I’ll be the first to admit that I am as far out of the hip hop window as any 40-year-old white man can be, but when this clip of P.O.S. covering Pearl Jam’s “Why Go” landed in my inbox, I just had to hear it for myself. He did the cover on the fly in his studio, with one pre-programmed beat and what looks like a one-octave keyboard. It isn’t perfect by any means, but it ain’t bad. He actually sings the track (smart), and even tries to add a guitar solo on that tiny keyboard of his (bonus points for trying). Try it — you might be surprised by the results.
Category: CD Reviews (Page 175 of 399)
Think of White Lies as the Menswe@r of the latest UK rock movement; there is nothing particularly wrong with them, but the combination of timing (they don’t have it) and chops (they have enough to get by) saddles To Lose My Life, the band’s debut album, with one heck of an uphill battle. Their earnest, widescreen melodrama will fit snugly next to your Editors and Interpol CDs, and the title track, with its unforgettable lyric “Let’s grow old together, and die at the same time,” is sure to rope in a lovestruck Goth kid or two. It’s all perfectly pleasant, and they even reach for Julian Cope levels of bombast on “Nothing to Give,” but it’s lacking that transcendant moment where the band rises above its influences to deliver something extraordinary. As debuts go, it’s unassuming – which went out of style with the advent of Soundscan – but so was Travis’ first album. Let’s see where they go from here. (Geffen 2009)
A guy, a girl, and a synth: It sounds like the setup for a bad music-nerd joke, but those three ingredients have become some of pop’s most popular in the 21st century, and a quick shortcut to niche stardom for artists moonlighting from less lucrative solo careers (see: Heap, Imogen; George, Inara). O+S, the latest sample-happy male/female pop duo – and earliest contender for least Google-friendly band name of the year – comes courtesy of Azure Ray’s Fink and Remy Zero’s Cedric Lamoyne, a.k.a. Scalpelist, and the duo’s pedigree adds a thin layer of folky weirdness to the assortment of loops and sound effects that go hand-in-hand with projects like this, but it’s neither as odd nor as compelling as you might hope. Though O+S take pains to cover all the genre’s bases – from the doomy “Knowing Animals,” which sounds vaguely like the work of a narcoleptic Siouxsie Sioux, to “Toreador,” which suggests a slowed-down Bird and the Bee, and the Sarah McLachlan vibe of “New Life” – none of the songs are all that memorable. It’s a shame, too – these tracks were built from field recordings Fink created during in Omaha, Alabama, and Haiti, which should have helped them sound like something other than Mazzy Star taking a nap in an elevator with Frou Frou, but ultimately, it’s just more of the same mostly soothing, slightly menacing bedroom pop you’ve heard from plenty of like-minded artists, minus the hooks. (Saddle Creek 2009)
It seems like a lifetime ago that Taylor Hicks was being crowned the champion of “American Idol” in its fifth season back in 2006. And while America clearly fell in love with this gray-haired wonder, Simon Cowell didn’t get it and neither did many critics, but Hicks’ debut album went platinum anyway. And while yours truly was a big fan of the material on that debut, the same can’t be said for Hicks’ latest, The Distance, released on his own Modern Whomp Records. There is no doubt this guy can sing with a trademark Joe Cocker-ish bluesy growl, but it’s pretty obvious that the recording budget was substantially less this time around, and the songs are mostly mediocre with performances at times reminiscent of cruise ship karaoke. Nevertheless, a few tracks do stand out, and Hicks is at his best when he tones things down for piano ballads – “What’s Right Is Right” and “Nineteen” are both heartfelt and destined for light rock radio repetition. And “Woman’s Got to Have It,” with fellow Idol alum Elliot Yamin, is a soulful and catchy closer. (LABEL: Modern Whomp)
Imagine the Killers recording a sequel to Def Leppard’s Slang – swapping anti-capitalist manifestos for love songs – and you’ll have an idea of what to expect from Habeas Corpus, the second effort from St. Louis trio Living Things. It sounds pretty ridiculous on paper, but it isn’t a bad sound, actually – Habeas Corpus loses points for buffing up the rough edges the band displayed on 2005’s Ahead of the Lions, but it’s got enough glammy sass and swagger to overcome the added layers of gloss. Unfortunately, no amount of ‘tude can overcome lyrics like “Endless summer nights I miss you…There’s an island in your heart / I want to run into your sun…only love can break your heart.” You’ve got to give Living Things props for being subversively funny enough to meld an album’s worth of party-rock arrangements with darkly political subject matter – it’s hard not to like a record that puts a song like “Post Millennium Extinction Blues” within spitting distance from something as proudly, basically carnal as “Shake Your Shimmy” – but no matter how brightly this bauble glitters, it’s still mostly plastic beneath the surface. It’s tempting to wonder whether the band was trying to make some sort of brilliant meta-statement by cloaking its politically aware sloganeering in such blatantly commercial music – but it’s more likely that this is the work of armchair politicians who like to party. Again, that isn’t such a bad thing; once they get around to writing sharper lyrics, it might actually be pretty damn good. (Jive 2009)
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