Tag: Headlines (Page 61 of 76)

Rob Zombie: Hellbilly Deluxe 2

February 16, 2010 /


RIYL: Rob Zombie, White Zombie…other zombie related culture

Rob Zombie’s 2006 album Educated Horses was a shocking departure for the shock rocker where he dropped the industrial dance beats and heavy production in lieu of classic rock riffs and heavy metal grooves. It was mature, experimental and a brave move for the man who hadn’t really advanced his musical style since 1992.

Hellbilly Deluxe 2 is not a brave move. Coming 12 years after the original Hellbilly Deluxe, this album finds Rob Zombie forcefully stripping away every development and evolution in his sound to deliver an album that is intentionally uninspired and derivative, but is that a bad thing? Because even though Educated Horses was a bold move for Zombie and it showed he could do more than he did in the past; the brand of rock he first showed us with “Thunder Kiss ’65” is still the what he does best. And while nothing here is original, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun. The industrial beats and distorted guitars that worked in 1998 on tracks like “Dragula” and “Superbeast” still work fine on “Dream Factory” and “Werewolf Women of the SS” (the latter of which named after Zombie’s mock trailer for “Grindhouse”). About the only thing that doesn’t work on this belated sequel is the closing “The Man Who Laughs,” which is a bloated overblown production complete with string arrangements by film composer Tyler Bates and a (very) extended drum solo. Prog rock excess does not belong on a Rob Zombie record.

There are artists who change and evolve their sound over time (REM, U2), and there are artists who discover that they are only really good at one thing early in their career and they stick to it, prevailing cultural winds be damned (Motorhead, AC/DC). It’s becoming apparent that Zombie is more than happy to be in the latter group, and Rob Zombie sounding like Rob Zombie for 20 more years is preferable to someone else trying to instead. (Road Runner 2010)

Rob Zombie MySpace Page

Alternative, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Industrial, Metal, Rock

Ryan States: Strange Town

February 10, 2010 /


RIYL: The Silver Seas, Ben Folds, The Grays

We’ll say this for Ryan States: his story is a unique one. It’s not every day that a press release includes the words “The Eagles,” “Queen,” “gay music” and “recorded on a circus train” (he’s a touring musician for Ringling Brothers), but that sums up States and his debut, Strange Town, as well as anything. He tells tales of being pressured to “fit in” (ahem, stop being gay) and married men hitting on him, but juxtaposes this modern-day lyrical freedom with a sound from days gone by. (Think Jackson Browne crossed with the Grays.) Guitars jangle and chime (and occasionally shred), the piano hops like a New Orleans beer hall, and he even gives a song a good old fashioned sax solo, while States sings in a baritone not unlike Rufus Wainwright or the Silver Seas’ Daniel Tashian. He doesn’t knock every song out of the park, but the arrangements are solid, and on “I’ll Give You (What You Want),” he resurrects a chord sequence just before the chorus that will stir the soul of any radio listener from the late ’80s, gay or straight. Had States been around back when this kind of music was popular…well, the album probably never would have found a distributor (only dance acts were allowed to be gay back then), but if it had, Strange Town would easily have saved the lives of a couple thousand boys coming to terms with their feelings. We’re guessing States would take that over a gold record any day of the week. (Drooling Class Records 2010)

Ryan States MySpace page
Click to buy Strange Town from Amazon

Adult Contemporary, Americana, Artists, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop, Rock

Kelley Ryan: Twist

February 10, 2010 /


RIYL: astroPuppees, Nina Gordon, Juliana Hatfield

As slight and pretty as a sundress on the first day of June, Kelley Ryan’s Twist finds the astroPuppees frontwoman making a deliberate shift away from what she calls “the rock boy way” of doing things, and toward a gentler sound, driven largely by acoustic guitars and layers of lush harmonies. Ryan’s in good company here, too: She recorded Twist with Don Dixon and Marti Jones, drafted Van Dyke Parks to lend string arrangements to a pair of tracks, and dug into the Beck songbook for a cover of “Lost Cause.” All solid marks in Twist’s favor, to be certain, and when the album lives up to its pedigree – as on the shimmering, gently descending opening track, “About a Girl” – it feels like a long-lost artifact from the golden mid ‘80s era of jingle-jangly singer-songwriter pop. Too often, though, Ryan uses her stylistic shift as a license to hide behind arrangements that don’t do much besides lie there and look pretty, or rhyme “love” with “above.” The end result is an album that might leave you feeling like you’ve just woken up from a pleasant dream – it’s soft, and warm, and no more than five minutes after it’s over, you won’t remember a thing. It’ll add an interesting wrinkle for astroPuppees fans, but there’s no shortage of similar-sounding records, and for anyone who isn’t already familiar with Ryan’s work, this really isn’t enough of a Twist. (Manatee Records 2010)

Kelley Ryan MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop

Massive Attack: Heligoland

February 9, 2010 /


RIYL: The Specials’ “Ghost Town,” Radiohead’s In Rainbows, film noir soundtracks

If you read enough reviews of Heligoland (spoken as ‘Hell Ego Land’), Massive Attack’s new album and first in seven years, you’ll eventually be able to play Bingo with them. At some point, the phrases “dark,” “brooding,” “trip-hop,” “atmospheric,” and “guest vocals” will pop up in the majority of them, and as overused as those expressions are, they fit. Of course, the other reason many reviews will say these things – again – is because, well, what else is there to say about Massive Attack? They have carved such a unique niche for themselves that talking about their music is akin to dancing about architecture. Some bands just are. Massive Attack is one of them. It’s a sweet place to be if you can swing it, but it makes objective analysis of their music almost impossible.

Massive_Attack_01

Up to this point, however, no one has ever needed to write “twelve years removed from their last good album” when discussing Massive, but that is exactly where the band finds itself; you have to go back to last century’s Mezzanine (‘last century’ is a trick writers use for dramatic effect) to find their last consistent piece of work, so the band needs this one to stick. And for the most part, it does, certainly when compared to the 2003’s hazy 100th Window; with a more focused approach on songwriting rather than groovemaking, Heligoland plays like Radiohead’s In Rainbows if they had gone the Santana route and recruited a slew of guest vocalists. (Bingo!) Longtime friend Horace Andy sings on the odd “Girl I Love You,” which begins in the vein of “Angel” but ends with a horn section jazz-out not unlike Radiohead’s “The National Anthem,” and the skittery “Babel” is like “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” done as a drum ‘n bass track. That’s a good thing, in case you were wondering.

Massive’s achilles, however, has always been their tendency to stay in a groove until it becomes a rut, and Heligoland is no exception. There is a lot to admire about the album, but it’s difficult to love; for as much time as they spend exploring dark themes both musically and lyrically, it’s lacking in emotional impact, and not even Damon Albarn can save the album’s final third from coasting to the finish line. Still, bringing the band back to a duo (100th Window was basically a solo project by Robert “3D” Del Naja) was a step in the right direction, but now that they’ve made two albums without Andrew “Mushroom” Vowles, it’s evident that present day Massive Attack is much like Think Tank-era Blur without Graham Coxon. The band still exists, but things will never be what they once were. It is now up to us to accept this and hope for the best going forward. (Virgin 2010)

Massive Attack MySpace page
Click to buy Heligoland from Amazon

Alternative, Artists, CD Reviews, Electronica

Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds: Live in Las Vegas

February 9, 2010 /


RIYL: Dave Matthews, Dave Matthews Band, owning multiple versions of the same song

Record labels have always been eager to sell music fans repackaged goods, and since the dawn of the CD era, the marketplace has been more flooded than ever with remixes, so-called “deluxe” versions, remasters, and all manner of different versions of the same thing. Still, even during a century that has brought us three different iterations of The Essential REO Speedwagon, Dave Matthews stands out as a mighty king of the leftover; since 1997, he’s released approximately 375 live albums, not counting the interminable Live Trax series, whose volumes now outnumber the population of Guam.

Adding to this towering stack of repetition is Live in Las Vegas, Matthews’ third double-disc live collaboration with guitarist Tim Reynolds. When the duo released Live at Luther College in 1999, it actually represented a bit of a nice departure for Matthews; the acoustic setting, while not altogether unfamiliar for his songs, added something different to tracks like “What Would You Say” and “Ants Marching.” But then came 2007’s Live at Radio City, which was essentially two more discs of the same thing, right down to the inclusion of four tracks that had been covered on Luther – and because Matthews’ fans will apparently never stop buying this stuff, he and Reynolds have returned for a third go-round.

Matthews is a prolific guy, but if you’ve already guessed that he’s running out of songs that he and Reynolds haven’t already covered, you’re correct: Just about half of Live in Las Vegas consists of songs that popped up on Luther or Radio City (or both). They toss in a few cuts from the Dave Matthews Band’s last studio album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, as well as a “Kashmir” cover that starts off nifty before dissolving into masturbatory guitar noodling, but on the whole, this is two and a half hours of music you can hear on other albums – and much of it in a musical setting that isn’t appreciably different from what’s on offer here. Unless you’re a hardcore fan, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference.

But it’s the hardcore fans that keep lapping this stuff up, of course, which begs the question of at which point Matthews crosses over from dedicated live anthologist to crass exploiter. Really, the only truly interesting thing about Live in Las Vegas is that it exists – that Matthews knows he has plenty of fans who will be willing to buy it, or anything else he releases, no matter how many times they’ve heard it before. Given the extraordinary difficulty the industry has had selling records over the last decade, the RIAA should probably just pack it in and let Dave Matthews run the whole show. If he can sell people Live in Las Vegas, he can sell them anything. (RCA 2010)

Dave Matthews Band MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock

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