Marc Hirsh

Eliza Rickman's "Pretty Little Head" is simple yet intricate, a contradiction which helps give it the feel of a nursery rhyme that's just starting to teeter off the rails. Except for the bridge, it's built entirely around two chords, a minor/relative-major pair that trade off inexorably in two-bar cycles without regard to differentiating between the verse and the chorus.

Everybody settle down.

Earlier this week, James Cameron made a rather bold statement in the New York Times, effectively swearing off any and all non-documentary filmmaking that doesn't take place within the fictional world he invented in 2009's Avatar. Here is the quote:

1. Ryan Seacrest's double/triple/quadruple fakeouts. Our host used to screw with the contestants by teasing the results before throwing to a guest performance or commercial. Now he gives those results using sentences so convoluted, with so many double-backs and twist-arounds, that you need a white board to diagram them and unpack their actual meaning. Frustrating the singers, yes. Confusing them entirely, no.

Grace Woodroofe's "Transformer" kicks in with a guttural lurch, the groan of the guitars and the clatter of the drums bulldozing everything in their path before the singer's rippling alto steps into the rubble. The effect is akin to Fiona Apple fronting The Stooges, so it seems inevitable that she'll eventually match the tenor of her band and start howling.