Orange Alert's Music Minute

Adam Duritz is the literary soul behind the fifteen year career of Counting Crows. I confess, as a young lad it was his lyrics that led me to the libraries and bookstores to discover my muse. He spoke of Angels, loves won and lost, change... he spoke to the simply nature of youth in a way that others in popular music at the time were unable to .

On March 25, Counting Crows will release their fifth studio album (and their first in five years), Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings, on Geffen/Interscope. Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is just your average brilliant, unsparing rock & roll song cycle about the high life and the low life, about sin and whatever the hell follows. This is an album with two distinct yet deeply related halves: Saturday Nights -- the album’s angry, electric, dissolute opening salvo -- was produced by Gil Norton (The Pixies, Foo Fighters.) The more acoustic and folk-influenced Sunday Mornings was produced by Brian Deck whose past credits include Modest Mouse and Iron & Wine.

For Duritz, Saturday Nights & Sunday Mornings is “about dissolution and disintegration. It’s about when Saturday night happens and you lose all sense of yourself. And it’s about when you wake up Sunday morning and look back at the wreck you’ve made of your life and you think, 'How can I possibly fix this? How can I ever climb out of this hole?' And then you start to try and climb.”

Listen to: 1492 (mp3) and When I dream of Michelanglo (mp3)

Speaking of fifth studio albums, don't let the new name fool you, Eric Elbogen has simply shortened the clever Say Hi To Your Mom to Say Hi. THE WISHES AND THE GLITCH is his fifth studio album and it will be released on Feb. 5th. It doesn’t take too many spins to hear that something very different is happening on his latest effort. The barrage of indiepop songs that fills Wishes' thirty-six minutes is musically richer than anything Elbogen has done before. Keyboards chime and swoosh, drums bump, basslines wiggle and vocal melodies shoot and fall, converging at the expected intersections some places and surprising with new tangents others.

Say Hi will be appearing at The Beat Kitchen here in Chicago on February 22nd. For all of their tour dates check out their myspace page.

Listen to: Northwestern Girls (mp3)

DEBT DEPT is the FOURTH record by Excepter. It's also their first record for Paw Tracks, and it will be released on March 11, 2008.

Excepter is an electronic performance group devoted to the destruction of boundaries between the psychic friends network and reality television.

DEBT DEPT is an album of protest songs played in anti-commercial style with a timeless message for today’s election-year consumer:

“VOTE NO” … or … “MAKE ONE MISTAKE, MAKE IT TWICE”

DEBT DEPT was recorded in FIVE days, in THREE intervals, over the course of NINE months. Of SEVENTEEN tracks recorded, EIGHT tracks remain, molded by FOUR successive layers of building and erasing, TWO bands in ONE.

LISTEN TO: Kill People (mp3) Here is their footnote to "Kill People": Originally titled “Guns and Roses,” this workout brings to mindthe old NRA clause, here reduced to its essential conclusion.

Why? has big plans for 2008, new album, tour, big time super-stardom, etc, etc. It all starts this March with the release of Alopecia on March 1tth and the start of the tour. You can check out their myspace page for all of the tour dates, but here is a preview of and special little treat.

Listen to: The Hollows (mp3) and Close to Me (The Cure cover) (mp3)

The Peel Back: The Cure "Head on the Door" (1985)

Where I appreciate and understand the importance of The Cure I have never been a huge fan their music. I have seen them live and been exposed to most of their music, and of all their releases 1985's Head on the Door is my favorite. I enjoy each of the tracks on this album, but most of all it is the bounce and the joy of "Close to Me" that I really love. The short little jabs of the horns to go along with the wonderful melody truly solidifies this album for me.

Head on the Door
In Between Days (mp3)/Kyoto Song/The Blood/Six Different Ways/Push/The Baby Screams/Close to Me (mp3)/A Night Like This/Screw/Sinking