Archive for the ‘CD Reviews’ Category

So, I like Robin Thicke. To a certain extent, I don’t even mind his father Alan. Not like I actively hated “Growing Pains,” and dad wrote a ton of theme songs to TV shows in the 1970s-80s (“Three’s Company,” anyone?). I adored “I Get You Alone” off of his debut disc A Beautiful World, a vocal reworking of Walter Murphy’s “A Fifth of Beethoven” off of the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack. The rest of the album was pretty good, and I figured that consequent releases would show him growing and becoming more of a complete singer/songwriter. This begins with The Evolution of Robin Thicke, and there’s a slight progression on his third album, Something Else.

It’s not that I don’t like Sex Therapy, it’s just that I’m no longer feeling a music progression from him. In a way, a lot of what’s on the album is the kind of sound found on pretty much any urban radio station in the country. And while Robin has a beautiful head-voice, at times in his career I wish I’d hear more of his powerful mid-register. There’s still a lot of head-voice, but it does have some better lower to mid-register vocal material on it.

The thing is, I actually like the record. I guess he’s becoming a guy who puts out a record that you’re expecting him to release, and that’s not necessarily always the worst thing in the world. He still has a very good voice, he still writes a very good lyric, and still writes accessible songs, while getting some good guest stars to stop by (Kid Cudi, Jay-Z, and Estelle, to name 3 from this album). So, I think this is actually worth checking out.

And as the host of your favorite down-tempo night time show on WAGM, “Dial It Down,” I can tell you that there’s more of a collection slower to mid-tempo tracks than faster tunes. I’d expect to be hearing some of this record on the show in the coming weeks.
3 out of 5 stars.

Mark Massi

DAVID GUETTA – One Love, Too Many Lovers…

So, I’ll admit off the bat, I’m not always terribly fond of someone putting out an album, and then having about 100 guest artists on it.  First of all, I have a hard time believing it’s THAT person’s album.  Secondly, it always feels like a bit of a jumbled mess to me with no continuity.  In the case of this blog, there’s a little bit of that going on here.

David Guetta’s “One Love” features many of today’s hottest artists in both dance and hip-hop music.  Such artists include Kelly Rowland, Akon, Will.i.am and Black Eyed Peas, Estelle, and several others.  And while some of these tracks work very well on their own, this doesn’t necessarily translate into a strong “album,” as it were.

I mentioned that problem with continuity before, and there is one here, but not for the usual reason.  Most of the time, the music seems all over the map, and there’s not one driving force.  In the case of “One Love,” it’s all too similar.  I’m not sure there’s a difference in beats-per-minute between one track and the next.  In a case like this, if everything’s going to have the same beat and feel, I’d rather it be mixed together.  At least THEN something is driving the album, y’know?  Of course, apparently there IS a version out there like this, but you have to buy the Deluxe Edition on ITunes to get it, which I did not.  The thing is, I kept waiting for a different type of beat to enter the picture, but that never really happened.

Not to say there aren’t some good cuts on this record.  There’s a couple of stand-outs, such as “When Love Takes Over” featuring Kelly Rowland, “On The Dancefloor” featuring Will.i.am and Apl De Ap are a couple that come to mind.  But overall, I kept doing with this album what I’ve done with several Adam Sandler movies… I kept waiting for it to begin.

2 out of 5 stars (1 star for each song I actually may go back to again).

Mark Massi

Stephen Pearlman, aka Haberdashery

Haberdashery – Valence

In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit right off the bat that I am friends with the driving force behind Haberdashery, Stephen Pearlman. This will not read as much as a review (and for this purpose, there will be no “stars” attached to this), but rather an advertisement. But the thing is, I believe in the Haberdashery experience, and would really like the listeners and readers of WAGM to believe in it, too. So, you may ask, why would one want to believe? Haberdashery is someone you should know.

For those of you who are Erasure fans, Haberdashery will not disappoint you in the least. Chicago based, and working out of a home-studio (although you’d never know it listening to the final product), Haberdashery invokes many of the styles and beats that would sound very familiar on an Erasure record, without sounding like a clone. There’s a “voice of his own” quality that is still unmistakable. Valence has one common theme: love. Whether it be about love lost, or love found, it’s love, love, love… And in a world filled with nothing but fear and contempt these days, wouldn’t some love be very refreshing right about now?

Valence is the 5th Haberdashery release. The new single is “I Love You Too,” with a video featuring someone very near and dear to my heart… ME! There’s several other folks in the video who are near and dear to my heart, as well. Other songs of note on the record are “Two Become One” (the single for which containing an incredible Japanese sounding remix, the Matsuri Mix, and a wonderful cover of the Rufus Wainwright song “Poses”), “Paradise,” and “Stars.”

I invite you, actually implore you to check out this fantastic Chicago artist. Go to www.haberdasheryinfo.com for more information and the ability to sample and purchase, or add Haberdashery as a friend on Facebook or MySpace as soon as you can. Haberdashery is someone you should know. This is what it’s like when music becomes fun.

It would be completely unfair to say that I was expecting more from this album, because I’d not heard much of Owl City before listening to Ocean Eyes, except for their hit single from earlier this year, “Fireflies.” Keeping that track in mind, I expected a really fun album. What I got was kind of a mess.

Owl City is just a band name for Adam Young from Minnesota. He’s a 1-man synthpop/electronic band, and at moments on this record, it shows. I suppose there’s an easy way to describe the album, which is schizophrenic. It can’t decide whether it’s synthpop, electronic, acoustic, rock, or just plain ol’ pop. And at the same time, the album seems to be broken up into 2 sections, fast and slow.

I’m a big believer in song-placement making or breaking a record. In this case, the album starts out pretty fast and poppy, and then veers off into this section of nothing but mid-tempo ballads. And the whole time, you’re left wondering, “Who is this guy, and what is he trying to say?” In my opinion, it’s good when you have a band that does ballads with the occasional upbeat track, or vice-versa. In this case, it’s split way too much down the middle.

Not to say there aren’t good songs on the record. “Fireflies,” “Dental Care” (the happiest song ever about going to the dentist), “Hello Seattle,” and “Vanilla Twilight” are a few that come to mind. But this album goes away from the “album” concept and starts to sound like a collection of singles. And, wuite frankly, while a drum-kit works on the more electronic sounding songs, I’d have preferred to hear a regular drum-set during some of the more organic sounds.

And going back to the song-placement concept, why would you put a remix of an earlier track (“Hello Seattle,” which actually would work quite well in a club setting) before ending with a new song? Breaks it up in a way it shouldn’t, when the rest of the album isn’t broken up in a way it should. As it’s got an issue of being too 50-50, and trying to play all sides of a multi-sided coin, I don’t feel comfortable reviewing it any differently.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

~Mark Massi

This is the debut studio record from the ambient duo Jónsi & Alex, a collaboration between Sigur Rós vocalist Jón Þór Birgisson (Jónsi) and partner Alex Somers that deftly combines acoustic instrumental music alongside a string quartet, Amiina, and the Kópavogsdætur Choir. To call the album ambient is truly understating things. The ambient can be carved with a chainsaw.

I have to admit openly, I’m not always the biggest fan of the work of Sigur Rós, Iceland’s second most famous musical export after Björk. Sometimes, I feel like their stuff drags on a little too long, and is slow and depressing for the sake of being slow and depressing. But the Riceboy Sleeps album doesn’t have those qualities. While some of the track times are fairly long, they’re not too long. And without any discernable lyrics, it’s tough to be depressed by this record. It’s one of those good “I really need to relax right now, possibly even sleep, and I need an album to help me do that” albums. The acoustic qualities blend beautifully with the less organic qualities of the record. It’s tough to say much more about a record that has very little to say itself. 

Notable tracks: “Boy 1904,” which supposedly has the last known castrati singer ever recorded (thank God they stopped that barbaric practice), “Daníell In The Sea,” (for which there is a video on their official website), and the opening cut “Happiness,” which has many qualities of the Gavin Bryars 1995 minimalist-classical piece The Sinking Of The Titanic without ever really stealing from it. 

3.5 out of 5 stars.

~Mark Massi

It’s fairly obvious to fans of Stephen Patrick Morrissey and his previous band, The Smiths, that he’s not always the happiest man on the planet.  You merely need to cite the lyric “Good times, for a change…” from the Smiths song “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want” to prove that point, amongst countless of other lyrics.  Moz’s music can often be described as “razor to the wrists” kind of fare.  I think if he released a happy record talking about how content he is with his life, many fans might actually start to worry about him (example: it hardly ever works when The Cure tries to be happy).

Well, don’t you worry, this isn’t a happy album.  But here’s the thing, it sounds happy.  In a way, even though the lyrics still convey a state of unhappiness, despair, or even giving up, so much of the record is uptempo and peppy that it takes a few listens to realize that the guy’s still as melancholy as he’s always been, proving the validity of the grey hair he now dons in the temples.  And unlike a few of his more recent releases (Ringleader of the Tormented, You Are The Quarry, and Maladjusted), there’s more of a cohesive feel to this album.  It’s a fast paced record that clocks in just over 40 minutes (unless you get the ITunes version with 2 bonus tracks), and I never feel like the album is dragging.

It starts off with a bang with the excellent track “Something is Squeezing My Skull,” a rocky track that features the lyrics “Thank you, drop dead,” and a list of generic medications with their brand names… and it works.  This spring’s single “I’m Throwing My Arms Around Paris,” while one of the slower songs on the record, is also one of the better ones that basically says, “if you’re not going to be here for me and to hold me, I’m just going to Paris.”  Hey, who can blame him, right?

In my humble and scary opinion, every track on this album is a highlight, but if you had to nail me down to just a couple more than the ones listed in the previous paragraph, I’d go with “Mama Lay Softly On the Riverbed,” “When Last I Spoke To Carol” (which has a slight flamenco feeling in the guitar at times), and “One Day Goodbye Will Be Farewell.”  If I had to change 1 thing about this album, it would be the ending to “You Were Good In Your Time,” which sort of trails on for 2 minutes of just sounds and such that could have easily been condesnsed to about 30 seconds.  But if that’s the only complaint I have, I’d say this is a pretty strong record.

Why am I reviewing an album that came out this past winter now?  Because if you don’t have it yet, you need it.  Plain and simple.

5 out of 5 stars.

~Mark Massi

Sometimes, but not always, it’s good to get something where you know exactly what you’re paying for.  Obviously, if you’re looking to buy a loaf of bread, you should expect to get a loaf of bread, and not poker chips with naked men on them.  However, there are moments where you go buy the new album from an artist you’ve come to know and love for a particular reason, and then all of a sudden, the electro-pop band is releasing an acoustic rock opera (Prince’s N.E.W.S. pops to mind… watered down Jazz?  Really?  The Madhouse jazz records were so much better).  However, time and time again, AIR continues to release what you expect them to.
 
Now, you might take my last statement as a bit of an indictment on the record, but it’s actually not.  With AIR’s laid back, sometimes ethereal style, it’s a good formula that I’m glad that they adhere to on a consistent basis.  It’s like my bread comment above.  If AIR suddenly put out a hard rock album, it might be a great hard rock album, but I’m just going to be disappointed that I didn’t get that album to which I can relax at the end of a hard day.
 
Like any of their records, I’m always fond of how they pepper in a couple of vocal songs -in this case, “So Light Is Her Footfall,” “Heaven’s Light,” part of and “Sing Sang Sung,”- within the confines of a mostly instrumental album, and how while they are very much an ambient electronic type of band there always is some sort of acoustical element to balance everything out so well.  It’s so easy to fall into a trap if you’re an electronic instrumental band, and that trap is to make the tracks almost indiscernable from one another after a while.  The peppering of the vocal tracks and the acoustic sound influence helps break that monotony for AIR.
 
Besides the vocal tracks listed above, some highlights include “Do The Joy,” “Be A Bee,” “Eat My Beat,” and “African Velvet,” which takes the album in for a smooth landing.
 
3.5 stars out of 5 ~Mark Massi

Wild Young Hearts, Noisettes second studio album after 2007’s What’s The Time Mr. Wolf?, was released in April in the UK and Europe, but finally saw its release here in the States a couple of weeks ago.  Like their first offering, this is a difficult album to classify.
 
Want something fairly light and acoustical?  “Sometimes” or “Atticus” are for you.  Do you want something a little more pop oriented?  There’s “Don’t Upset The Rhythm (Go Baby Go),” which reached #2 on the UK charts earlier this year.  Feeling a little in the mood for some slight 80’s revival?  “Beat of my Heart” and “Saturday Night” will work just beautifully.  Are you looking for something that sounds sort of Amy Winehouse or Sharon Jones-ish?  “Never Forget You” could easily have been a track on either of their most recent albums.  I even hear a little of The Smiths in this album from time to time.
 
Point is, if these guys are marketed right, they’ve got a chance to make a splash here in the US.  The album is quite varied, but not to the point of sounding schizophrenic.  And if anything else, lead singer Shingai Shoniwa’s hair could go down as my favorite hair in rock.  Quite a feat to get a fro to look like a heart.  And if you like Wild Young Hearts, don’t forget to check out What’s The Time Mr. Wolf, which is also a pretty cool little album.  Wild Young Hearts isn’t perfect, but it’s a fun album worth giving a spin.  After never hearing of these folks until about a month ago, I’m glad I got turned on.
 
3 stars. ~Mark Massi

If you’re a Flaming Lips fan, you know never to expect anything from a new release of theirs, because it’s most likely going to be different than you thought it would be.  I mean, we ARE talking about the band who released a 4-disc set, Zaireeka, only all 4 discs were to be played at the same time in different parts of the room.  We ARE talking about a band who brought 60 people with 60 cars together to an indoor parking garage, gave each of them a cassette for their tape-decks, had everyone turn on said tapes, open their trunks, and then just had everyone listen to the work they had created.  These boys, at times, can be really cutting edge, even in a frustrating way.
 
They’ve always been a band that has bordered both on trippy, and pop, but has always seemed to straddle that fence, bringing the 2 brilliantly together on their 2002 masterpiece, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots.  While their 2006 follow up, At War With the Mystics, tended to go a little closer to the mainstream sound they can produce, Embryonic goes in the opposite “trippy” direction.
 
An ambitious hour and 10 minutes over 2 discs, Embryonic is an initial difficult listen, and I didn’t like the record upon hearing it the first time.  While Yoshimi and Mystics had a very polished and produced feel, there’s moments on the record that I wondered if they just turned on the old recording devices, counted themselves in, and did some of these songs in one take.  And that’s not to say the quality suffers because of it, because I think in the end, I wanted them to release something slightly uncomfortable and edgy.  While being trippy, there’s a definite sense that much of this material would work live.  Sometimes electronic, but never losing its organic feel.  Also, there’s a few more instrumental numbers on this record, and songs that are mostly instrumental with minimal vocals.  The placement of these tracks really do work in terms of continuity.
 
There’s several track names on this album that envoke the zodiac.  “Aquarius Sabotage,” “Gemini Syringes,” “Sagittarius Silver Announcement,” “Scorpio Sword,” and “Virgo Self-Esteem Broadcast.”  Even with that said, that’s not the real “theme,” of this record.  In fact, it seems to do a great job at almost being a concept record without ever really getting there.
 
Stand-out tracks include the aforementioned “Sagittarius Silver Announcement,” “See the Leaves,” “The Sparrow Looks Up At The Machine,” “Worm Mountain (feat. MGMT),” and “Silver Trembling Hands.”  Lips fans should be pleased with this release, which really does sound like what Zaireeka would have sounded like in 2009 if they only came up with the concept this year, only over 2 discs that you play one at a time.  So much easier. 4 out of 5 stars.

~Mark Massi

When I’m hearing a new Basement Jaxx record, I’m usually prepared for the following: 4 really hot tracks, and some filler (of which is still better than the hot tracks of some of their peers).  So, I figured I’d be in for the same thing this time around with their brand new release, Scars.  I was pleasantly surprised.

he real highlight of the album, for me, is the title track “Scars,” which features Kelis, Meleka, and Chipmunk.  This seems to jump out of all sorts of boxes.  It’s out of the normal realm of Basement Jaxx, and it’s out of the normal realm of hip-hop.  My friend, Lee, and I have discussions about the state of music, especially hip hop, all the time.  For years, I’ve been telling him, “you know, the only direction hip hop has left to go is to sample a lot of different classical selections,” and finally, Basement Jaxx listened to me in the year 2009.  Not to say this sounds like a symphony, the choral sample is just a part of the overall feel.  Fantastic way to start the record. The single, Raindrops, is also a killer track, bound to be an instant club classic.  And for those who are looking for that “old time jazz cut” that they’re so good at making, “What’s A Girl Gotta Do,” featuring Paloma Faith will leave you very satisfied.  And let’s face it, who else but Basement Jaxx is going to take a 76-year old Yoko Ono and make her sound relevant to today’s music scene?  Hell, not even JOHN LENNON could successfully pull that off.  Remember her material on the album “Double Fantasy?”

Overall, I’d have to say this is a strong record.  As per usual, there’s plenty of guests, and plenty of twists in the sound to keep you occupied for the 53 minutes needs to take you on its very funky and fresh journey. 3.5 out of 5 stars.

~Mark Massi