Author: Jeff Giles (Page 6 of 41)

Katy Perry: Teenage Dream

August 19, 2010 /


RIYL: Ke$ha, Nelly Furtado, Lily Allen

Katy_Perry_Teenage_DreamShe sounded for all the world like a one-hit wonder when she made her debut with the aggressively obnoxious “I Kissed a Girl,” but surprise, surprise — Katy Perry is currently in the middle of setting airplay records with “California Gurls,” the Snoop-enhanced first single from her new album, Teenage Dream. A few more hits like this, and Perry stands a chance at carving out a Black Eyed Peas-style career, embracing cheerful disposability with a string of shiny, deceptively sharp pop songs.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, here’s Teenage Dream. Simply by virtue of the smash hits she’s scored with “Gurls” and the title track, Perry’s already vanquished the sophomore jinx, but does the album deliver on the promises made by those killer leadoff singles? The short answer: Not really. But compared to a lot of mainstream pop records, its wheat-to-chaff ratio is surprisingly high.

Given who she is and the era we’re living in, it’d verge on unreasonable to expect Perry to put together an album of songs as pop-smackingly delectable as “California Gurls,” so it shouldn’t come as any surprise that there’s a fair amount of filler on Teenage Dream. What’s unusual — and fairly troublesome for Perry’s long-term prospects — is the fact that her least appealing moments come when she’s trying to get serious, as on tracks like the meant-to-be-showstopping ballads “Pearl” and “Not Like the Movies.” There aren’t many pop singers who embrace brainlessness as warmly as Katy Perry, and as a result, she’s just not believable when she thinks she really has something to say. Like Teenage Dream‘s cover art indicates, she’s trapped herself in a fluffy prison.

Fluffiness has its own rewards, though, and even if Perry will probably never reach the levels of profundity she strains for so unconvincingly during Teenage Dream‘s duds, she at least has a knack for irresistible anthems to shallowness, stupidity, and narcissism. For a good seven songs or so, Dream finds Perry shooting cotton candy sparks on a beach made from rainbow sand while unicorns shit churros and pee ice-cold beer on everyone. You get the title track, “Gurls,” the fabulously dumb “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” the soaring “Firework,” and “Peacock,” which actually beats the Black Eyed Peas at their own stupid game, plus the cutely aggro “Circle the Drain” and future Hot AC hit “The One That Got Away” — basically, a solid EP’s worth of 21st century Top 40 at its most hollowly addictive. If you care about Katy Perry at all, this is probably exactly what you’re hoping for. How long she’ll be able to keep this up is anyone’s guess, but in the meantime, she’s living a rather pleasant Dream. (Capitol 2010)

Katy Perry MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop

Ray LaMontagne and the Pariah Dogs: God Willin’ and the Creek Don’t Rise

August 18, 2010 /


RIYL: James Morrison, Ryan Adams, Iron & Wine

51ENPcsTtLL._SCLZZZZZZZ_[1]When Ray LaMontagne burst onto the scene with Trouble in 2004, it was easy to assume that the album’s slight glossy sheen was the work of producer Ethan Johns, and look forward to a time when LaMontagne had enough clout to put together a collection with the sort of grit that would support and highlight the soulful folk of his unapologetically retro songwriting. Three albums later, LaMontagne has stepped out on his own — but the result, the teasingly down-home titled God Willin’ & the Creek Don’t Rise, is the most mannered and frictionless of his young career.

It didn’t have to be this way. LaMontagne convened a band, christened the Pariah Dogs, for the sessions, helmed by LaMontagne from the comfort of his own studio, and recorded everything live; frustratingly, it’s the songs themselves that lack the essential heat of his primary influences. Where LaMontagne evoked the bucolic soul of Van Morrison’s early ’70s recordings on his debut, he’s steadily retreated to a Laurel Canyon somnolence over time, and God Willin’ finds him mostly willing to simply lay back, unspool his tuneful rasp, and let the pedal steels do all the work.

The lone exception is the opening track, “Repo Man,” which hints at the sort of back porch funk LaMontagne has always seemed to have in him. But from the second track, the lovely “New York City’s Killin’ Me,” through the harmonica-laced closing track, “Devil’s in the Jukebox,” the rest of God Willin’ is curiously flat; it ambles sheepishly, hands in pockets, from plaintive ballad to lukewarm mid-tempo number and back again.

The end result is an album that certainly isn’t bad, but it’s undeniably frustrating. At his best, LaMontagne has always suggested the modern fruition of the seeds sown by rock’s earliest soul explorers; here, he sounds like nothing so much as a pleasant afternoon nap. And like a nap, listening to God Willin’ has its pleasures, but you’re liable to come out of it feeling groggy and a little ashamed that you weren’t doing something more productive with your time. Hopefully, LaMontagne will catch a twinge of that guilt too. (RCA 2010)

Ray LaMontagne MySpace page

Americana, CD Reviews, Folk, Soul

Marc Cohn: Listening Booth: 1970

July 16, 2010 /


RIYL: Eric Clapton, Sting, Jackson Browne

Will everyone who feels like they need to hear another version of “Maybe I’m Amazed,” “After Midnight,” or – God help you – “Make It With You,” please raise your hand? Thank you. The rest of you may be excused.

As covers projects go, Marc Cohn’s Listening Booth: 1970 has an admittedly nifty concept; it focuses strictly on songs from the year of its title. But the minus in this equation is that any song popular enough to survive the last 40 years has been played to death. There’s no doubt that Cohn really loves “Wild World” and “Long As I Can See the Light,” but so do millions of other people, which is why you’ve been able to hear the originals (as well as not a few covers of the songs on this album) on classic rock radio every day for at least the last 20 years. If you aren’t going to add something new to add to these songs, why bother?

It’s a question Cohn never really provides a satisfactory answer to here, aside from the obvious one: Because people from Cohn’s generation are suckers for nostalgia, and if they aren’t going to purchase his generally excellent original material — which, incidentally, does a far better job of synthesizing his influences than anything here — then he might as well cash a check and cut a slowed-down version of “No Matter What,” suitable for the next time Adam Sandler or John Cusack decides to film a romantic comedy.

Thoughts this cynical are depressing when you’re listening to classic songs like “Into the Mystic” and “The Tears of a Clown,” but they are, sadly, more interesting than anything that happens during Listening Booth: 1970. The performances are tasteful, the production is finely burnished, and Cohn’s voice remains a marvelously soulful instrument, but this is a hollow exercise. Like a musical Slanket, it’ll put your mother-in-law to sleep with a smile on her face. If you want more, look to Cohn’s albums of original material — or, better yet, the original recordings of these songs. (Saguaro Road 2010)

Marc Cohn MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop

Crowded House: Intriguer

July 13, 2010 /


RIYL: Split Enz, Tim Finn, Finn Brothers

Neil Finn titled his first post-Crowded House solo album Try Whistling This, and that may as well have been a manifesto for everything he’s done since. Once a dispenser of instantly memorable hooks, Finn spent his solo years burrowing into an increasingly insular (and ethereally lovely) melodic world, and where albums like One Nil were arguably more meaningful than his earlier work, it often felt like he was engaging in a bit of passive resistance against the pop fame he achieved – and inexplicably lost. Fine, he seemed to be saying. You didn’t buy brilliantly catchy Crowded House records like Woodface and Together Alone? I won’t bother with the mainstream stuff.

Fans who’d been frustrated with Finn’s drift away from stuff they could whistle were doubtless cheered when he unexpectedly decided to reconvene Crowded House in 2007, after a more than ten-year hiatus – but anyone who thought the reunion meant Finn was sitting on another “Don’t Dream It’s Over” must have been crushingly disappointed in their first album back, Time on Earth. For all intents and purposes, it sounded like another Finn solo record – which made sense, given that the sessions started out that way, but the band’s trademark energy was noticeably lacking.

So was Time on Earth just a case of Finn cleaning out the pipes before he got back to business? Yes and no. It’s true that Intriguer sounds like more of a band effort than Time on Earth, but what this album really establishes is how Finn has evolved as a songwriter. He’s always addressed unusual themes – this is a band that recorded a song titled “Pineapple Head” and once fantasized about Andrew Lloyd Webber’s pants falling down in front of the Queen of England — but as the years have worn on, Finn has found the confidence (or maybe just the means) to probe deeper, and with deceptively unrestrained emotion, into the things we worry about in middle age and onward. Family, aging, commitment, the bonds of friendship, the struggle to square one’s dreams with who and where they really are – these are the places Finn’s muse has led him, and as topics for pop songs go, they’re briar patches.

They beg for connections, though, and that’s the crux of the reunited Crowded House – it’s a musical fraternity, and not the kind that wears togas and slips roofies to undergrads. If you can listen past the lack of an obvious hit here (leadoff single “Saturday Sun” is about as straight up as the album gets), you can hear bonds being built; in three-minute increments, you can hear Finn discovering who he is as a husband, a father, a musician, and a friend. (Alternately, you can just let it sort of wash over you; aside from a few forays into spiky dissonance, Intriguer is as gauzily lovely as it is thoroughly mid-tempo.)

Songs like these clearly aren’t for everyone. Finn’s late-period work has a tendency to flit away if you try to get a grip on it, and Intriguer is cut from the same cloth. You need to slow down and let these songs come to you. It might take some effort, but it’s worth the wait. “These are times that come only once in your life,” Finn sings at one point, “Or twice if you’re lucky.” It sounds like an allusion to the band’s history, but he’s speaking for all of us. (Fantasy 2010)

Crowded House MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop

N.A.S.A.: The Big Bang

June 24, 2010 /


RIYL: Gorillaz, Afrika Bambaataa, The Neptunes

N.A.S.A.’s 2009 debut, The Spirit of Apollo, was one of the freshest, most creative hip-hop records to come out in years, a high-proof blend of booty-shaking beats (courtesy of partners DJ Zegon and Sam Spiegel), dizzying rhymes (from an astounding list of guest MCs that included Kanye West, Chuck D, Chali 2na, Gift of Gab, and Del tha Funkee Homosapien), and sharp pop hooks (with help from guests like David Byrne, Tom Waits, Lykke Li, Karen O, Santigold, M.I.A., and George Clinton). Those are some stuffed parentheses, but they only touch the surface of what Apollo has to offer; in the post-mashup era, it illuminates the fertile possibilities of cross-pollination and a healthy disregard for genre boundaries.

It’s therefore unsurprising – though still disappointing – that N.A.S.A.’s follow-up represents such a substantial comedown. The Big Bang is a remix project, and as such, it presented all kinds of strong possibilities; after all, we’re talking about a subgenre whose best-selling titles include Bobby Brown’s Dance!…Ya Know It! and Paula Abdul’s Shut Up and Dance, so the bar is set pretty low. Unfortunately, although The Big Bang is every bit as danceable as anyone could hope, it’s crippled by a narrow focus: Rather than remixing all (or even most) of Apollo, Bang‘s 17 tracks include four versions of “Gifted” and three of “Whachadoin?” – and it completely skips some of Apollo‘s strongest songs, like the David Byrne/Chali 2na/Gift of Gab collision “The People Tree.”

Still, it’s worth noting that all the songs being remixed here are solid; if you’re going to chew up most of an album with different versions of the same stuff, it’s definitely better to start with strong raw material. And of the two new tracks, the Maximum Hedrum/Barbie Hatch collaboration “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” with its breathy vocals and Tom Tom Club synths, is nearly worth the price of admission by itself. During the lead-up to The Big Bang‘s release, Squeak E. Clean has been in Ethiopia, recording traditional music for the next N.A.S.A. project, which suggests that even if this curious piece of between-album project represents a creative lull, they haven’t run out of barriers to ignore. (Spectrophonic Sound 2010)

N.A.S.A. MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Hip Hop

« Older posts Newer posts »

© 2026 Eat Sleep Drink Music

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑