There are precious few bands, especially those operating in the sonically weighty end of the musical spectrum, that demonstrate any appreciation for the notion that the notes you play may be less important than those you don't.
The Dead Weather, Jack White's latest project -- a collaboration with the Kills’ singer Alison Mosshart, Queens of the Stone Age guitarist Dean Fertita and Raconteurs bassist Jack Lawrence -- embraces that philosophy with bone-chilling power on "Horehound," the band’s take-no-prisoners debut.
Mosshart brings a wildcat's ferocity to her vocals; she's a fearsome adversary to all those high-pitched metal wailers. White, leaving the guitar work predominantly to Fertita, takes up his seat at the drums to drive this machine in tandem with Lawrence's titanic bass lines. Beefy riffs, upended beats and blues-rooted atmospherics are dolloped on sparingly, until it's time to explode with a solo.
"I like to grab you by the hair / And drag you to the devil" Mosshart snarls in "Hang You From the Heavens," which she wrote with Fertita. "Stand up like a man," she warns in the quartet-composed "Treat Me Like Your Mother," "You better learn to shake hands / And treat me like your mother."
In White's "Cut Like a Buffalo," his lead vocal, one of just two on this outing, is accompanied by the convulsive sounds of Mosshart's gurgles as he cries, "Is that you choking / Or are you just joking?" There's no joke here -- just mountains of chest-rattling primal rock designed to reassert the elemental power of the four-piece rock group. Mission accomplished.
Take a look at the artists who've spent time in the studio
with Antonina Armato and Tim James and among the likes of Miley Cyrus, Vanessa
Hudgens and Aly & AJ and you'll find this L.A.-based hard-rock trio, best known
for providing the soundtrack to the hit YouTube video Free Hugs Campaign, which
has racked up more than 46 million views.
Sick Puppies' songs seem distinctive only when you consider
them in relation to those tween-pop acts; examined as a set of lyrics and chord
changes, any of the 13 tracks on "Tri-Polar," the band's second album
since relocating here from Australia, could pass for work by such KROQ
second-stringers as Shinedown or Theory of a Deadman or Finger Eleven.
Thanks to James and Armato's studio wizardry, though, Sick
Puppies sound is another matter: With its crunchy textures and gleaming
surfaces, this is post-grunge alpha-male pop-metal for the Imax 3-D era.
In lead single "You're Going Down," recently
featured in a series of professional-wrestling spots, singer Shimon Moore
flexes his chest-beating bellow over a menacing industrial-disco bass line,
while opener "War" lives up to its title (and then some) with a battery
of machine-gun drums and laser-beam keyboards. Even closer "White
Balloons," which comes on like a folky acoustic shuffle, erupts into
solar-swamp pyrotechnics before it's over.
Think of the result as the musical equivalent of “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen” -- very pretty wrapping for a very empty box.
The best way to listen to Maxwell's new "BLACKsummers' Night" is with the volume turned all the way up. The R&B artist didn't take a turn toward heavy metal during the eight years he's spent between releasing albums; this one, like his previous three, is full of meditative jams written on the continuum between ardor and heartache. But as genteel and deceptively traditionalist as is Maxwell's veneer, he's always been bent on taking urban music forward: he just takes obsessively careful, small steps, best appreciated through close attention.
And he believes, passionately, in dynamics. Many of the songs on "BLACKsummers' Night," the first part of a trilogy Maxwell plans to unfold over the next few years, are structured around a short musical phrase, played on a keyboard or guitar, on which everything else loops and builds. (Doesn't that sound like Radiohead's approach? That's an inspiration Maxwell has cited in interviews.)
These details are different than the hooks usually heard on the radio. They don't grab; they're not compressed for maximum brightness. Sometimes one recedes and another momentarily dominates -- a horn line might burst through, or a kick drum completes the thought of a bassline.
Maxwell's vocals move in conversation with these elements, growing into the space above and around them. He sings about relationships -- many songs here are about a cherished but disappointing love affair -- and the music replicates the experience of an intimate connection, its ebbs and surges, its sometimes frustrating turns.
Son Volt singer-songwriter Jay Farrar casts his gaze around the good old U.S. of A. and isn't happy with what he sees. The economy has tanked, greed runs rampant and dreams come crashing to the ground. Even if all that's true, does it really help to sound this mopey?
Farrar's dour perspective courses through most of these dozen songs, the gloom broken only sporadically by the band's musical interplay. Too often, his melodies are Spartan vehicles for his lyrical prose, which is ambitiously artful but would be served just as well -- perhaps better -- as spoken-word exercises.
"Man's power over nature/Hubris and greed let the fossil fuels burn," he laments in "When the Wheels Don't Move." It's a position that's been argued for ages, but Farrar comes across like the grump at a dinner who grumbles invectives at whatever target comes up. "Pushed Too Far," a glum reminiscence of pre-Katrina times in New Orleans and elsewhere, takes the band into a late-night country Stones vibe that's bittersweetly colored with steel guitar. In "Sultana," his recounting of a Civil War-era maritime disaster, Farrar mistakes historical narrative for art.
The album's sound is raw, but "raw," even in the Americana circles that Son Volt travels in, doesn't always equate with primal power. Sometimes it's just undercooked.
-- Randy Lewis
Son Volt "American Central Dust" Rounder One and a half stars
Lyrically speaking, there isn't much on the debut album from local club-rap duo LMFAO that can be quoted in a family newspaper. What is safe for these pages, though, says just about everything you need to know about these guys' worldview: "Get crazy, get wild / Let's party, get loud," shouts MC Sky Blu in "Get Crazy," one of the 14 virtually interchangeable odes to night life naughtiness here.
Sky Blu and his producer partner Redfoo already are well known within the bottle-service set for their high-energy remixes of hits by A-listers like Fergie, Kanye West and Katy Perry. And though it consists of the group's own material, "Party Rock" offers the same pleasures as those remixes: thumping '80s-inspired beats, instantly catchy synth hooks, shouty catchphrases about how "what happens at the party stays at the party."
Provided you speak English -- an ability that might actually work against enjoying LMFAO's music -- Sky Blu's constant appeals to remove various articles of clothing can get pretty tiresome. Yet like will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, the rapper at least views hedonism as a participatory endeavor, not just something to be creepily observed from the VIP section. That gives tracks such as "La La La" and "Leaving U 4 the Groove" a welcome sense of conviviality.
The result is simple but effective: mindless fun that makes you wonder what's so great about having a mind anyway.
-- Mikael Wood
LMFAO
"Party Rock"
(Interscope)
Three stars
LMFAO plays a record-release party Tuesday at the Roxy in West Hollywood.
Call what saxophonist Steve Lehman does a variation on "math-jazz," with apologies to the time signature-hopping sub-genre that rose out of the mid-'90s indie rock scene. Though nothing from this album will ever be confused with Don Caballero, Lehman makes the seemingly counterintuitive choice to introduce computer analysis into jazz in the hopes of greater exploring of spectral harmony between instruments.
What this involves is a whole lot of mind-scrambling physics and deep thought concerning frequency relationships and microtonal overtones, but Lehman's heady excursions remain unique and engaging to the listener whatever your knowledge of musical theory. Album opener "Echoes" sets the tone with a complicated, slow-burning conversation among the octet, slowly building atop Lehman's chrome-bright pointillist arcs. The 10-minute plus "Alloy" marks another highlight with tuba, trombone and trumpet encircling Lehman's alto through an intricate, IDM-adjacent beat by drummer Tyshawn Sorey. Elsewhere Chris Dingman's vibraphone sets a menacing pace through a woozy take on GZA/Genius' "Living in the World Today" that resembles a crossroads of jazz, funk and drum and bass.
Though Lehman and his cohorts have created something drenched with almost staggering complexity, the end result never feels bloodless. The players may be working within a delicate framework, but improvisation and the pushing and pulling against boundaries reveals the warm heart of jazz still racing underneath.
Steve Lehman Octet "Travail, Transformation, and Flow" Pi Recordings Three stars
If there's one thing a good drummer knows it's the power of a groove, and Helm, one of rock's greatest with the sticks, has them in spades on "Electric Dirt," his second album since recovering from throat cancer.
Helm's upped the rock energy quotient here, taking him even closer to that timeless Americana sound he and his mates in the Band helped create four decades ago. The sources of that sound are evident in the earthy blues of Muddy Waters' "You Can't Lose What You Ain't Never Had," the deep gospel of Pops Staples' "Move Along Train" and Happy Traum's ethereal Celtic-cum-Appalachian ballad "Golden Bird."
The different strains of American roots music meld seamlessly in "Growing Trade," written by Helm and album producer Larry Campbell, and on his version of the Grateful Dead's "Tennessee Jed." Both songs sound like worthy companion pieces to the timeless roots rock of the Band's "Music From Big Pink" and the group's collaboration with Bob Dylan in "The Basement Tapes."
New Orleans great Allen Toussaint lends his unmistakable touch with colorful horn arrangements on Randy Newman’s "Kingfish" and Richard Carroll Lamp and Willy E. Taylor's effusive "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free."
Helm's voice has lost almost all traces of the cancer-treatment damage that was periodically evident on 2007's "Dirt Farmer," returning to what approaches the full glory of its prime. He sings of the land and of people who struggle to hold on to some small piece of it. It's especially powerful considering the ways in which he's transcended significant struggles of his own.
Among the innumerable discussions launched last week in the wake of Michael Jackson's death, perhaps the one that will go on the longest is whether the King of Pop's passing confirms what Internet evangelists have been saying for years: that the age of the monoculture is over.
Jackson made music not for a specifically defined demographic group but for anyone with ears; with their soul vocals, dance beats and rock guitars, records like "Thriller" and "Bad" seduced listeners accustomed to any genre. That's a mind-set that seems ill-suited to today's niche-oriented marketing models, but along with his talent and his charisma, it was key to Jackson's superstardom.
Rob Thomas, who first found fame as the frontman of Matchbox Twenty, won't ever ascend to Jackson's heights of creativity or popularity. But his belief in the monoculture is every bit as fervent as Jackson's was: On "Cradlesong," his second solo disc, Thomas presides over a sleekly produced, constantly undulating mixture of sounds that seems designed to appeal to all of the people all of the time.
He's not a Beck-style eclectic, flitting from one mode to another like a musical magpie; rather, he crams everything into each song: In opener "Her Diamonds" he flexes his grunge-god bellow over shimmering pop-rock guitars and percolating African drums. "Gasoline" has early-'80s synth riffs and a stutter-stepped groove borrowed from hip-hop. "Real World '09" moves at the speed of techno yet flutters with folky acoustic textures. "Getting Late" sounds like Nashville by way of Detroit.
What's surprising about "Cradlesong" is how rarely Thomas' please-'em-all attitude saps his music of its distinctive vitality. (Only "Fire on the Mountain," a chest-beating protest-rock move, feels phony.) Like Jackson, Thomas sees that outlook as an energizing force, not an enervating one.
On his last outing, 2008's "Seinfeld"-themed, "The Mixtape about Nothing," Washington, D.C's Wale, altered the paradigm for what a mix tape can be: re-appropriating dialogue, cover art and concepts from the beloved sitcom to ruminate on everything from the rap world to racism to "Roc."
Expectations for his follow-up, "Back to the Feature," were astronomical. Between the frequent delays, the blog feeding frenzy, the A-list cast of collaborators, Wale would've had to invent hover boards to top himself.
Accordingly, it's unfair to label the tape a disappointment. If Wale's previous release aimed for the stars, its successor digs toward the subterranean. As he declares during "Tito Santana:" "We ain't trying to make a statement . . . we just trying to give them collaborative hip-hop, that head-nodding, stoner, backpack lyricism." Toward the end, Wale admits "I wasn't trying to shoot for mix tape of the year or mix tape of the moment . . . I was just trying to get my rapping on."
With guest verses from Black Thought, Beanie Sigel, Bun B, Detroit underground legend Royce Da 5'9 and emerging talent K’Naan on the standout, afro-beat sampling "Um Ricka," good rapping was inevitable.
Full of self-conscious swagger, Wale's one-liner game remains tight and tailored to '80s baby sensibilities with its Homer Simpson name-drops, but "Back to the Feature's" hyper-critical paranoia toward media, blogs and the Internet's rap wasteland grows tedious by the end. If getting un-followed by someone on Twitter is seen as a legitimate gripe -- as Wale cites on "New Soul" -- then maybe it's time to disable the Google alert.
Tortoise, Chicago's venerable crew of rock-'n'-roll boundary breakers, has an illustrious history of dazzling first tracks. Any old band knows to frontload an album with a party-starter but few do it with such an unimpeachable sense of brainy fun.
"High Class Slim Came Floatin' In," the opener to "Beacons of Ancestorship," Tortoise's sixth full-length and its first release of new material in five years, is a cold funk telegram informing us that Tortoise is turning out its most invigorated set of omnivorous instrumentals since 1998's "TNT."
The eight-minute-plus jam trips with heavy synth chunks, high-finesse drums and an ending that sounds like a chillier version of the kaleidoscopic intro to the Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again."
"Beacons of Ancestorship" is still typical Tortoise. The five-piece appropriates form any genre, including rampaging punk, techno, twitchy jazz and desert-baked samba, but with renewed adventure. The 11 tracks burble and skitter to new corners and heights.
At times, the gentlemen feel like they're retreating to their comfort zone: "Minors" seems hardly more than a bridge to the calmer closing numbers, but after "Yinxianghechengqi," a crazed tiger of a track, or "The Fall of Seven Diamonds Plus One," the stormy love child of John Coltrane and Ennio Morricone, a little catnap seems in order.
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