the big hits?).

Honestly, a freaking dope song.  Shows off her voice (as usual), gets super funky with a danceable beat and the good usage of the drumline and brass, and I just got goosebumps right after the three minute mark when she kicked in.  If you don't want to dance a little bit to that then something is actually wrong with you.  It also uses elements of other songs - Tupac's "All About You" is what I hear, although that beat/sample probably came from some other, older track.
Also, this album is almost 2 hours long and has 40 tracks.  So if you want to try it, buckle down for a buncha Beyonce.  That being said, it it sounds like a really fun concert - heavy on the drum line and brass band and probably a bunch of awesome dancing that I can't see.  The call and response in tracks like "Run the World (Girls)" was probably highly fun to yell along to.  I ought to watch this Netflix special with my kiddos, even though I won't hold on to the album.