Author: Jeff Giles (Page 23 of 41)

Strive: Fire

April 17, 2009 /

Listening to Strive’s Fire can be a little disorienting – immersing yourself in the band’s piano-heavy pop creates an effect similar to what it might feel like to hit your head and wake up in 1988, on Johnny Hates Jazz’s tour bus, where the singer from When in Rome is doing the nasty with Elton John. Nothing on the album is as disturbing as that mental image, of course, but the songs strongly evoke memories of the late ‘80s heyday of melodramatic, thickly polished pop – and singer Derrick Thompson really does sound like the singer from When in Rome. This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, and really, if Fire had been released in ’88, Strive would be selling out arenas with Michael W. Smith and Amy Grant – but in 2009, there isn’t a non-CCM station on the planet that’s going to slip any of these tracks into heavy rotation, particularly when they’re as unintentionally funny as “On Our Way,” which is supposed to be some sort of tribute to the downtrodden people of Africa but ends up just ripping off the melody from Ben Folds’ “Brick.” Fire may trigger a mixture of nostalgia and ironic pleasure in listeners old enough to remember the ‘80s, but music this simplemindedly earnest is liable to be little more than an amusing curiosity for everyone else – and when you’re aiming for sweeping grandiosity with every track, as Strive so clearly is, that’s a pretty big problem. (GoDigital 2008)

Strive MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop

The Answer: Everyday Demons

March 27, 2009 /

Offering pure proof that good old-fashioned cock rock doesn’t need to sound as airbrushed as Nickelback (or as depressingly stupid as Hinder), AC/DC openers the Answer toss starving AOR fans a heavy bone with Everyday Demons. There isn’t a lick here you haven’t already heard a thousand times, but that’s sort of the point – each of these 11 tracks takes the most tried and true ingredients of your favorite classic rock records and regurgitates them with as much of that bad ‘n’ ballsy old-school spirit as you could reasonably expect in 2009. Don’t expect any Darkness-style camp, or any of the sour-faced defensive posturing you’ll hear from most other 21st-century rock revivalists, in these songs – the Answer, unlike most of their peers, remember that rockin’ is its own reward, and any given track on Everyday Demons would have sounded just fine being blasted out of a car stereo in the parking lot of your neighborhood liquor store on a Friday afternoon in 1990. It should go without saying that this is fairly awesome – but it should also be obvious that in sticking with screeched, fist-pumping choruses and double-tracked solos from low-slung guitars, the band essentially paints itself into a corner that it can only escape with the aid of songs that do more than evoke memories of every aging hesher’s misspent youth. Everyday Demons is unmistakably cut from “classic rock” cloth, but it isn’t a classic in its own right. Still, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. If you’ve been wondering which of the current crop of young rock bands has the balls to restore the genre’s faded glory, here’s your Answer. (The End 2009)

The Answer MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock

Sonos: Sonos

March 27, 2009 /

A cappella music is supposed to be the domain of fun-for-a-minute novelty acts like the Nylons or the Blenders, and even the best of the genre often sounds as though it was recorded by the same grinning, finger-snapping, vest-wearing nerds you laughed at during spring assembly in high school. The last time anyone cared about an a cappella single was in 1993, when Huey Lewis and the News scored a fluke hit with a cover of Curtis Mayfield’s “It’s Alright” – and when a genre’s last taste of success came from Huey Lewis, you know it’s seen better days. Into this cultural vacuum steps the six-member Los Angeles outfit known as Sonos, and although their press materials contain all the dreaded buzzwords used by makers of terminally unhip music – “push the envelope,” “redefine a genre” – their self-titled debut is actually far better than you might expect, especially given their über-hip taste in cover selections (Bjork’s “Jaga,” Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” Imogen Heap’s “Come Here Boy”) and/or the presence of AAA radio pox Sara Bareilles, who contributes vocals to her own “Gravity.” It helps that they aren’t a straight a cappella outfit – many of the tracks incorporate light instrumentation, and they aren’t afraid to chop and twiddle with their vocals – but what really puts Sonos across is the ease with which the group manages to substitute a cool modern feel for the stereotypical Up With People vibe. No vests here, in other words – and if Sonos is still a novelty, it’s one that’ll take a good, long while to wear off. (Big Helium 2009)

Sonos MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop, Vocal

Max Morgan: Interrupting the Silence

March 27, 2009 /

His album artwork promises an artist with the velvety smoothness of a young, guitar-toting Kenny G, combined with the addle-brained exuberance of Richard Simmons on Oxycontin – but Max Morgan’s Interrupting the Silence delivers on neither promise, instead providing the listener with an idea of what it might sound like if Leo Sayer had replaced Kevin Cronin in REO Speedwagon. The answer to that question, in case you were wondering, is a lot of generic pop/rock grooves with plentiful falsetto and a few scoops of faux vocal grit, not to mention a load of embarrassing lyrical clichés (“Wait for Me,” in particular, would make Bryan Adams blush). Morgan is a technically sound vocalist, and when he manages to come up with the right material for his voice, he does a fine job of showing off his range, but often – as is the case with the groanworthy “Ya Better Believe” – he doesn’t know which dumb-ass lines to cut, or how not to beat a mildly pleasant groove until it’s dead. (“Believe” is only 3:14 long, but feels like a prog epic.) Morgan’s love for cheese is bottomless; he begins the closing track, “Prayer for No One,” with the line “Hello, Ground Control, I think we’ve got a problem,” channels Michael W. Smith on the weepy power ballad “Nobody’s Coming to My Rescue,” and generally tends to hit Disney Channel rock territory when he’s aiming for arena slayer status. The result is the CD equivalent of a tract home: The pieces are all assembled competently enough, but they’re made from such flimsy stuff, the effort was largely wasted. (Chime 2009)

Max Morgan MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop, Rock

Andrew Ripp: Fifty Miles to Chicago

March 27, 2009 /

This is what happens when a young, potentially gritty blues vocalist hires a former member of Tonic to produce his album: Fifty Miles to Chicago, 11 perfectly inoffensive, slightly soulful rock numbers that suggest what might happen if Rob Thomas listened to a lot of Electric Mud (and did not suck). In fact, Ripp flashes a lot of talent here, both in his vocal performances and his songwriting; it’s just a shame that Dan Lavery’s squeaky-clean production was allowed to suck all the sweat out of the recordings. As a result, although Ripp clearly has the chops to carry a warts-and-all record, Fifty Miles makes him sound like an impostor, an impression deepened by frictionless belters like “Lifeline” that drop him squarely in the driest, whitest square of Taylor Hicks Territory. In all fairness, Ripp co-produced the disc, with Randy Coleman – but it’s hard not to assume that he’s a much more entertaining, dynamic performer in a live setting, and that the decision to geld this record was made purely for commercial reasons. Here’s hoping that subsequent albums find Ripp more willing to color outside the lines, and give his songs the rough treatment they deserve. In the meantime, he’s got a lot more than 50 miles to go before he gets anywhere near Chicago – other than maybe the one that gave us “Hard to Say I’m Sorry.” (Get Ripp’d 2008)

Andrew Ripp MySpace page

Blues, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock

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