ALBUM REVIEW

Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? About 99 per cent of pop is drudging twuntery assembled by blank-eyed robots who are unjustly rewarded with mountains of cash, while all my favourite bands languish and die in places like Tacoma, Washington. As someone who believes hardcore punk to be mankind’s highest artform, Lady GaGa is the antithesis of my fucking soul: she eats diamonds marinated in the tears of seraphim, I eat week-old misery on toast. I’d despise her… but she is that remaining one per cent.

It’s because she’s baffling.  ‘The Fame Monster’, being eight new tunes welded to last year’s ‘The Fame’ (where most pop muppets would tack on a tossed-off remix or two, La Gaga delves into her paranoid soul and constructs a thematic collection around new demons that have invaded her life – monsters representing her fear of, among others, sex, death, loneliness and alcohol) is as pristine as you’d expect, but has a sub-zero core of isolation and fear. In the same way as Radiohead battle computers and learn new instruments to hew their sculptures while Fuck Buttons and HEALTH discover new sonic languages, she uses pop, its producers and masks and all its artifice, as her tool of self-expression.

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Hot-shot resumes aside, the three heavy hitters in Them Crooked Vultures have a taste for the strange. Guitarist Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) indulges his weirder impulses in his long-running “Desert Sessions” ensembles. Drummer Dave Grohl (Foo Fighters, Nirvana) instigated the excellent heavy-metal detour Probot. And bassist John Paul Jones (Led Zeppelin) has collaborated with genuine subversives from Diamanda Galas to the Butthole Surfers. Together in Them Crooked Vultures, the three settle not for bland détente but for something a bit more out there.

The arrangements are laced with twists in tempo and mood. Nasty riffs and sticky melodies are everywhere, buttered over by the androgynous harmonies that have made Homme a hard-rock anti-hero, but verse-chorus arrangements hold little interest. Instead, there are fascinating digressions, packed with surprises.

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“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.

To read the complete review visit PASTE MAGAZINE