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Mr. Lucky is decent enough, but coming from someone who has built a career out of making “cool” retropop it’s disappointing to have an album almost devoid of that “cool” factor and even seems like it was made on autopilot and mailed in; the overall sound throughout is quite generic and anyone looking for more “Baby Did A Bad Bad Thing” will be disappointed.
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The Sounds continue their instantly identifyable pseudo-new wave sound on Crossing The Rubicon, but in doing so they seem to have fallen in to a rut because that same instantly identifyable pseudo-new wave sound has become formulaic and predictable; compared to their last album Dying To Say This To You, which had plenty of standout songs and managed to stay interesting throughout the disc, Crossing just kind of plods along generically and aside from Maja Ivarsson’s vocals it sounds like just about anything else in the record bins today…it’s moments, though, particulary the first single “No One Sleeps When I’m Awake” and the weird electronic sadness of ”Home Is Where Your Heart Is.”
Tags: maja ivarsson, the sounds
The boring album art accomanying Moby’s Wait For Me is perfectly suited for the album itself; the disc drones on and on with no innovation and nothing interesting or notable – a disappointment from someone who has shown flashes of such in the past, particularly with Play – the album accomplishes the moody and melodic feel Moby said he was going for in interviews, but, predictably, that translates to a cure for insomnia for listeners.
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30 years into their career, Sonic Youth aren’t necessarily innovators anymore, but what they are making is leagues beyond what you would expect from most groups who’ve been around so long: despite the typically confounding lyrics (“Elastic dreams of vicious actions/Plastic stomachs wrapped in steel”?) the songs on The Eternal are tightly and engagingly structured in their use of both noise and melody, never meandering, and most of the time just flat out rocking the shit. (See “Sacred Trickster”, “Antenna”, signature epic “Massage the History”, and the Lou Reed homaging “Poison Arrow”)
Tags: kim gordon, sonic youth, the eternal, thurston moore
This latest posthumous J Dilla release is a collection of beats mixed by Pete Rock and overseen by Dilla’s mother, their caring influence assuring that this is far more than what you’d expect, with beats fit to rival the man’s best material wonderfully sequenced and framed as a radio show hosted by Rock; the beats themselves are inventive and eclectically imagined and the guest appearances – while often unnecessary – are certainly well-intentioned.
Tags: black thought, blu, doom, frank n dank, havoc, j dilla, jay dee, jay stay paid, m.o.p., pete rock, phat kat, raekwon, slum village, stones throw
Primary Colours graduates The Horrors from the group of kitschy garage goths that they debuted as into something more refined though just as (forgivably) derivative – they’ve clearly done their homework and their more evolved sound is a mishmash of the last thirty years of classic British post-punk, from the moody Ian Curtis vocals to the shoegaze inspired guitars and ambient excursions – and the album’s closing track and biggest highlight, the epically rocking and almost dance-able “A Sea Within a Sea”, is hopefully a sign that the band plans to take their sound into uncharted territory instead of drawing on the past.
Tags: primary colours, the horros