Certainly I’m not the only person who heard the rumors about a sex tape involving Leighton Meester of Gossip Girl and thought, “Well, this will be a fine way to cross-promote that catchy little Cobra Starship song she lends vocals to.” I mean, it’s called “Good Girls Go Bad,” for Pete’s sake. So obvs! [The Awl / YouTube] More »
“(I Make) Good Girls Go Bad” is the first single from Hot Mess, the third album by self-aware electropop outfit Cobra Starship–and in a sort of one-upping of yesterday’s news that her co-star Taylor Momsen had signed to Interscope, it has Gossip Girl star Leighton Meester trading off vocals with lead Cobra Gabe Saporta. The track is produced by Kevin “Let It Rock” Rudolf, and it doesn’t quite have the crackle of “Guilty Pleasure” from the band’s last album, but Meester certainly sounds like she has at least a couple more songs of “electro-pop edge” left in her. [YouTube / MySpace] More »
Saturday’s “surprise guest” at the two-day parking-lot festival known as the Bamboozle was introduced with the three words “Don’t,” “Stop,” and “Believin’,” and from my vantage point in the crowd–which rendered the men muscling through four of Journey’s hits onstage into something resembling very animated Berzerk robots–I thought that I was actually watching the San Francisco band collect a big, yet sorta-strange, paycheck. As it turned out, the band that I was singing along with was actually a really, really convincing tribute band. (Of course, some smart-asses out there will assert that having Arnel Pineda on vocals makes the currently touring incarnation of Journey a cover band of sorts, but we’ll leave that alone for now.) But the surprise and its “gotcha!” aftershock were both appropriate for a festival that, despite being clad in “FUCK SWINE FLU” t-shirts as far as the eye could see, spent a fair chunk of time looking back. More »
The Academy Is… irritate me to no end when I’m forced to add the ellipsis to their name for accuracy, but I’m willing to let it go considering how much I’ve enjoyed their album Fast Times at Barrington High this year. Still, something’s been missing. Something that would tie the occasionally angsty teen-rock lyrics of the band with the popular films that seem to inspire the band; something that would summarize one of those films to spare me the trouble of watching it again. YouTube, you always come through.
ARTIST: Fall Out Boy et al.
TITLE: Welcome To The New Administration
WEB DEBUT: Aug. 25, 2008
Just in case you were wondering why on earth “gabe saporta dead” was rising up the Google Trends ranks yesterday, apparently some lunatic out there Photoshopped an MTVNews.com page and a death certificate that were both claiming the Cobra Starship singer had died in a bus accident. More »
