ALBUM REVIEW
“I wish I could go back in time,” Wayne Coyne yelps on the Flaming Lips’ 12th record. In a sense, he has: These psych-rock mystics haven’t sounded so off-the-wall since they were Oklahoma acidheads in the Eighties. Most of Embryonic sounds like laid-back echoes of Miles Davis’ early-1970s skronk jazz, with distorted funk grooves undercutting pillowy vibraphones and zonked electronics. Despite tons of studio chaff (five songs are fragments named after zodiac signs), a theme emerges, something about keying into the cosmos by relinquishing control. Hippie hokum? Maybe. But the Lips have always been able to subvert pie-eyed whimsy with a sense of homespun beauty, and there’s plenty of that here too.
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Monsters of Folk are already being called this generation’s Traveling Wilburys, but a better comparison is Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. Like CSNY, Monsters of Folk yoke together a quartet of folk-minded rockers [Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Conor Oberst and Mike Mogis of Bright Eyes, M. Ward of She and Him] at the top of their game — and both groups create something that’s often greater than the sum of its parts.
For one thing, there are the harmonies, which step fearlessly into the arena just as harmony singing has become the coin of the realm (see Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, etc.). James’, Oberst’s and Ward’s voices meld beautifully in a variety of styles: Check the Meet the Beatles-style belting on “Say Please” or the “Teach Your Children” vocal timbres on “Map of the World.” Ward’s mythic Americana spurs campfire-song playfulness on “Goodway” and “Baby Boomer,” while James’ current obsession with classic soul briefly turns the group into a trip-hop Four Tops on “Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.).”
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“It’s a bad time/ To be out of your mind,” singer Corey Glover cautions in “Out of Mind,” a brute-metal warning about staying sharp for battle on Living Colour’s most focused record since their 1988 debut, Vivid. To these black-rock fighters, apocalypse is colorblind. The greed and fallout in Vivid’s “Open Letter (To a Landlord)” still run deep in the enraged crunch of “DecaDance” and “Hard Times.” But “Bless Those (Little Annie’s Prayer)” is a hot ball of faith: Guitarist Vernon Reid slices across Doug Wimbish and Will Calhoun’s porch-party strut with sacred-steel licks. Reid’s playing is a thrill throughout; his solos sound like a mind blown wide but never to pieces.
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British singer/songwriter last released a proper studio album in 2005. It was called Life in Slow Motion, and it was lovely. It was also a complete waste of that title, which could be far more accurately applied to his syrupy new LP Draw the Line.
Opening track “Fugitive” and the string-swept “Jackdaw” are plucky enough, but the nine other tracks mostly sink into a mire of hookless, humorless mid-tempo muck. The songs themselves aren’t all that bad (though Gray’s apparent unfamiliarity with the concept of slant rhyme is occasionally maddening—get the man some Emily Dickinson, stat!), they just sound like they were produc
This includes “Kathleen,” the could-be-stellar duet with Jolie Holland in which Gray’s broguish tenor completely overpowers her delicate warble. And big closer “Full Steam Ahead,” a walloping duet with Annie Lennox, arrives a little too late to stoke the engines.
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Many art rockers have symphonic pretensions, but it takes gumption to compose a “symphony.” Enter Muse: The British trio’s fifth album closes with “Exogenesis: Symphony,” a three-part suite full of grandiose orchestral swells and lyrical koans like “Why are we? Who are we?” Muse’s humongous cresting and tumbling songs have earned them a massive cult following, along with criticism that the band sounds a little too much like its heroes. (Frontman Matthew Bellamy has a serious Thom Yorke fixation.) Songs like the industrial-flavored “Uprising” prove again that Muse know how to whip up an almighty roar. But the lyrics are pompous doggerel (”Coercive notions re-evolve/A universe is trapped inside a tear”), and they borrow shamelessly from Radiohead and Queen without the former’s musical invention or the latter’s cheeky swagger.
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As you probably know by now, the remastering of the Beatles catalog was carried out with the caution of translating the Dead Sea Scrolls. Happily, the results justify the obsessive care. These 14 stereo remasters — from Please Please Me (1963) to Let It Be (1970), with a two-disc Past Masters added for good measure — make the original recordings sound newly invigorated and alive, whether you’re listening on standard earbuds or a high-end system.
An enormous effort was made to stay true to the original mixes, so there aren’t going to be any easy revelations for Beatles fans. Instead, these albums sound deeper, richer and fleshed-out.
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