Music Review: Indie Round-Up - Spitzer's Folly, Sky Cries Mary, and Down the Line

We hear a lot of crappy music here at the Indie Round-Up. It's part of the process: we have to pan through a lot of sand to find the nuggets of gold. But before we get to this week's good stuff, bear with us while we explore the musical talents of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, the high-priced call girl at the center of the Eliot Mess.

Though briefly taken down after the scandal exploded, Dupré's MySpace page, with her song, "What We Want," is back up. It links to her Amiestreet.com page where you can - and where, apparently, over two million people did - purchase the song. (A second track has since been added.)

I understand people's prurient interest in listening to Dupré's track at MySpace. I did it myself. But that should be enough to satisfy simple curiosity. For the song to actually sell, wouldn't you think it should be a tiny bit - I don't know - good? But it's not. (Neither is the other song, the embarrassingly titled "Move Ya Body.") It's not "promising." It's not "halfway decent," as one music website called it. It's awful. Not halfheartedly awful, like the lamer work of her idol, Madonna, but MySpace hot babe awful. Tila Tequila awful.

And it's sad. Sad that someone with the troubled background that Dupré describes in her MySpace bio has been allowed to believe that the music she's put out is decent.

Not that it's more awful than some of the other stuff floating around on the Internet. There's always been crappy music, of course, but now that anyone with a computer and some time on their hands can record their crap and make it sound semi-professionally produced, musical "artists" are buzzing around as numerously, and as annoyingly, as locusts.

The whole Spitzer saga is sad, and the sub-story of the call girl with musical ambitions is no exception.

Now, with relief, let's turn to some good music.

Sky Cries Mary, Small Town

Since regrouping in 2004, trance-rockers Sky Cries Mary have been relatively seldom seen on stage, but their new CD Small Town shows the bicoastal sextet in top form. A lovely little acoustic guitar song, "Travel Light," breaks up the sequence of hypnotic wall-of-sound tracks, and the title track itself also features acoustic guitar. The "small town" refers to New York, various areas of which appear throughout the disc, which makes the album something of a portrait of NYC life. Who would have thought a band could make a compelling chorus with just the words "Here comes the 5 Train"? - but SCM could and did. The CD runs out of steam a few tracks before the end, but there is a lot of lush, muscular, feelingly executed, and well-written stuff here. Hear extended samples.

Article Author: Jon Sobel

Jon Sobel is Co-Executive Editor of Blogcritics and lead editor of the Culture section. As a writer he contributes most often to Culture, where he reviews NYC theater; he also covers interesting music releases and writes a semi-regular review round-up of independent albums. …

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