Houston Blog

MySpaced Out's most recent out-of-the-ether find is British singer-songwriter Keith Christmas. Most ballads are a very hard sell for us, but I was immediately knocked out by Christmas's stunner, "Better Men."

Of course, MSO immediately got a second opinion from the Significant Other. She gave two thumbs up. I was so knocked out that I immediately emailed to see if he had a publisher and song pitcher. Guess we should've read his bio first.

Aurélie Decourteix

The Russian Sextoys: No Thom Yorke fans, they.

MySpace is a great place for discovering off-the-wall tunes and performers. Here are three wack jobs from cyberspace that hail from that weird place that Captain Beefheart found so easily and in so many forms.

The Russian Sextoys: For every Radiohead fan, there's someone like this French trio who'd like to see the pretentious, self-absorbed hipsters loaded into a capsule and fired into deep space. Like the old Budweiser commercial, "Fuck Radiohead" is for you, and is loaded to the gills with sarcasm and irony.

Les Kiffeurs

France is easily one of my favorite MySpace music destinations. I've stumbled on so much cool stuff I've had to start keeping a notebook. Here are a few of the most interesting artists I've tuned in to lately.

Les Kiffeurs (Paris): Loosely translating as people who like to take pleasure, Les Kiffeurs is a side project of French pop-rocker Frank Schiff with female vocalist Cora and DJ Fred Bee. Essentially a Euro-dance club track, "Give Me the Kiff" not only has a great riff, the spoken interplay between the male and female parts is a perfect mix of sexuality and ironic humor. And when she says "ooh la la," well...

Henriette Coulouvrat (Paris): Coulouvrat's song "Paddy Fields" adds Asian musical swatches over Euro-dance beats to create a unique sound the likes of which I've never heard. The music is immaculately done, yet there is always an undertone of humor and taking musical conventions to excess.

Phil Lee (second from left) and friends chillin' at Neil Young's (left) crib

I've been planning a MySpaced Out column based on an array of oddball songs for some time now, and always planned to include at least one Phil Lee song because the Nashville headcase has beaucoup odd songs. But the other day I was listening to some of his new stuff and thought, "What the hell - Phil's got enough odd songs to do an entire column on."

Lee has always had a split songwriting personality, one minute cooking up some beautiful Beatlesque love songs that can cut your heart in half ("We Cannot Be Friends Anymore"), but in the next breath cutting loose with something totally out of left field like his popular blues song, the inimitable "Jemima James." Some of Lee's material actually harkens us back to the day when Nashville and country music weren't afraid of odd, quirky songs. Singer-songwriter and country music historian Robbie Fulks once did an entire album called 13 Hillbilly Giants that consisted of oddball Nashville stuff no one remembers anymore. So here it is, an entire column devoted to nothing but odd Phil Lee songs.

Frida Hyvönen

We all know Helsinki rocks; that's a given. But to pigeonhole the Finnish music scene as nothing but one huge population of Laika and the Cosmonauts headbangers would be a mistake. While Finland certainly stands shoulder to shoulder with Sweden and Denmark when it comes to steroidal rockers, the country is full of other highly talented acts that have nothing to do with turning it to 11 and playing three chords at top speed.

Frida Hyvönen: the epitome of wintry Finnish pop. You can almost hear the razor blades being hidden in songs like "Everybody Hurts" or "Fall Is My Lover." Hyvönen isn't just a wonderful emotive singer, she writes 'em like the big girls. Her Silence Is Wild dropped on Secretly Canadian last November and clocks over 1,000 plays a day on MySpace.

Gram Rabbit, "California Christmas"

In case you're still in your holiday hangover mode like I am, here's one wonderful holiday YouTube video that our gallant Mr. Rocks Off left out of his holiday onslaught. Cute doesn't begin to describe this one.

While we are on the subject, high desert California psychedelic art rockers Gram Rabbit are in the final stages of recording their fourth full-length. According to producer and good old Amarillo boy Ethan Allen, the new album will have more of "a high desert sound." This is a term that Californians must intuitively understand, but it doesn't much compute to me; maybe it's one of those things you only know when you hear it.

It was War of the Worlds author H.G. Wells who famously said, "Advertising is legalized lying."

I recently had the unpleasant occasion to have a brief tete-a-tete with a young lady in the music public relations business. They call themselves "publicists." Not liars.

It all began innocently enough, a "friend request" in my MySpace inbox. I looked at the lady's MySpace site - I always look before I click - and saw she was a publicist of what is pejoratively know as "Texas Music" in some circles - OK, well, mine mostly.

No problem. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed that maybe there was no hidden agenda, that maybe she is just a very literary woman desiring to expand her mind by hanging onto my eloquent prose.

Click. She's my "friend."