LFO’s self-titled debut album from 1999 was the poster child for everything wrong with the boy band craze.
At its best, it was inane; at its worst, dismal. The rushly recorded album was nothing more than a cookie cutter collection of ballads, dance pop and white boy R&B. It came across as calculated as it was.
In an interview with SonicNet, Rich Cronin vowed to incorporate more rock into LFO’s next album. The first step in accomplishing this endeavor, however, was ditching boy band svengali Louis J. Pearlman as executive producer.
Cronin takes the reigns of LFO’s second album, Life Is Good, and it certain deserves high marks in the effort category.
The band keeps its promise — the guitars on the album aren’t buried under slick R&B beats. The power ballads and dance numbers have given way to a more diverse approach, where hip-hop, pop, rock and a bit of dub meet.
Life Is Good is nothing if not ambitious.
“6 Minutes”, which I hope doesn’t refer to any of the members’ bedroom proficiency, jumps from a dancehall chant to a thump-whack rock ‘n’ roll backbeat between verse and chorus.
“Erase Her” shows the trio channeling a bit of Depeche Mode. “Where You Are” attempts to horn in on the Goo Goo Dolls-meet-Backstreet Boys action BBMak has going.
“Gravity” sounds like an ‘NSync outtake, while “That’s The Way It Is” targets the grunge-lite audience that digs Vertical Horizon and 3 Doors Down.
But those are the exceptions.
For the most part, LFO stays well within their trademark pop/hip-hop sound, even accomodating De La Soul and MOP on a few tracks.
With the musical breadth covered by Life Is Good, it’s almost criminal the guys in the band don’t quite have the singing talent to pull it all off.
Devon Lima, whose soulful voice dominated the last album, is mostly absent here, and his fellow members Cronin and Brad Young don’t have the same kind of vocal strength.
Then there’s that irritating habit of name-dropping current cultural icons. Guys — all that’ll do is make your music terribly dated a decade from now. Will teenage girls in 2011 really care about Ben Affleck? Will the grown women who listened to your music in 2001 still care?
It’s nice to see that LFO really does care that it’s perceived as something more than a get-rich-quick scheme, and the members definitely attempt to wriggle free from the constraints to big business pop.
But there’s a huge gulf between concept and execution. LFO secured the musical material to break out of the mold, but it doesn’t have the talent to hold up its creds.
Shimada Aiko’s Blue Marble has a lot of downtown New York muscle behind it.
There’s Evyind Kang twiddling the recording console knobs as producer. There’s fellow Seattle-ite Bill Frisell popping in for a track. There’s John Zorn putting the album out on his Tzadik label.
Shimada’s angular, haunting melodies lend themselves well to the catholic interests of a downtown aesthetic, and as a result, Blue Marble is one of the most strangely beautiful recordings of the year.
Shimada’s clear alto never obscures her melodies, which sometimes stray a half-step here and there from their tonal center. And while she sings entirely in Japanese — not even including a throw-away English word as is common practice in Japanese pop music — listeners don’t need a lyric sheet to feel the longing in her voice.
And while Shimada could have felt at home with more traditional instrumentation — say, an acoustic guitar and a brush drum kit — her songs take on a larger sense of proportion with the unconventional approach she and Kang employs.
Toy pianos mimic a gamelan ensemble on “Busy Rabbit,” the closest thing to a single on the album. A string quartet that could have come from Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 backs Shimada on “Toki Wa Sugi”, while Björk-like drum patterns drive “Wakare”.
Every track offers something distinct — an Enya-meets-Meredith Monk chorale on “Hikari (Morning Part II)”; no vocals and all strings on “Silent”; Frisell’s chiming tones on “Song for Mark.”
But the overall mood of Blue Marble is introspective and disturbing. Shimada isn’t content to produce music that’s calm and soothing. Blue Marble looks inward but is never afraid to peek into the dark corner of the mind’s ear.
The 41-minute album concludes with the 10-minute “Asa (Morning Part 3)”, a piece that combines all the techniques introduced in the preceding tracks, even reprising the opening guitar lick.
Blue Marble is a quiet, unsettling collection of songs propelled by a singular vision. It’s a challenging listening experience that doesn’t leave a person worn down.
This album is a lot more interesting if you take it literally.
In other words, you have to believe an 11-year-old Japanese martial artist is playing guitar, a drummer possessed by the ghost of his hip-hop friends is hammering out those phat beats and a guy with two fractured eyes is singing those deadpan lyrics.
If you believe the animated characters of Gorillaz really are playing their instruments — ignore those musicians behind the curtain! — then Gorillaz the album comes across as pretty cool.
Which it is … for the most part.
IRL (translation: “in real life,” for you beginning Internet surfers), Gorillaz consists of Blur singer Damon Albran and producer Dan “The Automater” Nakamura, with a revolving door of guest musicians including Del tha Funky Homosapien, Hatori Miho of Cibo Matto and Ibrahim Ferrer from Buena Vista Social Club.
A supergroup of that magnitude has got to produce one helluva recording, right? A few tracks support that assumption.
“Re-hash” certainly harkens back to 1994, when some guy named Beck layed an acoustic guitar riff over a hefty backbeat, but this time Albran and co. — I mean, 2D and co. deliver an off-kilter sing-song melody that’s as every bit stoner as it is childplay.
“Tomorrow Comes Today”, one of three incredibly appealing singles off the album, quietly rumbles with a mournful harmonica line and watery bass line. “19-2000” blips and bleeps along, propelled by a catchy chorus delivered by Hatori.
And of course, there’s “Clint Eastwood”. Every music journalist reviewing this disc is required to mention “Clint Eastwood”, a spooky-sounding song that combines dub and hip-hop in a way that’s supposed to be cool and new but comes across as pretty lethargic (to mine ears at least).
From track to track, Gorillaz produces moments of ear-catching cleverness. Like the eerie greeting that opens “M1 A1”. Or the slow-motion Latin rhythms of “Latin Simone”. Or the concise “Hey ho, let’s go”-ness of “Punk.” Or the cool trumpet hook of “Rock the House.”
But all these great, little moments don’t add up to any brilliant whole. If anything, Gorillaz sounds like Nakamura and Albran took one tempo, changed a bunch of preset patterns on a drum machine, then let the rest of the musicians just lay all sorts of different stuff on top of it.
It gets boring after a while listening to one song after another trot along at the same tempo, booming and buzzing with much of the same sonic effects.
If real people were put to task for producing a work this non-descript, they would be raked over the proverbial coals.
But these real people are giving voice to a conceit. Gorillaz is the ultimate concept group, and Gorillaz is a might fine concept album.
Hatori’s broken English enuniciation comes across far more intersting if channeled through Noodle. Del tha Funky Homosapien does an excellent job getting into the character of Russel. And Albran reins in his heavy Cockney accent on enough tracks to give 2D some real humanity and versatility.
Makes you almost wonder what the hell Murdoch does.
If the aim of Gorillaz is to take rock music drama to its extreme, it does a fucking good job.
Although released more than five years ago, UA’s debut album 11 still sounds incredibly new.
Sure, some of the drum programming may be a bit dated, but UA’s strong artistic vision is every bit as challenging in 2001 as it must have been in 1995.
11 is a diverse collection of internationally influenced jazz-pop. The album’s opener, “Rhythm”, could have come off a Basia or Sade album.
But when UA, whose name in Swahili means “flower” or “kill”, tears into the exuberent, flamenco-influenced “Ookina Kina Amaete”, all proverbial bets are off — wherever UA takes you next, it’s going to be exciting, and it’s going to sound good.
The Japanese soul singer who was discovered in a jazz bar in Osaka even flirted with drum ‘n’ bass way before Madonna dragged William Orbit into a studio (“Bara Iro”). The backbeat sounds a bit primitive, but even then, UA knew what would eventually become electronica was more about texture than songcraft.
UA’s smokey, sultry voice works best when she draws inward, and 11 has more than its fair share of ethereal, Homogenic-era Björk-like textures.
“Jelly” and “Himawari” specifically keyed more successfully into the sonic territory Iceland’s most famous export was trying to attempt on Post — big dance beats, atmospheric instrumentation, mellow rhythms.
While UA does create some smart, daring music, she also knows the value of a good single.
On “Kumo Ga Chigireru Toki”, UA skillfully tunes into the melancholy her deep alto can easily evoke. And on both versions of “Jounetsu”, one of which appears as a hidden 12th track, UA gives herself a workout on some jubilant music.
Although UA would go on to make more diverse and challenging albums — Ametora is even more cosmopolitan, and AJICO’s Fukamidori more haunting — 11 finds the alluring singer at a creative high.
She balances her more riskier leanings with a need for hooks, and UA doesn’t stumble one bit.
For a band as feedback-friendly as mono, they sure have some nicely melodic music.
mono specialize in the kind of long, drawn-out, repetitive instrumental that some avant-garde experts might call “post-minimalist”.
But where music of this kind can get pretty boring pretty fast, mono possesses a very keen sense of proportion.
The Japanese quartet’s debut, Hey You E.P., contains only four tracks and clocks in at 37 minutes.
The 11-minute opener “Karelia”, however, doesn’t feel like it just stole 1/6 of an hour of your life. Rather, the meticulously-crafted arc of the piece makes those 11 minutes feel more like three. (Eh — maybe five.)
mono knows never to try a listeners patience. They build to a climax gradually and organically, never sacrificing common sense to be merely clever.
The eight-minute “Finlandia” starts off slow, but by the time all the band members are playing, that slow piece has transformed itself into a hulking, kinetic wall of sound.
Unlike other Japanese underground bands, mono likes tonal harmonies. Noisy, buzzsaw distorion is a vital part of the band’s sound, make no mistake, but the foundation for their skyscrapers of overdrive are muddy triads fed through lots and lots of reverb.
With a tonal foundation set against a screeching foreground, mono creates an arresting Big Picture.
In short, it’s a tremendous piece of work from a band expert in making extremes work as a single unit.
The four members of mono — bass guitarist Tamaki, guitarists Goto Takaakira and Yoda, and drummer Takada Yasunori — are expert sound architects. They know how to make the harshest noise sound angelic.
PuffyAmiYumi is a chart-topping phenomenom in its native Japan, and just like in America, some questionable stuff reaches the top of the charts.
Puffy, who tacked on the suffix AmiYumi to avoid confusion with the Artist Formerly Known As Puff Daddy Now Known As P. Diddy, could be considered an “idol pop” group.
After all, Onuki Ami and Yoshimura Yumi were recruited by producer Okuda Tamio. He formed the group, not Ami or Yumi.
But that’s where similarities between Puffy and other idol groups ends. Ami and Yumi are in their late 20s, positively ancient in the youth-geared idol scene.
Instead of chirping to swirling techno beats and layers of over-produced, synthetic dance pop, Ami and Yumi scrape their way through guitar-driven, ’60s-inspired rock-pop that sounds positively beefy next to, say, Koyanagi Yuki or Hamasaki Ayumi.
Does all this matter to the anime-loving Asiaphiles to which Puffy’s U.S. debut, Spike, is evidently geared? Maybe.
Sony is banking on college airplay, not mainstream radio, to introduce bands from Japan to America. In short, the Discman/Wega makers want a piece of the Pizzicato Five-Shonen Knife action.
But PuffyAmiYumi is a pretty risky means to an end. Although Spike is rife with bouncy hooks and straight-ahead headbanger guitar riffs, it’s still first and foremost an album geared for Japan’s pop audience.
In other words, this music is so sweet, it can make a listener develop some awful cavities. “Boogie Woogie No. 5”, the album’s opener, should have included a dentist’s warning.
Other tracks could have come straight off a really bad anime soundtrack. The cheesy analog drum machine and synthesizer effects of “Cosmic Nagaretabi” sounds like an outtake from Macross or the ending theme of an episode of Urutsei Yatsuura.
But for the most part, Spike really isn’t that bad. (At least for folks who listen to too much Number Girl and Shiina Ringo and were expecting the worse.)
“Sumire” contains the kind of uplifting melody that comes across as sincere instead of crass. “Mondo Muyo” does a great job of pounding into your subconscious.
“Destruction Pancake” really lays heavy on the distortion, while “Sakura no hana ga saku amai amai kisetsu no uta” tones down the exuberence for a slightly introspective mood.
Vocally, Ami and Yumi are just one voice short and a few notes shy of being Bananarama, but their earnest delivery has more personality than, say, the technical polish of any member of Eden’s Crush.
In all, Spike is an indulgent guilty pleasure, an album that takes its lack of seriousness so seriously, it comes across as fun as it should.
So. Let’s compare notes. How many listens did it take for you to realize that Radiohead’s Amnesiac doesn’t suck after all?
Although rumours about the album’s content hinted it would feature more of the band’s signature guitar rock, Amnesiac pretty much continues in the same vein as Kid A.
Ethereal effects, cryptic vocal processing, fluid song structures — Amnesiac is every bit as unconventional as Kid A.
So why is Amnesiac’s predecessor still a better recording?
First off, this album sounds like it really was recorded at the same time as Kid A. This is not a band who recorded a collection of sonically challenging, atmospheric instrumental music, then was told by its label to go back into the studio and do something more conventional. (Like, say, Café Tacuba did with Reves/Yosoy.)
Amnesiac are the leftovers of the Kid A sessions, plain and simple. If the album really did live up to its rumors and stood out in contrast from Kid A, evaluating it would be a much fairer task. That’s just not the case.
Whereas Kid A managed to seep into listeners’ consciences without their knowing it, Amnesiac struggles to make its grotesque sound seem more interesting and beautiful than it is.
The album starts off promisingly enough with “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” and the Brian-Eno-by-way-of-Steve Reich piano chords of “Pyramid Song.”
Then “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” starts up … and goes nowhere. The cacophonic, stuttering of the song’s instrumentation comes across as flashy instead unsettling.
And that’s how the rest of the album plays out. Songs start, songs meander, songs attempt to stretch into some sort of dramatic arc, songs end.
Like a colleague of mine said, “It’s no Kid A,” which is unfortunate — Amnesiac is still a daring, strangely pretty set of songs. It just has to contend with a predecessor that lived up to the press it generated.
And as the beginning sentence of this review implies — after a few listens, Amnesiac reveals some nice moments.
“Like Spinning Plates” paces itself on so many different levels, the title is pretty appropriate. The conventionally structured “Knives Out” provides the album a much needed break from its experimentalism. And the re-working of “Morning Bell” from Kid A brings out a pleasant eerieness not evident in its other form.
Once that beauty reveals itself, then Amnesiac doesn’t feel so much like leftovers.
Back in 1998, Rufus Wainwright somehow managed to make every critic on the face of the planet trip over themselves in desparate high praise.
Like Kelly Willis’ What I Deserve from 1999, Wainwright’s eponymous debut yielded many more accolades than it probably deserved.
I speak only for myself, but Wainwright struck me as impenetrable and overly smart, his nasal deadpan sounding like the alien love child of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Japanese rock diva Shiina Ringo.
But Wainwright struck a chord with listeners, and even if he didn’t topple the Backstreet Boys from their chart-topping perch, the very few people who bought his first album really, really loved it.
So now Wainwright returns with Poses, and somewhat self-mockingly, he told Rolling Stone his aim with this album was to sell out.
He did, and thank goodness for that.
Poses lives up to the hype critics heaped on him three years ago. It’s a solid collection of lush, dramatic pop songs that veers from crooner ditties to quasi-folk pop.
When Wainwright “sells out,” he does so marvelously, nailing radio-friendly hooks that scream “injustice” if program directors summarily ignore these songs.
“California” feels like an update of Burt Bacharach’s “San Jose” and Petula Clark’s “Downtown”, only with jangle guitar rock that Michael Stipe would have done if he came out a decade earlier.
“Grey Gardens” is a straight-forward pop song, the kind with an immediate melody and enough restraint to come across as revelatory and not flashy.
On other tracks, Wainwright still indulges in the brainy, literate muse that made his first album somewhat inaccessible, but this time around, he’s gotten moodier, holding back on hitting people over the head with his songwriting prowess.
“Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk”, “Rebel Prince” and “Greek Song” sound like excerpts from a work-in-progress stage production — three-minute minature dramas with their own start, middle and ending.
“The Consort” builds slowly, depending on long notes to stretch the momentum of the song to a comfortable pace.
And on a cover of his dad Loudon’s “One Man Guy,” Wainwright cleverly confounds the song’s theme. The title should indicate how it might be construed but ultimately isn’t.
In all, Poses shows Wainwright being smarter with his smartness. He’s letting his music and not his talent speak for him, and what emerges is a beautiful album that makes doubters into believers.
Hate to admit this, but when I see the name “Everything But the Girl”, I usually expect to hear Tracey Thorn somewhere.
Thorn’s rich voice gives Everything But the Girl’s music a distinctly human touch, especially now that the pair has lept two feet into the cold, synthetic world of electronica.
Back to Mine, a series of remix recordings, is devoid of Thorn, but her presence isn’t entirely missed. Thorn and musical co-hort Ben Watt still manage to find that essential bit soul in the pieces they selected to remix for Back to Mine.
Beth Orton’s “Stars All Seem to Fall” epitomizes Everything But the Girl’s mastery at bringing humanity to technical wizardry.
Orton’s ruddy voice keys into the same emotional realm as Thorn’s, and Watt provides Orton with a restrained backdrop, letting Orton do what she does well.
At its core, Model 500’s “Flow” and the Ananda Project’s “Cascades of Colour” traffics in the same kind of dance floor-driven soul jazz that marked Everything But the Girl’s pre-DJ work.
Even some of the song’s themes, such as Slick Rick’s cautionary tale “All Alone (No One to Be With)” and the Roots’ “Silent Treatment”, parallel the love-lost longing in Thorn’s lyrics.
But Back to Mine is all about mood, one that shakes your hips, even if your heart does some twists and turns.
To that end, Everything But the Girl includes Margaret Mary O’Hara’s “To Cry About,” a folk-pop tune given a spare, ethereal arrangement that’s haunting as anything the duo has ever written.
It’s a terrific move, and O’Hara’s un-slick voice gives the collection a nice break from all the back beats and electro-effects.
If anything, Back to Mine feels like a really cool mixed tape given by friend. Except this mixed tape is threaded together by a single aesthetic that makes it feel personalized and person.
It’s as much your tape as it is the person who made it for you.
So, uh, when did Depeche Mode become such a texturally interesing band? And when did David Gahan learn how to croon?
It must be producer Mark Bell, the guy partly responsible for turning Björk from a punk party-band chanteuse to an electronica pop diva.
A lot of the ethereal effects that made Björk’s Homogenic a fascinating listen informs a lot of Exciter.
And with songwriter Martin L. Gore trading larger-than-life dance beats for more subtle rhythms and more mellow fare, Bell manages to keep Exciter from sinking into the filler boredom of most Depeche Mode album tracks.
Most of the songs on Exciter writhe and seethe without ever exploding into a grand chorus or bridge, and they work because of it.
Bell and the band build to climaxes that never come and always back off before anything gets to crowded.
“Dream On”, “I Am You” and “Shine” capitalize on this technique most effectively.
Other times, DM is content to soak in a sea of ethereal effects on such tracks as “Comatose”, “Breathe” and “The Sweetest Condition.” In the past, these excursions often tended to be the most boring moments on a Depeche Mode album, but with Bell’s arrangement expertise, they never lose interest.
“When the Body Speaks” is perhaps one of the more beautiful DM songs. Driven by a throbbing bass but never getting louder than a quiet whisper, this restrained ballad absolves the band for ever writing “Somebody”.
Despite drug problems and a suicide attempt — or maybe because of them — Gahan has become a stronger singer, not by becoming more powerful but by exercising tremendous control. On this album, Gahan has mastered the concept of “less is more.”
Exciter makes some very forgiveable missteps when it tries to dredge up the past. “The Dead of Night” sounds like an outtake from Songs of Faith and Devotion that should have remained an outtake. But even a lyrically weak song as “Breathe” still possesses an insanely catchy melody.
“I Feel Loved”, on the other hand, is a nice return to Depeche Mode’s more dance-floor friendly work.
Exciter is perhaps one of the most coherent albums Depeche Mode has ever recorded, and it never has to resort to overstatement to make that point.