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  • 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.

  • Tiny Spirits in Paradise

    “What the hell is this?” The guy standing next to me asks his friend. His friend shakes his head.

    Cocorosie has just begun to play to a packed Paradise Rock Club in Boston.

    A woman in a newsboy cap strums a harp and when she opens her mouth, opera warbles out. A tinny prerecorded loop plays the mooing of a child’s toy cow.

    A few minutes later, the same guy says, “what is this?” This time, he’s staring at the band, enraptured. Converted. The rest of the crowd—exactly the kind you’d expect to gather on a Saturday night to hear a woman sing opera while her sister plays a series of cat meows—is similarly transfixed; faces have turned like sunflowers toward the stage.

    There’s no way Cocorosie could play an average show—there’s nothing remotely average about them.

    As a band, Cocorosie defies labels, though their record company, Touch and Go, aptly describes them as “tiny field mice singing gospel.”

    Two sisters form the band. Sierra sings opera and plays the harp, guitar, piano, and kazoo. (The fact that the previous sentence is completely devoid of irony or sarcasm indicates the originality that makes Cocorosie so compelling). At the show, Sierra, with smudged eye make-up and exaggerated facial expressions, resembles a weeping clown. As she sings, she sometimes rocks back and forth as though comforting herself. Her unholy voice rises and falls manically, like a ghost haunting the opera.

    The other sister, Bianca, has the tinny, trembling voice of a shriveled grandmother (with impressive range, of course). She manipulates various children’s toys, electronics, and other strange noisemakers. She wears a bandanna over hair that splits into two braids and she’s painted a V over the front of her face so that she looks like a cross between Skeletor and Raggedy Ann.

    They’ve got a bassist on stage, but he’s practically invisible. A beatboxer supplies percussion, changing up and laying down grooves that ground the soaring voices and echoing loops.

    They play only a few of their more upbeat songs—I’m surprised by the absence of favorites such as “Noah’s Ark.” The crowd dances when the beat picks up, but dancing isn’t the goal of the audience or the band. The show primarily consists of songs that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

    Sierra’s vocals induce shivers, especially when her voice curls in on itself and becomes achingly plaintive. She doubles over and croons, “All I want in my life / is to be your housewife,” pulling at nothing with desperate hands. I keep thinking that the crowd will grow weary of this bizarre slow sadness, but they don’t. Cocorosie creates a mood I’ve never quite seen before at a concert—the sisters have cast a spell like a net over the crowd.

    The fairy tale story of Cocorosie’s formation is consistent with their magical aura. Sierra and Bianca were estranged for much of their adolescence; Bianca studied in Brooklyn and Sierra moved to Paris to sing opera. In 2003, Bianca showed up at Sierra’s apartment and the two of them almost immediately began recording La Maison de mon Reve, which they recorded in the acoustical epicenter of the house—the bathroom.

    They intended to keep La Maison among friends, but in late 2003 Touch and Go got the album, fell under the spell, and pursued a contract with the sisters.

    Cocorosie perform as though they’re curled up in the bathtub in a roomful of friends. I feel communion with the band and with everyone else who has shown up and submitted themselves to Cocorosie’s charms. We all—even the skeptic from the beginning of the show—have fallen for this strange rainbowarrior music and for the band that takes spare parts, vocal gymnastics, and magic to make it so.

  • 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?