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Pop Rock Nation

Category: Releases

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  • New Releases of the Week: 9/22/09: Pearl Jam, David Gray & More

    A ton of stuff in stores today. Let’s check out some of the highlights.

    Pearl Jam “Backspacer”: The most successful rock band of the Nineties haven’t lost a step since their heyday. Their self-titled last album (which was the first PJ album I’d actually listened to in half a decade) was pretty damn good. The band still plays with a sense of purpose after all these years. “Backspacer” is their first album since they’ve gone independent (after a one-album jaunt on J Records) and the reviews have been glowing. Backing away from the overtly political lyrics that have been their mainstay for at least their last two albums, reports are saying that this is the most lighthearted, fun album Pearl Jam has ever recorded. Count me in as interested. FYI, folks. This album is only being sold at Target stores and at your local indie retailer…which means no FYE, Best Buy or Wal-Mart. Support your local indie retailer! We’ve gotta keep these folks in business!

    David Gray “Draw the Line”: Also making a label switch is this Welsh singer/songwriter, who casual fans might remember from his huge 2000 hit album “White Ladder” and its’ hit singles “Babylon” and “Please Forgive Me”. While his album sales have tailed off since (then again, so have everyone else’s!), his music  has remained intensely personal and powerful. After almost a decade on Dave Matthews’ ATO Records, Gray moves over to Downtown Records-home of Gnarls Barkley and Mos Def, among others. “Draw the Line” apparently does away with most of the electronic touches that permeated his last few records in favor of a full band sound. The album also has a cameo from Annie Lennox, which is enough to get me to plunk my cash down on anything.

    The lovely guys and girls at Popdose have reviewed “Draw the Line”: you can find that review here. There’s also an excellent interview with Gray elsewhere on the site.

    John Forte “Style Free EP”: John Forte was an associate of Wyclef Jean and The Fugees, appearing on their smash album “The Score” and on Wyclef’s debut album “Carnival”. The nasally-voiced rapper guest-starred on several other records and had a minor hit with “Ninety Nine (Flash the Message)”, which you might remember due to the fact that it sampled Nena’s “99 Luftballons”. Anyway, Forte was arrested and jailed a few years back for intent to distribute cocaine. His jail sentence was commuted by former President Bush and Forte was released shortly before Christmas last year. While not being too sure of the circumstances of his arrest and sentence, Forte is definitely NOT a gangsta rapper, and actually, it doesn’t appear he’s doing much rapping at all these days. “Style Free” is an EP that features Forte singing and playing guitar. This guy’s a true talent, definitely check him out.

    This isn’t on the album, but check out Forte and Talib Kweli’s excellent version of Kanye West’s “Homecoming”

    Brother Ali “Us”: My friends have been trying to get me to give this guy a chance for years. He’s received so much glowing press that I think this will be the album on which I finally give in. A powerful, passionate emcee (who happens to be white and albino), he’s one of the darlings of the hipster-hop community. His new album, “Us”, features cameos from Chuck D. and Freeway. If Chuck is co-signing this dude, he’s gotta be good, right?

    Elsewhere, there are new albums arriving from Harry Connick Jr., electronic favorites Basement Jaxx, Yoko Ono, Vertical Horizon (yes, they’re still around), campy British act Mika and reggae/pop star Sean Kingston. Also in stores today is an album called “Monsters of Folk”, a supergroup of sorts containing M. Ward, My Morning Jacket’s Jim James (as his alter ego Yim Yames) and Conor (Bright Eyes) Oberst.

    Oh yeah, and there’s a new Michael Bolton album out, too-apparently featuring Ne-Yo and Lady GaGa. Who blackmailed those two into appearing on a Bolton record?

    As always, get your full list of this week’s releases from the good folks at Pause and Play here.

  • CD Review: Jay-Z’s “The Blueprint 3”

    Jay-Z’s been in a weird place these last few years, career-wise. After “un-retiring” in 2006, the rapper seemed to struggle to find his way. That year’s “Kingdom Come” was a credible attempt to make a “grown folks” hip-hop album, but it didn’t appeal to Jay’s younger contingent of fans and underperformed commercially. The following year’s “American Gangster” found Jay revisiting the hustling themes of his older albums and restored his position critically, although I personally don’t think it was much better than “Kingdom Come”. He’d been promising “The Blueprint 3” for at least a year, tossing off a bunch of teaser singles that sounded, well…tossed off. To my ears, it sounded like Jay had lost his passion for rhyming. I wasn’t holding out hope that “BP3” would be worth the money I would inevitably spend on it.

    Surprise! Jay apparently regrouped at some point and came out of the studio with one of the stronger albums of his career. The production is uniformly solid, sounding right in the pocket of current radio trends without sounding like Jay’s trying particularly hard to appeal to a younger audience. Jay sounds rejuvenated on the mic; he hasn’t sounded this spirited and in love with words since “The Black Album”.

    Every Jay album-even the best ones-have a few songs of fast-forward material, so what surprises the most about “BP3”-besides Jay’s renewed vocal dexterity-is that it’s a consistent listen all the way through. The only other Jay album that flows this well is the first “Blueprint”. The embarrassing moments on this album have nothing to do with Jay himself. Pharrell Williams delivers a lukewarm synth-pop beat on “So Ambitious”, but I’d give a pass to the song if it wasn’t for Pharrell’s God-awful chorus. “Reminder”‘s insistent chorus is somewhat repetitious (and therefore annoying as hell), but Jay’s solid verses make up for the crappy hook. Other than that, there’s a forgettable verse (surprised?) by Young Jeezy on “Real As it Gets”, and the rest of the album is gravy.

    Jay’s at his best when his songs follow some sort of narrative, and “BP3″‘s standout tracks are the ones that focus on a subject other than Jay himself. The piano-spiked “A Star is Born” gives props to a string of other rappers. Jay even extends an olive branch to a few of the rappers he’s had beef with over the years. I wasn’t too keen on “D.O.A. (Death of Autotune)” when it hit the airwaves a few months ago, but it’s grown on me. It’s a back-to-basics Jay tune; straight-up New York boom-bap. Speaking of New York, “Empire State of Mind” is a loving tribute to Jay’s home, with a triumphant chorus from Alicia Keys.

    Whenever Jay’s rhyming about himself gets a little tiring, the producers come in to save the day with hot beats. “On to the Next One” features a bassy, head-nodding beat flavored with vocal samples from Justice’s hit “D.A.N.C.E.”. “Off That” spotlights Jay’s awesome flow and proves that he can even rhyme on one of Timbaland’s more dance/pop oriented beats. Kanye West even digs up Alphaville’s 1985 synth-pop tearjerker “Forever Young” for the album closer “Young Forever”. Aside from the aforementioned “So Ambitious”, there’s not one bad beat on the “BP3”.

    Two more things that stood out to me: Jay successfully experiments with his flow on “BP3”, whether overdubbing his vocals on top of one another on the dark, mysterious “Venus Vs. Mars”, or trading off lines relay-race style with Kanye on “Hate”. It’s nice to hear that even though he’s 15 years into his career and pushing 40, he’s still exploring what he can do with his voice. The album is also fairly devoid of guest rappers, with the exception of Young Jeezy’s yawner of a verse on “Real As it Gets”. J. Cole (one of Jay’s newest proteges) contributes an inobtrusive verse to “A Star is Born” and  Kanye delivers some of the most entertaining verses on the album with his contributions to “Hate” and the smash single “Run This Town”.

    I’ve gotta admit, “Blueprint 3” was a pleasant surprise. It has a consistency missing from a lot of Jay’s catalog, and his rhyming sounds more focused, more joyful, than it has in a number of years. It’s not a stone-cold classic like the first “Blueprint” (that would have required Jay to do a little more soul-searching on the lyrical tip than he did on this album), but it’s also thankfully not the overambitious, disjointed mess that was “Blueprint 2”. What you get with “Blueprint 3” is a solid, enjoyable album, which proves that even in his advanced age (in hip-hop years), Jay-Z is still capable of recording material that challenges his best work.

  • First Listen: Mariah Carey’s “I Want to Know What Love Is”

    So, Mariah Carey’s no stranger to covers, right? She’s shown a special interest in soft rock ballads. After all, she covered Nilsson’s “Without You”. Then there was her remake of Journey’s “Open Arms”. Oh! She also covered Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)”. Even though I certainly don’t mind Mariah’s music, none of these songs held a candle to the originals, with “Without You” being particularly wretched.

    As the second single from her upcoming “Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel”, Mariah’s reached back into lite rock again and decided to tackle Foreigner’s #1 hit from 1985, “I Want to Know What Love Is”. It serves a couple of purposes. It brings Mariah back to power ballad territory after forays into deeper R&B and hip-hop production, in the hopes that the fans who abandoned her after she went hoochie will come back. It also brings back the dog-whistle. Remember back when Mariah first came out and she used to hit those insanely high notes in damn near every song? Well, despite the rumors that she’s lost a bit of her upper register and belting ability (remember the less-than-stellar performance of “I’ll Be There” at the Michael Jackson memorial?), this song makes it apparent that she’s still got it.  Heaven help our ears. I was actually wondering if it was studio trickery, but I heard a live version of this song in which she unleashed the whistle, so it hasn’t totally left her.

    Anyway, this is another case in which the original is much better, and quite frankly, Mariah doesn’t really add anything to the song. As Simon Cowell would say, it’s a bit karaoke. What do you think?