How clichéd--make that calcified--has the concept of "irony" become in alternative music? When North Carolina's Squirrel Nut Zippers scored an unlikely late '90s hit with "Hell" (from their Hot album), many cynics (and a few critics) thought the band was merely mocking the hot jazz stylings of the '20s and '30s. But having put a couple more albums and some trying times (the defection of singer-guitarist Tom Maxwell and passing of horn player Stacy Guess) under their belts, it's clear that musical affection was no mere passing affectation. The Zippers have honed both their chops and their courage here, with subtle new influences from the 20th-century American musical pantry (a dash of country, a pinch of Spanish guitar, more Crescent City bump) tastefully simmered into the stew. Katherine Whalen's vocal turns are as convincingly smoky as the lighthearted material is jokey--an inviting balance that's equally true to its historical sources. More than mere opportunistic swing revivalists, the restless curiosity displayed on this album argues that the Zippers are in it for the long haul. Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but this band is clearly more interested in inspiration, and that's not a bad compliment, either. --Jerry McCulley
Entertainment
The entertainment industry has grown and evolved over the years with music and cinema taking a new form through the ages and so have the technologies that fuel it. Gone are the days of eight songs on a cassette and VCR players with merely two hours of entertainment recorded on a single video cassette. With the advent of computers came digital data storage and hence the birth of DVD/CDs.
Quiet a step back in matters of physical form as these new generation audio/video storage devices hold an uncanny resemblance to the records that preceded the cassette generation. DVDs and CDs today are an everyday household entertainment storage device which has come a long way since the first records and cassettes were distributed commercially.
Notable advantages of DVD/CDs have to begin with the amount of storage space available. These days its possible to burn multiple movies on a single DVD and as far as audio goes if its in a highly compressed format such as .mp3 a single CD can accommodate multiple music albums. These discs are easy to handle, light and portable with no moving devices unlike the tape generation however they are delicate and a scratch on the DVD/CD surface could cause a disruption in the information being read by the player.
DVD/CDs were initially invented to provide high quality audio/video data to a user with the ability to regulate its production however this soon fizzled away with daily household computers gaining the ability to burn data in such formats. The race to curb piracy through such means has not hit a roadblock and DVD/CDs keep evolving with newer encryption technologies in a bid to curb unchecked replication of data spawning newer technologies like Blu-ray discs which seems to be yet another milestone on an unending road of innovation.
