1. Ah,
Promosquad.
It's like ghetto Napster.
Ashlee Simpson's got a couple new clips up on it. And if you don't care, we don't like you. Not on any ironic shit, either. If you come over to our house we'll play you this joint called "Sorry" that they left off
Autobiography -- really pithy, get-even type lyrical content and a killer hook: imagine if "Shadow" and "LaLa" had been the same song. Totally feeling this new "I Didn't Steal Your Boyfriend," which is like the long-awaited final song in the Hollywood cat-fight trilogy that includes Lindsay's "
Rumors" and Hilary's "Haters"? Also, ever since
Kelly C.'s people stepped up the teen-pop game by raiding the ProTools hard drives of
prominent alt-rockers for guitar sounds, we've been wondering which
CMJ showcasees were gonna get their chain snatched next. Sure enough, "Boyfriend" has an answer:
Radio 4, your groove has been jacked. God, we love it when professional songwriters fuck hipsters in the butt like this. New Ashlee movie,
Undiscovered, drops August 23; new album,
I Am Me, out October 11.
LISTEN: Ashlee Simpson,
"L.O.V.E." (mp3, 2-min clip)
LISTEN: Ashlee Simpson,
"I Didn't Steal Your Boyfriend" (mp3, 2-min clip)
2. We apologize if this has been all over the internet already. We just got around to checking our email, and Arts & Crafts have posted a track from
Broke-ass Social Scene's forthcoming and imaginitively titled
Broken Social Scene (due October 4). Generally we're the type of guy BSS fans hate: the dude who goes, "Well, no, but that
Feist girl is quite nice." That said, this is not bad:
LISTEN: Broken Social Scene,
"7/4 (Shoreline)" (zipped mp3 file, via
Arts and Crafts)
3. So we just discovered that
All Things Rock is alive and well -- better, even, since it's without the
old hosts -- on
MTV Overdrive. Watching it, we felt like we'd woken up and it was 1986 again, with
A7X in the role of Motley Crue and
System of a Down as some weirdo hybrid of Frank Zappa and Megadeth. But good god, what the bitch happened to
Coheed and Cambria? All the sudden, dude with the frizzy hair is rocking Gary Cherone's three-day growth, Jimmy Page's double-neck, and the string swells from "
Kashmir"? Note to emo-prog stylists: bloated-Kip-Winger-gets-struck-by-lightning is
NOT A GOOD LOOK.
WATCH: Coheed and Cambria, "
Welcome Home" (real video stream)
4. Transplants fans want answers, but maybe only Paul Wall knows:
WAS IT THE PURPLE DRANK?