Elvis Costello and the Impostors, “Momofuku” (Lost Highway) [2 STARS]
Constitutionally incapable of editing himself or accepting that maybe, just maybe his considerable talents aren’t quite so considerable that they justify excursions into piano jazz and classical music or collaborations with Allen Toussaint and Burt Bacharach, part-time luxury car pitchman Declan MacManus is getting some mileage from the fact that he rush-released this new disc with minimal hype (never mind that there’s been little interest in any of his new releases this millennium) and recorded it even more quickly after a sudden burst of inspiration following a guest stint on Jenny Lewis’ next album. (The California retro-pop/alt-country chanteuse adds harmonies here as payback.)
“Obviously the title is a tribute to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of the Cup Noodle,” Costello writes. “Like so many things in this world of wonders, all we had to do to make this record was add water.” For Elvis, the idea of avoiding overcooking and unnecessary spices is a good one: Touring solo acoustic and opening for Bob Dylan last year, his set outshined the headliner’s with its pared-down simplicity and unencumbered emotion. But the singer and songwriter couldn’t resist the urge to tart things up in the studio, even if he was working quickly.
Fussily adorned with harmonies, keyboards and pedal steel guitar, the new songs that worked onstage last fall—including “My Three Sons,” “Song with Rose” (co-written by Rosanne Cash) and “Pardon Me Madam, My Name Is Eve” (co-written with Loretta Lynn)—fall painfully flat here, and Costello persist in dabbling in genres that just don’t suit him (witness the samba of “Harry Worth,” or better yet, save yourself the pain). Only the organ-driven, Attractions-in-everything-but name garage-rockers (“No Hiding Place,” “Go Away”) offer any hint of the fun that Elvis claims he had.
Rare is the scrap of press about Philadelphia-raised, Wesleyan-educated, Brooklyn-based singer and emerging hipster heroine Santi White that doesn’t draw connections to her friend and fellow genre-blurring globe-trotter Maya Arulpragasam, and not without reason; just listen to this album’s single, “Creator.” But the comparison that haunts me isn’t with M.I.A., but with Missing Persons—the disposable ’80s pop band fronted by Dale Bozzio—both for the annoying similarity to Santogold’s helium-tainted warble, and for the sheer contrivance of both acts’ bids for pop stardom.
Bozzio was a former Playboy model who linked up with a group of veteran L.A. sessions musicians and former sidemen for Frank Zappa in an effort to hit it big by riding the then-mighty New Wave gravy train. White is a former talent scout for Epic Records who previously fronted a ska-punk band, wrote songs for artists as diverse as Res, Lily Allen and Ashlee Simpson, pals around with producers Diplo, Mark Ronson and Switch and is making her assault on the pop charts with help from a big corporate marketing push. (A press release from the Chicago advertising agency DDB boasts that it “has the new beer of the summer in Bud Light Lime and Downtown Records has the new artist of the summer in Santogold. It only makes sense that we should collaborate to get the most reach for both our brands.”)
Antiquated notions of indie purism and outdated critical standards of authenticity aside, none of the above would matter a whit if the merger of sugary bubblegum hooks, reggae, dub, electronica and hip-hop rhythms and boastful lyrics (“Me, I'm a creator, thrill is to make it up/The rules I break got me a place up on the radar”; “We think you’re a joke/Shove your hope where it don’t shine”) didn’t sound as sterile at times as a corporate marketing session (“My Superman,” “Creator”), and if White’s vocals weren’t so fingernails-on-the-chalkboard annoying that they mar what could have otherwise been Gwen Stefani- if not Elastica-worthy neo-New Wave anthems (“L.E.S. Artistes,” “Say Aha”).
“Thank you for your continued and loyal support over the years—this one’s on me,” Trent Reznor wrote on Nine Inch Nails’ Web site on Monday when he offered the band’s new album as a free download. In doing so, he not only took over the role that fellow alternative-era art-rockers Radiohead had claimed in leading the charge toward free Internet distribution, but he marked the release of his fifth disc of new material so far this year, following the instrumental “Ghosts I–IV” issued in mid-February, and matching the previously none-too-prolific output of his major-label career from 1989 through 2006.
Of course, one of the strengths of Reznor’s discography had been the painstaking effort he made to create utterly distinctive worlds on each new album, whether it was the tortured angst-ridden trip of “The Downward Spiral” (1994), the more sprawling soul-searching of “The Fragile” (1999) or the dense, playfully paranoid conceptualizing of “Year Zero” (2007). In comparison, “Ghosts I-IV” was merely an overflowing notebook of half-finished sketches, while “The Slip” is a quick ’n’ dirty garage-rock basement recording, industrial-thrash style, divided between atmospheric mechanical mood pieces such as “999,999” and “Corona Radiata” and much more aggressive, urgent and rewarding tunes such as “1,000,000,” “Letting You” and “Head Down.”
As such, “The Slip” doesn’t come close to matching the musical and lyrical intensity of Reznor at his very best. But it’s a testament to how vital his creative vision remains that it’s at least as good as lesser efforts such as “With Teeth” (2005) or “Broken” (1992). And who knows what else he has in store for the remaining seven months of 2008.
Los Campesinos!, “Hold on Now, Youngster…” (Arts & Crafts) [2.5 STARS]
There are plenty of reasons to dislike the debut album by this seven-piece indie-pop buzz band from Wales, starting with… its undue fondness for… ellipses and lots! of! exclamation points! Here are a few more: There’s more glockenspiel here than on any record since vintage Jethro Tull, paired with plenty of equally cheesy violin; the arch Art Brut-meets-Pulp spoken-word asides of Gareth Campesinos!—no real last names for any of these excitable collegiate auteurs—who is no Eddie Argos, much less a Jarvis Cocker; and the ironic intellectual pretensions on one hand (chattering about existential crises and bragging that “We Are All Accelerated Readers”) paired with faux-naive playground confessions on the other (Aleksandra Campesinos! compares an ideal boyfriend to Spiderman, and can easily be imagined dueting with Kimya “Juno” Dawson).
Above all, though, there is the cloying, clubby nature of the lyrics, which are full of so many inside-indie-rock references that a casual listener will need a Rosetta Stone to decipher them. (“So stick with your instincts/Stick with the imprints/With the hieroglyphics that the fan club sent us,” Gareth exclaims on “Broken Heartbeats Sound Like Breakbeats.”) The shame of it all is that the band’s exuberant melodies are otherwise so infectious and invigorating that if the Campesinos! could have invested them with real emotion of any kind and given up trying to exclude everyone who isn’t anti-cool enough to worship K Records, they might have made a masterpiece.
Long hailed as the best live band in hip-hop, the Roots are different things to different listeners. They’re the Bonnaroo-friendly jam band known for playing three-hour sets. They’re the showcase for versatile producer and drummer Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson, who’s worked with artists as diverse as D’Angelo, Erykah Badu, John Mayer and Hank Williams III and who even mastered the shopping-mall anthem with “Birthday Girl,” the new bonus track featuring Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump. But most importantly, they’re the unapologetic community activists who’ve now crafted eight powerful if inconsistent albums of musically inventive, lyrically challenging hip-hop.
The collaboration of an unlikely trio of gloomy Brits—sonic wizard Geoff Barrow, jazz guitarist Adrian Utley and hypnotic chanteuse Beth Gibbons—Portishead scored the biggest commercial success of any of the bands to emerge from Northern England in the mid-’90s with the mixture of hip-hop rhythms and psychedelic ambience dubbed “trip-hop,” one of those pointlessly limiting genre constructions so beloved of English rock critics. “Trip hop died on April 29, 2008, in Portishead, North Somerset, England, after a long illness,” an addlepated reviewer recently bemoaned in Salon. “The funeral service has been released in the form of a CD by the band, titled ‘Third.’”
Although she’ll turn 50 in August, the mouthful of sweets that is Madonna Louise Ciccone Ritchie proves with her new album “Hard Candy” that she’s nowhere close to relinquishing her crown as the queen of dance-pop -- or abandoning her favorite role as pop music’s most hot-to-trot coquette.
Surveying the unnamed pack of (much) younger challengers to the throne -- among them Nelly Furtado, Britney Spears, Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera -- Maddy turns to us midway through the new disc and declares over a Chic-worthy riff that, “She’s not me/She doesn’t have my name/She’ll never have what I have/It won’t be the same!”
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, “Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!” (Anti-) [4 STARS]
Although long-running Australian cult hero Nick Cave has never produced anything without merit, it was hard to imagine how his 14th studio album with the sprawling collective known as the Bad Seeds could top last year’s self-titled disc by his one-off, mostly-for-yucks side project Grinderman, a deliriously grungy burst of blues-rock brilliance. No, “Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!!” doesn’t better my choice for the best album of 2007. But it is the strongest Bad Seeds disc since the potent one-two punch of “The Boatman’s Call” and “No More Shall We Part” in 1997 and 2001, and it does find the 50-year-old singer as vital as ever at an age where, as the British newspaper the Guardian noted, “Paul McCartney released ‘Off the Ground’ [and] Bob Dylan was favoring the world with ‘Wiggle Wiggle.’”
Tokyo Police Club, “Elephant Shell” (Saddle Creek) [3 STARS]
Formed in Newmarket, Ontario, these twenty-something indie-rockers garnered major buzz in 2006 with their debut EP “A Lesson in Crime,” which whizzed by in an exuberant rush of 8 songs in 18 minutes. Anticipation has been high for a proper album ever since, though now that it’s here, it’s no easier than before to pinpoint why it’s so endearing. Yes, there are the rollicking rhythms, nicely decorated by the conversational interplay of keyboard and guitar, though none of those sounds are new or unique. And while there are elements of pop-punk, garage-rock, power-pop and New Wave of New Wave, Tokyo Police Club doesn’t fit neatly into any of those genres.
The Breeders, “Mountain Battles” (4AD) [1.5 STARS]
Although they were enormously influential—it seemed as if every band during the alternative-rock explosion of the ’90s wanted to mimic the sound of “Pod” (1990), to say nothing of emulating the success of “Last Splash” (1993) and its mega-hit “Cannonball”—the Breeders have not exactly been prolific. Led by 46-year-old twins Kim and Kelley Deal, the group fell apart in a haze of drug troubles in the mid-’90s, and until recently, its four-album discography included only one other disc in the new millennium, the forgettable “Title TK” in 2002.
Album review: Destroyer, “Trouble in Dreams” (Merge) [1 STAR]
If one were looking to find a band sunk by the weight of all the worst indie-rock traits of the moment -- fey, affected vocals; orchestral filigree applied to mask melodic deficiencies; pointless complexity rubbing up against annoying faux-simplicity and wannabe Ivy League lit professor lyrical allusions -- it would be difficult to find a better candidate than Destroyer, the revolving-lineup art-rock showcase for Vancouver, Canada-based eccentric and songwriter Dan Bejar.
Album review: Moby, “Last Night” (Mute/EMI) [3.5 STARS]
For all of the charges detractors throw at him, from the claim that he can be self-righteously preachy to the oft-repeated criticism that he can’t and shouldn’t sing (a notion I refute), no one has ever accused Moby of trying to appear cool -- not when he was an underground presence on the then-burgeoning techno scene of the early’90s; not when he scored a phenomenal worldwide pop hit with “Play” in 1999 and certainly not now, when he’s returned to his dance roots after two commercially unsuccessful song-oriented albums in “18” (2002) and “Hotel” (2005).
One measure of the brilliance and ubiquity of a timeless pop song is the number of times it’s covered by other respected artists, and in that regard, few recent releases have matched Gnarls Barkley’s 2006 hit “Crazy.”
It seemed as if one of every three bands performing at Lollapalooza that year took a crack at the psychedelic soul/rock/hip-hop hybrid, and others who tackled it included Nelly Furtado, Cat Power, the Raconteurs, Shawn Colvin, Beyonce and Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. None matched the multi-hyphenated musical brilliance and memorable panache of original auteurs DJ Danger Mouse (Brian Burton) and singer Cee-Lo Green.
Now, the duo at the heart of Gnarls Barkley is in the unenviable position of trying to top that accomplishment from their debut album, “St. Elsewhere,” which sold 1.3 million copies in the U.S. and spent 47 weeks on the Billboard albums chart.
