Brandon's Buzz

July 4th week is traditionally one in which the music bidness kills all the lights and hangs the gone fishin’ sign on the door, so imagine my surprise to find there’s actually a tiny li’l bit of life in the industry here at the top of the month. None of the following are exactly what you’d call earth-shattering releases, but if you absolutely need your shopping fix (not that I would know anything at all about that concept!), you might find one or more of these new albums worth checking out.

Their 2004 debut yielded them a surprise cross-format radio smash (“Heaven,” whose massive appeal always escaped me), a Grammy (for Best Pop Vocal by a Duo or Group), and the undying respect and admiration of their peers (Willie Nelson is said to worship their music). Their 2006 album Sacred didn’t achieve nearly the same success, but Texas trio Los Lonely Boys are back to roll the dice once more with Forgiven.

A little juggernaut called High School Musical made Vanessa Hudgens the most famous girl on the globe whom nobody over the age of sixteen could pick out of a lineup. Get used to her mug, kids: her first album, 2006’s V — whose smash single “Come Back to Me” contained a nifty riff on Player’s “Baby Come Back” — served as her introduction to the world at large, and she’s looking to build on that momentum with her second record, Identified.

Another band that gets the Sherry Ann Seal of Approval — yes, indeed, the very same Sherry Ann who yelled at me for, like, a solid hour over the telephone last night for my recent R.E.M. playlist, which I thought was heart-stoppingly brilliant and which she thought was bone-crunchingly godawful (that crazy witch even had the gall to proclaim to me that “Losing My Religion” was Out of Time‘s worst song!) — is The National, a group of guys, led by the terrifically kooky Matt Berninger (who has the hands-down oddest voice — imagine, if you can, Don McLean’s lilting angst crossed with Johnny Cash’s brooding rasp, and you’ve got a pretty fair idea of what you’re in for here — that you’ll ever fall head over heels for), who last year released Boxer, their fourth album and the disc that brought them their greatest success (both critical and commercial) heretofore. A Skin, a Night, in stores last week, contains a DVD chronicling the making of Boxer alongside a CD of original demos, live performances, acoustic radio sessions, and b-sides.

(P.S. Being the magnanimous best friend that I most certainly am, I invited Sherry Ann to pen her own playlist of, ahem, supposedly better R.E.M. material which evidently slipped through the cracks over here at Buzz Central, and I even promised to publish it right here on the Buzz, replete with iTunes links. She was utterly incensed that 1992’s “Everybody Hurts” — the token wrist-slitter on every ’90s mixtape of consequence, no doubt — wasn’t included, reason being that the song scored a Noel bawling jag during one of the maddening manic-depressive pendulum swings in his push-pull relationship with you-know-who during the first season of “Felicity.” And I told her what I’m telling you all now: any song whose first and primary conjured mental image is of that ridiculous drip Scott Foley — was there ever a more ass-chapping WB superstar? — just can’t be that noteworthy. (What can I tell you? I was always a Ben guy.) Anyhow, we’ll see if Sherry Ann has the cheek to accept my offer, but let me say upfront: if one of her playlist’s entries is “Shiny Happy People,” the band’s unbearably twee 1991 quasi-duet with the B-52’s’ Kate Pierson (and doesn’t the mere thought of that force a shudder?), don’t say I didn’t warn you people.)

(P.S.S. She is totally gonna let me have it over this one, and don’t for a second think I don’t know it!)

Enjoying a surprise radio triumph of his own this summer with “Say” — the sweet tune he wrote for last winter’s smash film The Bucket List (and if you’re not yet familiar with the song, get thee to at once and rectify that; it really does grow on you after a couple of listens) that has strangely caught fire at top 40 radio in the past two months — John Mayer is back with Where the Light Is, a live album (his third) whose setlist hews closely — and a little too much so, if you ask me — to Continuum, his overheated 2006 record that won him his first Album of the Year Grammy nomination (an honor that should have gone to his earlier triumph Heavier Things). Recorded during a two-night stand at Los Angeles’ spankin’ new Nokia Theatre (which is, like, six blocks from A’s downtown loft) last December, Light also contains a miniature jam session with Steve Jordan and Pino Palladino, who fill out the cleverly-named John Mayer Trio (its namesake’s side project, for when he’s in the mood to indulge his blues jones), and covers of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin'” (not sure if he can muster the wondrous weariness required to vocally pull that song off, but it can’t be any worse than Deana Carter’s ridiculous stab a few years back) and Jimi Hendrix’s “Bold As Love” (a Mayer concert staple for years now). It’s always so hard to tell with Mayer: this could be great fun, and it could be a pompous trainwreck.

names dropped with reckless abandon: "Felicity", A, Deana Carter, Don McLean, John Mayer, Johnny Cash, Los Lonely Boys, R.E.M., Sherry Ann, The B-52's, The National, Tom Petty, Vanessa Hudgens, Willie Nelson