Bleu McAuley had his first (and only) brush with the mainstream back in 2003, when his shifty ode to insecurity, “Somebody Else,” found its way onto the hugely popular soundtrack to the first Spider-Man movie. The tune was also on Bleu’s second album, Redhead, a delectable slab of power-pop bombast and one of the most unjustly overlooked albums of the early 2000s. Seven years and one falling out with Columbia Records later, Bleu knows better than to go sniffing around for scraps amidst the carnage of a dying industry. Recently, he averted any future label shenanigans altogether, appealing directly to his fans for money to make his latest CD, Four (The Major Label). They responded by forking over almost $40,000 via online funding platform Kickstarter. Over the years, Bleu has found highly entertaining ways to celebrate his knob-twiddling heroes. Alpacas Orgling is the 2006 product of his Jeff Lynne-loving collective known as L.E.O. And for LoudLion, he’s recruited Rooney’s Taylor Locke, the Donnas’ Allison Robertson and some other L.A. pals to shamelessly emulate Mutt Lange. The band’s contributions to the Balls Of Fury and The Hills Have Eyes 2 soundtracks couldn’t sound any more like circa-Hysteria Def Leppard if they had spots. Bleu will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our Q&A with him.
Bleu: Blindness was one of my favorite books from the last couple years. It’s a novel by Nobel Prize winner José Saramago set in an unnamed city and time period; even the characters are unnamed. It involves a mass epidemic of sudden blindness and the ensuing societal breakdown. I guess it’s kind of sci-fi, but certainly not typical. The story feels frighteningly accurate. It’s an addictive page-turner, but the prose is what really makes it special. He uses these crazy run-on sentences (lots of commas and almost no periods) that make it sometimes unclear who’s speaking (or if anyone is). Yet, somehow, it’s not difficult to understand, just interesting to devour. And, actually, I thought the film adaptation with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo was pretty fantastic. Definitely one of the most overlooked flicks of ’08.
Video after the jump.
