Other top award winners were songwriters Amund Bjørklund and Espen Lind (both members of Norwegian performing right society TONO and represented in the U.S. by BMI), along with Ne-Yo, who received the prestigious Robert S. Musel Award for Song of the Year for Beyoncé’s “Irreplaceable.” The song is published by EMI Music Publishing Ltd./Stellar Songs Ltd.; the song and songwriters also received the BMI Urban Song of the Year prize earlier this year.

Modest Mouse’s “Dashboard” earned BMI’s College Song of the Year crown for tallying the most performances on American college radio. The infectious lead single off the band’s We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank album, “Dashboard” was co-written by Johnny Marr (PRS), Tom "King Sour" Peloso and Joe Plummer and published by Chrysalis Music.

The BMI Dance Award went to Ian Dench and Amanda Ghost (PRS) for “Beautiful Liar,” recorded by genre-bending combo Beyoncé and Shakira. “Beautiful Liar” was published by Bucks Music Group Ltd. (PRS), EMI Music Publishing Ltd. (PRS) and Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd. (PRS).

Prestigious “Million-Air” certificates were also presented throughout the evening in recognition of those songs that have achieved more than three million U.S. radio and television performances — the equivalent of more than 17 years of continuous airplay. The Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” co-penned by Sir Mick Jagger (PRS) and Keith Richards (PRS), and Eric Clapton’s (PRS) “Layla,” co-written by Clapton and Jim Gordon, both topped the list with seven million performances each, while John Lennon’s (PRS) self-penned “Imagine” was recognized for six million performances. Five-million performance honorees included “Higher Love” co-penned by Steve Winwood (PRS) and Will Jennings; Graham Lyle’s (PRS) “What’s Love Got To Do With It”; and “You Really Got Me,” composed by BMI Icon Ray Davies (PRS). BMI Icon Steve Winwood also composed two more songs in the list: “Gimme Some Loving” (4 million) co-written by Muff Winwood and Spencer Davies (both PRS), and “Valerie” (3 million) which was also co-written by Will Jennings.

Additional award-winners whose compositions soared past the three million performance mark included Shania Twain (PRS), Graham Gouldman (PRS), The Bee Gees’ Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb (all PRS), Sir Paul McCartney (PRS), Fleetwood Mac’s Christine McVie, Roxette’s Per Gessle (STIM), Mats Persson (STIM), Paul Herman (PRS), Mort Shuman (SACEM), Wally Badarou (SACEM), Stig Anderson (STIM), and ABBA’s Benny Andersson (STIM) and Björn Ulvaeus (BUMA).

In addition to winning Dance Song of the Year, “Beautiful Liar” garnered BMI Pop and Urban Awards for writers Ian Dench and Amanda Ghost (both PRS); Dench and Ghost also scored Pop Awards for Jordin Sparks’ “Tattoo,” and College Song of the Year “Dashboard” garnered Pop Awards for its creative hive. Kanye West’s “Stronger,” co-written by West, Thomas Bangalter (PRS), Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo (PRS) and Michael Dean, earned awards in both Pop and Urban categories as well, as did Song of the Year “Irreplaceable.” Iconic rocker Pete Townsend (PRS) garnered three awards in the TV Music Awards field, while KT Tunstall (PRS) and Julieta Venegas (SGAE) each secured two awards in the Pop and Latin fields, respectively. Composers Rupert Gregson-Williams and George Fenton (both PRS), also earned two awards each: Gregson-Williams in the Film category and Fenton in Film and Emmy Award-winning divisions.

A complete list of award winners is available here.

Overhead's third album is a little bit on the lacking side of things. While the music is well constructed and produced the entire thing comes off as very formulaic. While the band certainly has moments of flash they also often come off as a band without their own identity - listening to the album is nothing like listening to a band who has their own unique approach, and comparisons can easily be drawn to other bands who do have that more unique approach. The music is mostly midpaced with the occasional rock moment and the occasional downtime and the vocals are in a familiar ''haunting and depressive'' kind of fashion. Many of the songs run together, and though it's sometimes done intentionally the album can get that ''wall of sound'' feeling rather quickly.

Still, you have to give them credit for making something unquestionably progressive in style. Prog heads will find themselves in familiar grounds with this one, keyboards and guitars make up the majority of the sound along with the accented vocals, and most of the tunes are reasonably long, such as the two-part opener and the lengthy Lost Inside nearing the end. The rest of the tunes sit comfortably in the 6-8 minute range and they develop well, moving on from one idea to the next fairly gracefully. The undeniable standout of the album is the second part of the opening tracks A Method... is the opening song which starts out nicely using piano which builds into an emotional climax before turning into the second part of the song, the wonderful ...To The Madness, which uses a robotic style of singing to blast through the waters with a rhythmic bass section until some spoken word kicks in near the end. Nice. Entropy is another song that deserves a nod, this one being the rocker. Though it opens in a way that is a touch electronic is soon moves into quick motion with the keys and guitar working in tandem, though this song borders on some of the problems that the album has (see next paragraph), it stands out above the rest for some great solos (if a bit Dream Theater-like) and its speedy pace.

However, there's still some things that pop into the listener's head as this all goes on. Who are we listening to here? The band doesn't really seem to have anything going for them that is better than the next guy's. At times there's flashes of music that sound very familiar to Riverside with heavy segments and a dark voice, other times they sound strikingly like Oceansize with more electronic parts mixed in with a haunting voice. Time Can Stay is a good example of this as it opens like an Oceansize tune, only with a more whiny vocal section. A heavily distorted guitar comes in near the end which sounds a lot like something you'd hear in mainstream American rock music these days, bringing to mind something like Hedly or the like. Luckily the piano section in this one is good enough to keep our minds off that as the vocals develop to the climax. Lost Inside is the longest track of the bunch and it has its moments, but in general it comes off as a much longer version of some of the other songs on the album. A Captain On The Shore is a nice closer for the album with its soothing pace and nicely harmonized vocals nearing the end, but in general it doesn't really open any new areas for the band to explore.

While the album has some great moments and it certainly sounds and looks pretty this one is fairly forgettable. However, if you're a big fan of Oceansize and Riverside then Overhead's new album might just pull at your heart strings. 2.5 out of 5 (rounded up to 3), fans will enjoy it, others may want to look elsewhere.

by King By-Tor


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Stream/Myspace: Oasis Dig Out Your Soul

At last summer’s Download Festival, Australian electro-rocker trio Cut Copy overcame playing in the daytime and put up one of the best performances of the event. They worked the crowd into a tizzy for their entire 45-minute set.

Sunday night (Oct. 5) at a sold-out show at the Mezzanine in San Francisco, they were out-played by their opening band, bus-mates the Presets, also from Australia.

Compared to a DJ, a third band and the Presets, who all turned the volume up to 11 with a non-stop thumping bass, the headliners were quiet, cautious and conservative, saving all their popular songs until midway through their performance. It would have been better if they had spread those songs out a bit. Cut Copy did eventually pick it up to a higher level, but if there’s any continuing friendly rivalry between the two bands, the Presets were named the winners for the night.

Some advice: It might not be a good idea to let the opener spoil your stage show by letting them use your uber-cool light show, which in this case involved a patchwork of LCD picket fence-style screens. The bands can thank Coldplay for letting them borrow them. By the time Cut Copy came on stage, the crowd had already seen everything the screens could do.

In electrorock, and there are those who will disagree, it is important that the beats are provided live, by a drummer.

Bands with canned beats give off one of two impressions: They either don’t want to pay a drummer, or they are not talented. A good drummer will handle anything a drum machine can muster; just ask the guy from LCD Soundsystem.

It’s a compliment to both bands for having a good drummer. The Presets, drummer Kim Moyes and keyboard player Julian Hamilton, played an hour’s worth of non-stop dance songs with thumping bass and catchy riffs.

The band was slowed only on a couple of songs where Hamilton sang in monotone (on “My People,” which got old, fast), or when Moyes stepped away from his drum set. The drums were prominently set at the front of the stage, reshaping spines one kick at a time.

Some of the intensity was lost when Moyes switched to another keyboard for a song, but it was regained when he traded the keyboard for a xylophone

Cut Copy, singer/keyboardist/guitarist Dan Whitford, bassist Tim Hoey and drummer Mitchell Scott, waited about 20 minutes into their set to begin their show. The three were joined by an additional member.

In the interim, Whitford had to ask the crowd – which did comply – to get crazy a couple of times.

They eventually regrouped and demonstrated why the show sold out with four extremely danceable “pump up the jam” songs in a row: “Far Away,” “Feel the Love,” “Out There on the Ice,” and “Lights and Music.”

They had their crowd in a tizzy, just a little late.

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No surprise after five consistently immaculate releases since 1970, the record is a sure-footed take on British folkrock by players who knew exactly what they were doing and from where their musical heritage had come. ‘Drink Down the Moon’ approaches gradually, Maddy Prior finally cutting through with her siren call, the funereal trudge of the band and Peter Knight’s drunken-sailor fiddle. Trad. Child Ballad ‘Two Magicians’ sings of a maiden’s flight from an amorous blacksmith, escaping his clutches as a swift-footed hare, and the slightly creepy title is sung by a nervous boys choir. Faeries come out to rock for ‘Seven Hundred Elves’, a call in the night, a gathering under the stars, a majikal happening. And Maddy serenades us with ‘Long-A-Growing’, a Traditional Round from the 18th Century [The Trees They Grow So High] about a young man’s coming of age. A familiar dance arrangement in ‘Mooncoin Jig’, the stone-heavy, almost Sabbatic riffs of ‘Edwin’ supported by Tim Hart’s sparkling banjo and Bob Johnson’s electric blues accents. The at once dear, bizarre and off-key rendition of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ follows and the record ends with the superfluous and much maligned cover of ‘To Know Him is to Love Him’ sporting an alto sax solo by David Bowie.

Overall one of this endlessly talented brood’s best, and an ideal place for a prog rocker to cut their teeth.

by Atavachron


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Former Apostates guitarist Peter Mavrogeorgis’ latest project the Bellmer Dolls got the enviable job of opening the evening, and although fighting a bad sound mix that would be a problem all night, delivered an excellent set. Right now this trio are New York’s best exponent of gritty, slightly glammy noir garage rock in the tradition of the Chrome Cranks and early Jon Spencer. The bass, trebly and growly in the style of Jean-Jacques Brunel of the Stranglers, was up and down in the mix all night, though the bassist lept and sauntered around with unleashed energy. From time to time, Mavrogeorgis would let his guitar hang and move to the old organ he’d brought along and add dirty, distorted fills, or just leave a note or a chord sustaining throughout the whole song (though this was, sadly, often inaudible). Their best songs were a straight-up, minor-key garage hit built over a catchy three-chord chromatic progression and a fast, Joy Division-inflected rocker driven by octaves in the bass. Most of the crowd sat outside the theatre for the duration of the Bellmer Dolls’ set: their loss.

When Nick Cave and his slightly stripped-down band took the stage, it was hard to resist hollering, “Ladies and gentlemen: The Doors!” Consider: legendary gloomy frontman with a voice few can resist (and a history filled with as many substances as substance); a great band, a flair for drama and the unexpected. The difference being that Cave is alive, rail-thin and looking great, playing a brilliantly diverse mix of songs from throughout his career. While this wasn’t a Grinderman show, Cave played mostly Telecaster: freed from his seat at the piano, he bounded around the stage for most of the night. The jacket came off early: “Don’t make me do that again,” he joked.

This wasn’t the Nick Cave that most of the crowd – a remarkably wide range of ages, with lots of couples -  grew up listening to. The band hit the ground running, the lead guitarist strumming furiously on a violin running through a distortion pedal, following their opening number with  Tupelo, then the fast piano anthem Weeping Song. Switching to a tango beat, they brought it down a little with Red Right Hand and then a gorgeous version of Midnight Man (from Cave’s most recent Bad Seeds cd Dig Lazarus Dig) with its lushly crescendoing changes on the chorus. The subdued piano ballad Love Letter got a perfectly pensive, rueful treatment.

Wearing thin under the strain of having to sing over a loud, two-guitar band, Cave’s voice started to give out during the gospelish God Is in the House. They began the song casually, bringing it down to just a tinkle of the piano and then silence. “All right,” said Cave in a stagy soul whisper, to considerable laughter. After a tastily brief violin solo, the crowd got into it again at the end when Cave mused, “I wish he’d come out.”

“When they came and took me out of the meat locker, the city was gone,” Cave intoned, as the best of the new songs, an absolutely riveting, hallucinatory version of the long post-apocalypse epic Moonland built gradually to a hypnotic intro that got deathly quiet at the end. The high point of the night was, predictably, Cave’s signature song, the anti-death penalty anthem The Mercy Seat which built to a screaming crescendo: “And anyway I’ve spoiled the fun with all these looks of disbelief,” the sardonic words of the wrongfully convicted man in the electric chair as resonant as they were when he wrote it over 20 years ago. As dark, desperate and abandoned as the protagonists in most of Cave’s songs may be, it’s his gallows humor that always saves him from lapsing into cliché and this is perhaps the best example.

“This is Into My Arms,” Cave announced to wild applause, much of the crowd clearly gassed to hear that uncharacteristically gentle, romantic pop song. But he didn’t play it. “This is actually Into My Arms,” he explained as the band ripped into a pounding version of Hard on for Love. The surprisingly short, hourlong set ended on a high note with a stomping take of the new We Call Upon the Author to Explain, which decayed into a noise jam mid-song, and Papa Won’t Leave You Henry, from 1992, its attractive acoustic guitar intro exploding into a roar when the whole band came in on the chorus. The first two of the encores, stomping versions of The Lyre of Orpheus and Get Ready for Love, kept the crowd energized. This seems to be it for the US part of the latest Nick Cave tour, which continues in November in the UK: as bad as the sonics were (a venue that charges upwards of sixty bucks a head owes it to their patrons to deliver sterling sound, not the muddy mess it was for most of the night), they definitely went out on a high note. The Bellmer Dolls play the Mercury Lounge tomorrow night, October 7 at 10:30 PM.

With the baseball playoffs in full swing, last week we asked the readers to tell us their sports anthems. After sorting through information like the Vancouver Canucks’ goal song and what Dio song the Phillies’ Pat Burrell comes to the plate to, we can reveal that Guns N’ Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle” is your favorite stadium rocker, beating out a pair of tunes by AC/DC, Metallica and the White Stripes song that has become the unofficial theme song for soccer hooligans. Check out the list below:

1. Guns N’ Roses — “Welcome to the Jungle”
2. AC/DC — “Thunderstruck”
3. Metallica — “Enter Sandman”
4. AC/DC — “Hell’s Bells”
5. White Stripes — “Seven Nation Army”
6. Ozzy Osbourne — “Crazy Train”
7. U2 — “Vertigo”
8. Ramones — “Blitzkrieg Bop”
9. Todd Rundgren — “Bang The Drum All Day”
10. House of Pain — “Jump Around”

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