Take Two translates the day’s headlines for Southern California, making sense of the news and cultural events that affect our lives. Produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from October 2012 – June 2021. Hosted by A Martinez.
Tuesday always means it's time for Tuesday Reviewsday, our weekly new music segment.
This week,
, news director at Billboard Magazine, and music journalist
join host Alex Cohen in the studio.
Halperin's first offering is from the band Fiction Plane and their new album, Mondo Lumina (release date: Nov. 13). The band features frontman Joe Sumner, the son of Sting!
She says that while their first album came out in 2003, they never quite took off in the U.S. On this album you find a band that’s found its stride. And yes, it nods to the Police, but also to bands that skirt the like between modern rock and pop, like Jimmy Eat World, and their contemporaries in England like The Verve.
Martins brings us new music from the band Sports. It's a 4-5 piece basement rock band, started in 2012 at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. They playfully call their genre "sock-core," or "sockwave" ... a joke on their style of soft/emotional band playing music owing entirely to punk and power-pop. The Get Up Kids is a great reference, maybe early Saves the Day, and also current stuff like Waxahatchee and Swearin'.
Next Halperin talks about the 12th edition of the Bob Dylan bootleg series, which is a collection that aims to contextualize his recording career in a different way through recordings of alternate takes, rehearsals and live performances. Here we have the original version of the song, Subterranean Homesick Blues.
This particular volume, which spans his work in 1965 to 1966 and is packaged as a six-CD set (there’s also an 18-disc version that includes every note recorded during those session), covers perhaps Dylan’s most creative and prolific period and some might even say his best.
In 18 months, he recorded three seminal albums: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde (a double album) marking a transition and evolution from recording in New York to Nashville.
The final selection comes from Martins and the mysterious Lazyboy Empire.
He describes it as a super-catchy, fairly viral tropical-pop gem from a mystery artist. We know it was produced by burgeoning Los Angeles hit-maker Ricky Reed, but no one knows who else is involved.