Posts Tagged ‘Listening Booth’

  
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Monday, January 26th, 2009

Listening Booth: Bruce Springsteen, “Working On a Dream”

by Ken Shane

Bruce Springsteen - Working On a DreamBona fides: I’m a Jersey boy, and a fan. I’ve got more than 50 Springsteen concerts under my belt. I’ve even met him once or twice, and no, I never call him The Boss. Now on with the show.

Someone on Twitter (follow us @popdose) recently wrote that Bruce Springsteen’s Oscar snub by the Motion Picture Academy was his punishment for “Outlaw Pete.” Maybe. I do know that the failure of the Academy to include Springsteen’s title song from The Wrestler in the Best Song category is one of the most egregious oversights I’ve ever seen in my years of following the Oscars. Are the Academy voters allowed to write in their choices?

I do understand the sentiment about “Outlaw Pete,” though. The song’s placement as the leadoff track on Working on a Dream (Columbia) is one of he most curious decisions in rock history. First of all, the thing is more than eight minutes long. Second, the story doesn’t make much sense. I suppose, based on his acknowledged respect for the iconic western films of John Ford, Springsteen was trying to create a widescreen western epic of his own. What he ended up with is more akin to the spaghetti variety.

I tell you this as someone who has listened to the track over and over in an attempt to understand its significance. I’ve done this because the balance of the album contains some of the best work that Springsteen has done in years. The E Street Band is in great form, despite the very noticeable lack of input from Clarence Clemons (wouldn’t a sax solo have been preferable to the whistling verse on the title track?), and producer Brendan O’Brien, working with Springsteen for the fourth time, has tamed most of his impulses toward the murky sound that nearly destroyed Magic for me. (more…)

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Saturday, December 13th, 2008

Listening Booth: Beth Rowley, “Little Dreamer”

by Jeff Giles

Beth Rowley – Little Dreamer (2008, Verve Forecast)
purchase this CD (Amazon)

Yes, Beth Rowley is another white, female British soul singer, but before you write her off as another of Amy Winehouse’s coattail riders, it would behoove you to pause and consider a couple of things:

1. Amy Winehouse, talented as she is, isn’t the best this latest soul revival has to offer.
2. As music trends go, this is one of the best we’ve seen in years. If it’s possible to have such a thing as too many soul singers — white, female and British or otherwise — I, for one, am perfectly willing to find out just how many it takes to get there.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can evaluate Little Dreamer on its own merits — which, unfortunately, are rather small and pedestrian. Rowley is a talented vocalist, and this isn’t a bad debut album at all, but Dreamer does little to distinguish itself from the albums it’s going to be compared with. Song-to-song, Little Dreamer is more consistent than, say, Adele’s 19 — but it lacks a killer single as undeniable as “Chasing Pavements,” and Rowley’s voice lacks the grit and brassy overtones that many of her peers have been blessed with.

No, not brass, but porcelain. On the female soul-singer continuum, Rowley is closer to Dusty than Aretha, although she doesn’t really sound like either of those artists; her voice is part Bonnie Raitt and part Eva Cassidy, with a dash of Karen Carpenter thrown in. What Rowley lacks, however, is the songwriting chops it takes to come up with consistently memorable original material, or the interpretive depth to carry a classic cover. (Give her points for chutzpah, though — she covers both “I Shall Be Released” and “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” here.)

Of course, again, this is just a debut record from a young artist, and if not for the glut of similar artists releasing albums right now, Little Dreamer would probably sound fresher than it does. “Oh My Life” (download), in particular, is an eminently hummable taste of what’s hopefully to come from Beth Rowley.

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Friday, December 12th, 2008

Listening Booth: Olivia Broadfield, “Eyes Wide Open”

by Jeff Giles

Olivia Broadfield, Eyes Wide Open (2007, Pig Factory)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Just when I think I’ve heard enough wispy female bedroom pop, along comes another cute-as-a-button waif with an adorable British accent and a fondness of drum machines to draw me back in. Which is funny, because I don’t ordinarily care about British accents, and I don’t like drum machines at all. I mean, I enjoy a good Imogen Heap record as much as the next person, but come on, right? How much more of this stuff do we need?

At least one more album’s worth, apparently, or so my ears are telling me as I glide my way through my latest listen to Olivia Broadfield’s Eyes Wide Open. It’s got all the usual trappings of the genre — programmed beats, vintage-sounding keyboards, and lyrics like “Don’t fight this fire/Come stay the night with me/Silence never sounded so good,” all frosted with a tasty layer of Broadfield’s breathy vocals — but what it lacks in originality, it makes up for with pure craft.

Broadfield (who wrote all the songs, played a variety of instruments, and co-produced) has a gift for spinning delicately infectious melodies out of all the lyrical themes you expect (love, longing, heartbreak), and she keeps the arrangements smartly sparse without sacrificing the occasional burst of ear candy. Like a really well-made sports movie, it’s thoroughly predictable, but in all the right ways. Much as I never tire of watching the Italian Stallion whup Ivan Drago’s ass in the final act of Rocky IV, I’ve been spinning this album for a week, and I’m not tired of it yet.

Eyes Wide Open came out overseas last year, but Broadfield’s American reps are still (or starting to? I don’t know) pushing it here, and you can get the whole kit & caboodle for less than $9 at Amazon’s MP3 store via the above link. Try out “Fool Today” (download) and see what you think.

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Monday, December 1st, 2008

Listening Booth: Guns n’ Roses, “Chinese Democracy” — A Second Opinion

by Dw. Dunphy

It’s the curse of the debut album: the artist, unsure of who he/she is or what he/she ought to sound like strikes out in all directions — a power ballad here, a blues grinder there, a piano pop-tune way over yonder. The artist can be forgiven for their somewhat schizoid aim since the label has put all the weight of the company, as well as one’s own career path, down on their freshman shoulders. With that in mind, W. Axl Rose is the oldest freshman in the history of music, as his magnum opus Chinese Democracy has finally seen the light of day. The good news is that it isn’t the unmitigated failure we expected, yet it is far from the triumphant return from exodus his handlers would like you to believe.

It is the equivalent of time travel wrapped in aluminum, or vinyl if you so desire, as songs that gestated through the 15-year span in between it and the previous covers album The Spaghetti Incident? (1993) have not been updated to any semblance of modernity. Rose’s flirtation with industrial rock in the early nineties, plainly NIN-fluenced, are left intact and instantly dated as are the tracks that are NU-fluenced. Korn should be proud to hear the presence of down-tuning, hip-hop loop beats and scream chants on a GNR album, but even Linkin Park jumped that train and caught a taxi to emo-town. I suppose we dodged a Rose-colored, mascaraed bullet on that.

But there are a couple songs that I didn’t mind listening to. In fact, if “Better” came on the radio, I might not turn the dial. It has a semblance of the old attitude the band once had, and not too much of the stylistic shout-outs that bog down the rest of the album. “Shackler’s Revenge” survives a disheartening opening to reveal itself as one of the stronger tracks, and because I do have a soft spot for proggish bombast and consider “November Rain” my favorite GNR tune, “There Was A Time” survives the time trials. But where I finished Metallica’s Death Magnetic and thought, “I’ll still listen to Justice and the black album more, but I’ll revisit this occasionally too,” I can only bring myself to clicking off my favorites in Chinese Democracy’s jumble and dumping them into a hard-rock mixtape. The rest of the album is skip-fodder and, considering the majority of my music listening happens in my car, I’d rather play a different CD and keep my eyes on the road. (more…)

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Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

Listening Booth: Ranlom, “Going on Holiday”

by Jeff Giles

Ranlom – Going on Holiday (Quirky Bird, 2008)
purchase this album (Amazon)

With the amount of shit I’ve given Christmas music over the last few years, and the obvious relish with which it’s been applied, I never would have expected any sane independent artist to willingly send me a copy of his or her holiday album — but lo and behold, here I am listening to Going on Holiday, the latest Ranlom release, an EP consisting of five Christmas covers and two originals.

What is Ranlom? I’m not entirely sure. I know Ranlom has released a handful of albums, including The Red Eye, A Rest Stop and a Snooze, and Ravens and Doves, and I know it’s some sort of musical collective led by a man named Matt Molnar, who says his passions include “his lovely wife, inexpensive road trips, good eats, lazy fishing trips, and libraries.” Also, I know Matt Molnar has terrible taste in band names. Beyond that, I cued up Going on Holiday without knowing what was getting myself into.

Molnar — er, Ranlom — calls Going on Holiday “a truly unique Christmas album with quirky, clever arrangements of classics and carols coupled with contemporary, witty originals,” and that’s more or less on the mark, but don’t listen to it expecting a Dr. Demento Christmas or anything. This album’s quirk is gentle, and not evenly applied; although some tracks, like the Richard Cheese-meets-Perry Como “Little Drummer Boy” (download), are slightly (and, I have to say, awesomely) off-kilter, others are given a straight reading. (”Do You Hear What I Hear,” for instance, is suitable for any church gathering.)

One area where Ranlom doesn’t screw around is in the arrangements. Even at their most deadpan, the songs are impeccably performed, with shifting layers of pop and jazz beneath the clean, smooth production. For what seems to have been a lark, Going on Holiday was assembled with admirable craft and skill. Having said that, I’m not sure where the audience for an album like this is, particularly given how crowded the holiday music marketplace has become — but if you’re looking to fatten your Christmas music collection with the work of some off-the-beaten-path artists, this isn’t a bad place to start.

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Thursday, November 20th, 2008

Listening Booth: The Guggenheim Grotto, “Happy the Man”

by Jeff Giles

Guggenheim Grotto – Happy the Man (UFO Music, 2009)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Its artwork has the sort of washed-out color tones that usually suggest an album from Jack Johnson or one of his buddies, but do not be alarmed by the beanie you see on the cover of the Guggenheim Grotto’s Happy the Man — this is not campfire music for college sophomores. Rather, it’s an album of electronic-laced grown-up pop music, firmly grounded with acoustic guitars and harmonies, and filled to the brim with graceful hooks and instantly memorable, partly-cloudy melodies that should appeal to fans of smart Anglopop bands like Crowded House and the Trashcan Sinatras.

It’s a very subtle record, in other words, made up of songs with very subtle charms — but damn if they don’t all gang up on you and rope you in. I often listen to an album a dozen times or more before writing a review, and that’s been the case here — but I could have taken it off repeat a long time ago; I just keep replaying Happy the Man because it’s so gently addictive. Not every song lands with the impact of the killer opening one-two punch of “Fee Da Da Dee” (download) and “Her Beautiful Ideas” (with its wonderful refrain of “Let’s get naked and get under the sheets”), but there’s plenty to love here, and very little not to like.

Lovely on the surface, the Guggenheim Grotto’s music is seemingly tailor-made for Starbucks and television soundtracks — and it has already appeared in both locations — but don’t be deceived by its seemingly facile beauty: co-Grotto Kevin May says he and partner Mick Lynch “wanted to sing joyfully about sadness in the world” on this album, and they’ve succeeded in adding sweetly somber overtones to Happy’s head-bobbing refrains. The result is an album that feels lighter than air, but carries a weight that will linger after the final chord fades. Wait for the physical product to reach shelves in January, or download the mp3 album now; either way, if you have a weakness for unabashedly sentimental, artfully assembled pop music, you won’t want to miss Happy the Man.

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Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Listening Booth: Guns n’ Roses, “Chinese Democracy”

by Jeff Vrabel

Guns n’ Roses – Chinese Democracy (Geffen, 2008)
purchase this album (Best Buy)

Unless you’ve spent a lot of time in the company of William Shatner, Chinese Democracy will likely be one of the most ridiculous audio recordings you ever come across. It is sprawling and stupid and ludicrous and hilarious and will make you shoot milk out of your nose and cringe and it is not very good and sometimes extremely terrible, and just when you think things cannot possibly get any more extraordinarily strange, that’s when Axl Rose drops the MLK sample on you.

Originally slated for release in 1948, Chinese Democracy comes out Sunday exclusively for people shopping for Black Friday-sale plasmas at Best Buy, a wise promotional stunt and kind of an all-in proposition — if putting this record out this week doesn’t create interest or move units, nothing will. Because one thing is sure: the songs won’t sell it.

The final, finished, ostensibly archival version of Chinese Democracy is a fucking mess, a haphazard, stop-and-go Transformer of rap-metal parts, ideas, sketches, Chester Bennington riffs, lyrical crimes, la la las, and ridiculous electronic touches and twists that only occasionally resemble completed songs; in what will be the least surprising thing you’ll read all week, it sounds like what happens when you dicker around with something so long it stops making any sort of cohesive sense. Tracks like “I.R.S.” and the absurd “Riad n’ the Bedouins” barely begin accelerating before they veer into left-field guitar solos, tempo shifts, distracting vocal tricks, and Axl’s never-far-afield need to drop in something robotic. These songs build no momentum, create no wave. It’s more like Axl’s “A Day in the Life”; you feel like he cut up the tape, threw it into the air, and sticky-taped together the results.

(more…)

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Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Listening Booth: Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, “Cardinology”

by Ken Shane

Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, Cardinology (2008)
purchase this album (Amazon)

It’s been fashionable for the last few years to slag Ryan Adams at every turn. There’s no doubt that he’s brought some of this animosity on himself by virtue of some less than discrete behavior, notably at his live performances.

I’ve always been one to believe that the proof is in the grooves, or whatever they call the equivalent on a CD. When judged by this criteria, it’s hard to think of another artist who has created the sheer volume of music that Adams has in recent years, while maintaining reasonably high standards. Sure, he’s shot and missed, but his misses are generally more interesting that a lot of other artists’ hits.

Word has it that Ryan Adams wanted this album to be billed as being by the Cardinals, without his name involved. In interviews he’s said that he is happiest just being a member of the band, and at live shows he has lined up with the other band members, and not claimed his spot as the frontman. It appears that a compromise was reached with his record company. The new album, Cardinology, carries the credit Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. Apparently Adams got his Cardinals, and Lost Highway got their Ryan Adams. (more…)

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Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Listening Booth: Tipsy, “Buzzz”

by Jeff Giles

Tipsy – Buzzz (Ipecac, 2008)
purchase this album (Amazon)

They call their music “drunktronica,” explain the seven-year layoff between this and their previous release by saying they were “distracted by commercial corporate money music for hire (as well as occasional substance abuse),” and are the new kids on the block at Ipecac Records, the imprint founded by noted rock & roll madman Mike Patton. Clearly, whatever else Tipsy might be, it isn’t boring — and neither is their third album, Buzzz.

Honestly, although I can often appreciate this sort of thing in principle — and I freely admit it would take me a lot longer than seven years to build something sensible out of the chopped-up bits of music Tipsy works with — anything -tronica usually turns me off; I can’t think about club music without remembering things like the time I woke up to the sound of a friend banging on my window, pre-dawn, to ask me if I’d help him wash some girl’s puke out of his car so his mom wouldn’t know he’d been at a rave all night. Even when the DJs manage to mix some melody in with the beats, I can’t help tuning out — I’m a lyrics guy, and I want some narrative with my noise.

All that being said, I found Buzzz to be an enjoyable listen. It’s a sonic tour through a strange world that sounds exactly like its garish cover, but there’s too much going on for the listener to get bored, and it’s so artfully assembled that you can admire it even if you can’t dance to it. Listening to each track is like staring at an immense mosaic — you’re constantly torn between taking it all in and dissecting it. It’s also got a sense of humor, as evidenced by catchy tracks like “Chop Socky” (download) and the lovably schizo “Swingin’ Spaceman.” Rather than relying on a monolithic barrage of beats to get their point across, Tipsy gambols in the rusty playground between analog and digital, playing on the tension between man and machine, old and new, drunk and sober.

A fun little record, in other words, and suitably strange for anyone looking for new frontiers in machine-assisted pop music. Heck, I may even find myself listening to it again — and for a grumpy old lover of acoustic instruments like me, that’s really saying something.

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Tuesday, November 18th, 2008

Listening Booth: Rosie Thomas, “A Very Rosie Christmas”

by Jeff Giles

Rosie Thomas – A Very Rosie Christmas (Nettwerk, 2008)
purchase this album (Amazon)

Okay, yes, I know — everyone hates Christmas music, and anyway, we’re about to bombard you poor bastards with 25 days of the stuff during Mellowmas III: Season of the Bitch. Honestly, it wasn’t my intention to even talk about holiday music until Mellowmas kicked off on December 1, and I certainly didn’t plan on reviewing any of the new yuletide titles that were released this year. And that goes double for A Very Rosie Christmas, an album that, at first glance, left me thinking that a certain pumpkinheaded former co-host of The View was cutting duets with Elmo again.

Life is full of surprises, though. This silver platter came to me courtesy of our pal Nell at Nettwerk, bundled with a little note that said “Hey Jeff, thought you might enjoy this.” I promptly shoved it to the bottom of my “in” pile and snorted a silent snort at Nell — you thought I might enjoy this? You don’t know me at all! AT ALL! I mean, shit, the cover photo makes it look like one of those post-ironic song poem compilations, and I need to listen to another album by someone described as a “Seattle-based indie darling” like I need a hole in the head. Matter of fact, I only listened to this because I thought there was a small chance it might contain some Mellowmas contenders.

And you know what? It turns out Nell knows me better than I thought she did. I owe you an apology, Nell from Nettwerk, and a promise to never silently snort at you again, because A Very Rosie Christmas is actually sort of awesome. I’m not kidding, holiday music haters! It’s honestly one of the best Christmas albums I’ve heard in a very long time. It doesn’t rank up there with Phil Spector’s classic compilation, but it’d definitely go on my list of top seasonal albums, which is a very short list indeed, because my relationship with Christmas music is, as Facebook would say, “complicated.” (more…)

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