Jumping The Land Shark

Do you like LCD Soundsystem, Basement Jaxx and sex? That's what Land Shark's self-titled debut sounds like, you lucky dog.

Sure, it was released in September and, since we spend most of our time hiding under our desks, it took us a while to pull around. But we did. And whoo-boy, the Shark has a great mix of mindless/mindful electro-house, campy (yet somehow alluring) sex-poetry and hot bass lines.

You nasty, Lance. And the album art (above) is between the bee's knees and its waistline.

Be Good Jaded Insiders

We'll admit to exercising one of the stupidest approaches to music criticism when it came to the Be Good Tanyas: judging a band by its fans (see Matthews, Dave).

See, we were at a show featuring Jolie Holland (a former Tanya) a couple years ago, standing next to a gal trashed on alco-pop with a Coach handbag, smacking her gum while slurring asininity like, "I like all sorts of muuuusic. Like jazz, I really love John Mayer and Josh Groban is, like, so deep. And I like blues, like the Be Good Tanyas." Being the crass, snobby jerks we were are, we associated this drink-spilling dipsy-doodle with the trio.

Today, though, we finally got around to "Hello Love," released in October, and we gladly put our dumb feet in our dumb mouths. It's a great mix of country, rock, folk and blues, with standouts like "For the Turnstiles" and a cute cover of Prince's "When Doves Cry." Their melodies are pretty and we like that we can when they take breaths and move their fingers on the frets. It's not the greatest Americana release you'll hear this year -- have you even tried listening to Solomon Burke? -- but it's a nice place to start.

Arcade Fi(red)

"Mixing is going really well, but that's not what I'm writing to you about today..."

Well, dammit.

Arcade Fire's "Rebellion" is apparently featured in the background of a (RED) AIDS relief/awareness campaign commercial during this holiday season.

Edit: "Rebellion" is featured in a "manifesto video" for the campaign, according to organizers. While there are no plans at this point to broadcast said video on T.V., it certainly presents a unique opportunity for the band...

The campaign, thus far, has been made prominent via partners like Apple and Converse. Arcade Fire frontman Win Butler is obviously a little bit more than conscious about the unfortunate connotations that come with licensing donating song rights to commercials.

"Some people this may seem crass and capitalistic, and I sympathize with that position, but in the first week of the campaign they have raised enough money for 10,000 women to have antiretroviral drugs for a year... We don't give a f*ck about the Gap or American Express, and we are in no way endorsing their products, but as long as scientists are developing drugs that you can give to a HIV positive mother and her newborn baby to help stop the transmission of AIDS to the child, the money could be coming from the devil for all I care, as long as people are getting medication," he said on the band's Web site.

"Just know that we made this decision with a lot (sic) soul searching. It just seemed so snobbish to not engage with the reality of the absurd sums of money big business can raise without even noticing it."

Don't worry about it, Win! At least it wasn't a new song. Then we'd call it hocking. Then we hope you'd write a song about what we said about it. Then write a blog post about it. And then we'd write about that, huh? So meta.

You're Crumbelievable!

It's not quite John Mellencamp painting himself up with patriotic colors and sprinting through amber fields of grain. But the morphing of EMF's "Unbelievable" into "Crumbelievable," the theme song to a new Kraft chemical compound/cheese product of a curious nature, is extremely upsetting, and not just because that song is really pretty good, and don't you judge us.

Actually, it's not even the song so much, it's the product. Crumbles? Cheese crumbles? As in, torn-up pieces of cheese? Ostensibly, said crumbles are designed to ease the process of adding cheesy flavor explosions to your chili, salad or candy bars, which is extremely handy, because anytime anyone here at Jaded Insider attempts to slice up blocks of cheese themselves it usually results in violent geysers of blood.

EMF, you might remember, stands for something dirty, but for the life of us we can't remember what. Kill m----erf---ing Depeche Mode, we think.

Rockin' Me Sideways

We had heard the tale of Citizen Cope busking in New York's lifeline subway, but it wasn't until this weekend that we saw it in action.

Northbound G train in Park Slope on Sunday afternoon, a scraggly looking Cope on cello was joined by his dreadlocked-and-toothless friend, who sang what we thought was a cover of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door." Most people looked disinterested if not annoyed -- then again, most would have the same reaction even if it were the perfectly resurrected body and soul of Marvin Gaye staging an encore of "What's Goin' On" on a Saturday night.

Since we're paid in peanuts and blank CD-Rs here at Jaded Insider, we can't afford a camera phone and thus could not capture a pic of the perpetrator. Instead, we've found another Citizen Cope "street" marketing scheme, and rebuttal, in the photo above.