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I still stand by what I said the last time Do As Infinity released an album — the band hasn’t really evolved since its first albums, a few anamolous songs aside.

And I wasn’t expecting much from Need Your Love, the band’s sixth album.

Do As Infinity doesn’t exactly break expectations, either — the slick, friendly pop they’ve delivered over the past six years is still very much the duo’s modus operandi.

And yet, Need Your Love is actually pretty good.

Do As Infinity built its reputation on a genre-blending trifecta — a bit of rock, a bit of jazz, a lot of pop. Owatari Ryo added guitar muscle to songs that would have otherwise drowned in an ocean of synthesizer effects.

But the genre-hopping became too distracting, sacrificing focus for diversity. The songs suffered for it, the albums even more so.

Need Your Love is still a pop album, but the band concentrates more on its hard rock underpinnings, resulting in perhaps its most cohesive album in years.

Album opener “For the Future” doesn’t stray too far from the template that brought listeners “Summer Days” or “Toshikari Naru Mama”, but the following track, “Blue”, keeps the band on a steady rock course.

“Be Free” still owes a lot to “Week!”, but the former has more of an edge over the latter. Even “Yotaka no Yume”, which starts off sounding like another ballad in a long line of DAI ballads, bursts out in a dramatic chorus more akin to Cocco.

The songwriting, while still adhering to a recognizable Do As Infinity aesthetic, features some of the better hooks the band has produced in a while. The delicate opening of “Rakuen” immediately grabs, while its chorus keeps hold.

“Ultimate GV” and “One Flesh” start off with strong guitars and build to even stronger choruses.

By the time the band winds down to its more predictable balladry, it had already given listeners a good workout.

Need Your Love doesn’t paint outside the lines of Do As Infinity’s creative borders, but within them, it’s the tightest work the duo has done thus far.

I don’t need to write a review for this album — Minnie Driver already did it for me.

In a television interview, Driver described how she had her album playing in the background, when her sister remarked, “I’m really liking this new Dido album.”

And there you have it.

Legend (or public relations machinery) has it Driver originally sought a music career and was actually signed to Virgin Records before her casting in Circle of Friends launched a film career instead.

Of course, celebrity crossover has its own pitfalls, the least of which is an audience skeptical of jacks-of-all-trades. (Believe it or not, Jennifer Lopez can be a very good actor.)

Personally? I like Minnie Driver. She’s the kind of actor whose presence can push movies beyond their potential. Return to Me, in which she stars opposite David Duchovny, is pretty standard as far as rom-coms go, but Driver managed to keep the plot from getting too sappy.

So part of me is rooting for her to achieve some degree of success as a songwriter. Does she earn it? Check back a few paragraphs about that Dido remark.

Everything I’ve Got in My Pocket, Driver’s debut, is a your basic slow tempo, slightly ethereal, singer-songwriter fare. On more than one occassion, she displays her affinity for Elton John.

Driver’s voice is sturdy and appealing, but she’s no Joni Mitchell.

The album’s lack of flashy production makes it difficult to perceive the album on more than a subconsious level. That’s a roundabout way of saying it makes for some pretty good background music.

Eventually, the tunes sink in after a few listens, but as first impressions go, Everything I’ve Got in My Pocket does the soft sell a little too softly.

“Invisible Girl” has the distinction of being the most extroverted track on the album. The Eno-like effects on “Wire” and “Deeper Water” provide a nice backdrop, while “Ruby Adeline” actually does an good job of concluding the album.

A lethargic cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart”, though, misses the point entirely.

Everything I’ve Got in My Pocket doesn’t do anything to dispel the notion that actors should stick to acting and musicians should stick to music. But even with Driver’s pedigree as a musician-turned-actor, it’s probably her luckiest stroke that her day job turned out as well as it did.

I don’t need this boxed set.

The albums Naked City released from 1989-1993 sit in a permanent spot on my shelf. When sifting through my collection to find which albums could earn me cash at a second-hand store, these albums are never touched.

Still, Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings marks the first time a majority of these albums have been released in America.

John Zorn recorded the first Naked City album while he was signed to Nonesuch Records. But legend says Nonesuch balked at the cover art Zorn proposed for subsequent releases, and the composer departed the label.

The following Naked City albums were released on various labels in Japan, including Zorn’s own Avant.

In the span of its compact existence, Naked City released seven albums, each one distinctive, all of them covering a broad spectrum of style and mood.

The original self-titled debut is a dazzling display of showmanship, and at the time, it was inconceivable just how much further this ensemble could go. They would go very far, indeed.

Naked City was the nexus between high art and punk rock. Brash and noisy, but accomplished. Spontaneous and unpredictable, but precise. Dissonant and unsettling, but melodic.

Rock fans took to the band for the volume. Student composers took to the band for its breadth. Jazz listeners took to the band for its improvisatory fire. Not everything in the Naked City lexicon appealed to everyone, but it sure brought a lot of different fans together.

In my college days, I preferred the band’s melodic material over its purely improvised performances. But nearly a decade later, even the parts that didn’t appeal to me have something to appreciate.

Heretic, a soundtrack to a French erotic film (yeah, I could have called it pr0n), is thoroughly improvised, but even in all the chaos, there’s an underpinning of logic to the performances.

It wasn’t just the cues — Zorn, guitarist Bill Frisell, keyboardist Wayne Horvitz, bassist Fred Frith and drummer Joey Baron possessed a telepathic chemistry. In the greatest of jazz improvisatory traditions, they made music on the spot that sounded like fate.

By contrast, Absinthe is the band’s darkest performance and perhaps Zorn’s most brilliant studio creation. On this album, none of the band members sound like their parts.

Guitars and keyboards go through heavy effects processing, bass and drums get spliced up and pasted every which way. What results is a nightmare soundscape as alien as it is terrifying.

Zorn had already anticipated this slower, gradual structure with Grand Guignol, something of a mish-mash album. The title piece is a slow, ominous collage, ever-shifting between extremes and never seeming to settle on one direction.

At the time, it seemed like Zorn’s least cohesive piece. As it turns out, it was. Zorn re-mixed the piece with a new vocal track provided by ex-Faith No More singer Mike Patton, and the new version brings a clairty to the piece missing in the original.

The rest of Grand Guignol is split between ethereal covers of classical pieces and the remaining 30 tracks from Torture Garden that did not appear on the self-titled debut.

Zorn resequenced Grand Guignol to put the classical covers at the end, and the result is an album with better flow.

By the time Naked City recorded Radio, Zorn got the sense the band had gone as far as it could have. (Original plans called for a second volume of Radio, but Zorn nixed them.)

With Radio, the band returns to the varied program of its self-titled debut, with more of an emphasis on improvisation. The first half of the album contains melodic material, but the second half goes utterly bugfuck. On one level, it wasn’t as successful as the first album, but still, it’s a performance to behold.

Naked City: The Complete Studio Recordings doesn’t give much room to reproduce the sparse but disturbing cover art of the original albums. And Zorn’s annoying aesthetic sense to put light text against light backgrounds makes the accompanying bound book, Eight Million Stories: Naked City Ephemera, useless.

Not totally, though — the booklet contains snippets of Naked City scores and a lot of great photos and art.

This boxed set contains some of the most amazing music ever produced by one band. Naked City managed to create more great music in five years than other bands who lasted twice as long.

I don’t need it, but I have it anyway. And man has it been nice revisiting it!