Brandon's Buzz

Not so much happening out there in musicland this week, so please forgive the short and sweet record store report. (And don’t forget: with new stuff on the horizon from Daughtry, Reba, my beloved Brooke White, and Sweet & Hoffs 2.0, summer ’09 is far from over, kids, so enjoy this relative breather.)

• One of the great underrated American bands of the past
  decade receives a gorgeous career retrospective this week with
  Music from the North Country: The Jayhawks Anthology. (And, yes, their classic singles “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” and
  “Save It for a Rainy Day” are most definitely front and center.)

 

• Hot on the heels of a big screen smash, which has spawned the
  surprise soundtrack hit “The Climb,” cute li’l Miley Cyrus is back already with Hannah Montana, Volume 3, the latest collection of songs from the Disney Channel’s cash cow.

 

• And finally, this week brings another visit from Jay Farrar
  and the brilliant boys of Son Volt, who drop their sixth album,
  American Central Dust. Methinks it’ll be quite hard to top their terrific 2006 effort The Search, which featured a spine-tingling cameo from the dynamite Shannon McNally, but if anyone’s up to the task, it’s the very gentlemen who gave us the scorching 1996 rock radio classic “Drown,” which remains one of the best songs in the history of ever. Count me in.

names dropped with reckless abandon: Brooke White, Daughtry, Hannah Montana, Jay Farrar, Matthew Sweet, Miley Cyrus, Reba McEntire, Shannon McNally, Son Volt, Susanna Hoffs, The Jayhawks