Quick! A Break in the Action

Hey rockers, I have a bunch of stuff to post, but thought I would take a detour from the concert reviews to give you some great tunes to get you through the dog days.  Ready?

First up, it's the pop master himself, Justin Timberlake.  Say what?  Yeah, I know, I'm a hard rockin' dude at heart, but I have much broader range than most people know.  I've liked Justin for a while.  I like him in the movies, I like him dancing, and I like him singing pop songs.  And this track, Can't Stop The Feeling, is infectious.  But even better is the video!  I love it!!
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I was recently in Tennessee along the banks of the Mississippi River.  Big Muddy, Old Man River, whatever, it drains a huge swath of the country and is our mightiest river.  And then I heard this track by the Doobie Brothers, and thought, voila, put this on BRP.  I was a big DB fan back in the day.  A little known fact is that my second concert of all time was seeing the Doobies.  They used to play with that dry ice "smoke" around their knees and feet, and when you're 14, that's pretty freakin' cool.  This track was a HUGE hit for them, and I like it to this day.
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Football season is coming up, and that means stadiums and big-time crowds.  Crowd mentalities are weird as the wheels can come off and the "we'll never get caught" euphoria pulses through the masses.  To control that, stadiums play songs that everyone knows and that help to get the crowd appropriately pumped, but not out of control.  Enter the White Stripes.  Is Seven Nation Army one of the most ubiquitous stadium songs or what?  Sometimes, entire crowds just pulse to it and chant it even when the loudspeakers don't play it.  This song rocks.  And I think the video is pretty low-fi but cool, too.

I've been digging this next track since the first time I heard it.  Fang Fang's Proscenium Arch rocks it pretty good.  Great guitar, singable chorus, good song structure.  What else do you want?  How about that they're from Philly!  Local band done good, let's support them, ok?
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Oops, I'm a day late, but I'm going there anyway.  Yesterday was Feargal Sharkey's birthday.  Remember him?  He was the lead singer of the best rock band out of Northern Ireland, the Undertones.  In celebration of Feargal's birthday, here is the seminal Undertones track, Teenage Kicks.  John Peel, the famous rock broadcaster from England, once called this the perfect rock song.  I don't disagree. Great riff, Feargal's interesting and unique voice, classic teen angst lyrics.  Listen up:
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As you know, I love Motown.  As you know, I love British new wave/punk.  As you know, any band that can combine these two into one fantastic track has to be celebrated.  The Jam put out Town Called Malice which was both danceable and serious.  Alas, it was near the end for this great trio, but still it's one of my favorite songs from this era.  Check that, make it any ​era.
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One more, shall we?  If you've ever been to Toronto, there is a place called Echo Beach.  They even have a music venue there.  Toronto is a wonderful city, clean and diverse with tons to do and all set along a gorgeous lakefront.  Martha and the Muffins put out this tune many moons ago celebrating Echo Beach, and it still sounds lively and fresh.  And while I am not much of a nostalgic person, this one puts me back into my youth and makes me feel happy.  Who can't relate to the lyrics?  If they changed it to "my job is very boring, I'm a big firm jerk," that would put this into the stratosphere.  
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Was that cool?  Did I scratch the itch a bit?  And when I did, did your leg move like your dog's with that funky kick thing?  I hope so.  I'll be back very shortly with some more hijinks.  It's what we do here at BRP.  And it's what I do in real life, too.  C'mon, time to party!
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