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Published: November 13, 2008
Updated: 11/12/2008 09:35 pm
The Cure
4:13 Dream
Label: Suretone/Geffen
If you like: The Cure, flirting with happiness
Song to download: "The Only One"
Through a 30-year recording career, singer Robert Smith has led the Cure through various recurring modes. Behind Smith's slurred, quavery, perpetually nervous yelp, the Cure has put across stripped-down new wave, brooding, synthesizer-dominated dirges; crisp pop; electronics-dominated dance music; vigorously strummed folk-rock; and splashy, distorted quasi-psychedelic rock. The new 4:13 Dream, the band's 13th album, is one of the splashy ones, with up-tempo songs awash in guitar reverb and cymbal whooshes, akin to albums such as "Wish" (1992).
The territory is familiar. But it's not a comforting nostalgic reprise; it's another plunge into the maelstrom. The upbeat songs don't mean that Smith, one of rock's most articulate mopers, has gotten all happy.
The album includes two love songs in which, amazingly enough, things are working out euphorically; one, "The Only One," is a list of all the sensations Smith's lover gives him.
But it's not like the Cure to settle into lasting contentment, and the rest of 4:13 Dream is filled with upheavals. As the band churns ahead, Smith blurts lyrics about insecurity ("Sorenson"), disorientation ("Freakshow"), infidelity ("The Real Snow White") and bitterness about materialism ("The Hungry Ghost"). In "Switch" Smith returns to his lifelong alienation — "I'm sick of being alone with myself/And I'm sick of being with anyone else" — as Porl Thompson's guitar scrapes and chatters and Jason Cooper's live and looped drumbeats go bounding ahead.
On this hyperactive Cure album there's barely any gap between exultation and desperate flailing.
— Jon Pareles
The New York Times
The Eagles Of Death Metal
Heart On
Label: Downtown
If you like: A 1970s, sex-addicted Flight Of The Conchords on crank
Song to download: "Cheap Thrills"
The Eagles Of Death Metal — Josh Homme (Queens Of The Stone Age) and Jesse "Boots Electric" Hughes — began as a for-grins project and, three albums later, finds itself on the cusp of being taken, horror of horrors, seriously.
The new Heart On — puerile title aside (wait, that's the point) — plows the same sort of sexed-up mock-rock that was, and ostensibly still is, at the heart of the band's appeal. The music remains rooted in the mid-70s, mixing scuzz rock and oddball groove with swashbuckling elan.
Lyrics stay focused on girls and sex. The difference this time — the band's previous albums rocked with such amateurish, garage-band enthusiasm, the lyrics and performances were so obviously over-the-top that it was obvious that it was all about having fun.
Raw rockers are now in short supply, the production is sneaky-slick and the material is more marketable than memorable. It's almost as if Hughes and Homme are taking themselves seriously — and that would be a fatal flaw.
— Ed Bumgardner
relish staff writer
Cheap Trick
BUDOKAN! (The 30th Anniversary set)
Label: Sony Legacy
If you like: Truly powerful power pop
Song to download: "Speak Now Or Forever Hold Your Peace"
In 1979, Cheap Trick, the veritable embodiment of power pop, had released three great studio albums to the sound of cash registers not ringing — in the United States. In Japan, the band was godlike, to the point that it recorded and televised a 1978 show at the Budokan arena for use only in Japan.
Then the unexpected: A hip American radio station started playing the imported Japanese live disc, and subsequent public demand forced a stateside release that turned the band into stars and made Live At Budokan one of the most ubiquitous albums of the 1970s.
The band is celebrating the 30th anniversary of this landmark show with a three-CD, one-DVD set that is a Cheap Trick fan's fantasy. The DVD is the film of the 1978 gig, shown only once in Japan — and it alone is worth owning the set.
The three CDs consist of remastered takes of the full hard-rockin' show. The inclusion of edgier songs, including a couple of songs never before released, paints a far-more representative picture of the band at that time. In a word — great.
— Ed Bumgardner
relish staff writer
Little Joy
Little Joy
Label: Rough Trade
If you like: Fun
Song to download: "How To Hang A Warhol"
Little Joy, a new band featuring Strokes drummer Fabrizio Moretti with Binki Shapiro and Rodrigo Amarante, is named after a bar notorious for encouraging lost weekends among musicians. So it's fitting that Little Joy, the band's debut album of easygoing indie-Caribbean pop, seems tailor-made for a Sunday-afternoon hangover.
The album's pleasures are fleeting, but plentiful. There's a bit of assimilated Tropicalia on "No One's Better Sake," and Amarante's crooning is wrapped in a fuzzy reverb worthy of Buddy Holly that makes the disc sound like an unexpected crate-digging find.
For such an unassuming album, the production is unexpectedly crafty. The band sneaks bits of doo-wop harmonies and odd percussion in the margins that can be enjoyed or ignored.
The charmingly lazy songwriting makes no gesture at becoming anything beyond an excellent dinner-party soundtrack. But in these trying times, such warm-hearted mood music at least will make any headache go away.
— August Brown
The Los Angeles Times
Q-Tip
The Renaissance
Label: Universal Motown
If you like: Common, Talib Kweli
Song to download: "We Fight/We Love" featuring Raphael Saadiq
Q-Tip revolutionized hip-hop as the leader of A Tribe Called Quest primarily by being himself — no fake gangster poses, just witty rhymes over a jazzy, beat-heavy groove.
The group disbanded, and it has been nearly 10 years since Q-Tip's last solo album. But The Renaissance, Q-Tip's new album, reveals that he's still very much the Abstract Poet. He is at times playful and other times serious, all over a musical melange that encompasses the boom-bap of hip-hop, the improvisation of jazz and the lovey-dovey melody of R&B.
This sonic mishmash isn't dissonant, and Q-Tip thrives in such genre-bending, his rap delivery as animated as ever and full of clever pop-culture references. Guest stars are minimal, but the ones who appear — Norah Jones and sorely-missed soul singer D'Angelo — add to Q-Tip's mission to spread a message of peace, love and soul through music that compels one to move.
His long absence only makes Q-Tip's return that much sweeter to enjoy.
— Michael Hewlett
relish staff writer
Ryan Adams & the Cardinals
Cardinology
Label: Lost Highway
If you like: Ryan Adams, from Crazy Horse to Coldplay
Song to download: "Let Us Down Easy"
Ryan Adams' prodigious songwriting gift has yielded an growing body of work that's best viewed as snapshots of his thoughts and feelings at a given moment than as definitive pronouncements on life. On Cardinology, Adams and his band, The Cardinals, explore loss of love, of ideals, of life direction.
Adams has a famously combative public persona, but as an artist he often takes the high road, sending well wishes to people left by the wayside ("Go Easy"), or, more impressive, to people who have done the same to him. Humility hasn't always been Adams' strong suit, which makes it so touching when he connects with it on "Let Us Down Easy."
The songs are largely built on a potent interplay of ringing electric and steel guitars over lock-tight bass and drums. They echo the classic rock of the Allman Brothers at times, Crazy Horse at others, with swings toward Coldplay and U2. Adams and band aren't pushing musical boundaries — again — but they have settled into a groove that works just fine for now.
— Randy Lewis
The Los Angeles Times
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