Within Temptation - The Unforgiving: B+

"Faster"

Within Temptation, make no mistake, is a symphonic metal band. They are as cheesy and bloated as symphonic metal bands come and the Danish sextet’s sixth album, The Unforgiving wastes no time in making its intentions clear, beginning with a horribly pretentious spoken-word piece in which a melodramatic whisper lets off such grammatically suspect lines as “It’s certainly a lonely life, but a fulfilling one at best,” and “Someone has to take a stand against evil. Why should it not be me?” There are loads of fake strings, thoroughly saturated production and an operatic singer that seems to expound upon her bitterness that she didn’t get into Julliard with each note she oversings. However, the good news is that, however objectionable the ingredients of The Unforgiving are, Within Temptation focuses them into songs that are undeniably catchy and legitimately enjoyable.

The secret to the group’s success on the album is lead singer, Sharon del Adel. Where other symphonic metal singers tend to dilute their vocals through the Auto-correct strainer, rendering them pitch-perfect but emotionless, Adel has a real sense of timbre and uses her voice to come away with some of The Unforgiving’s best hooks. Her pleading soprano in the chorus of “In the Middle of the Night” gives the song an extra kick to an already pretty enjoyable duel guitar/keyboard riff. “Faster”, The Unforgiving’s lead single, is similarly excellent, Adel letting her accent slip in the repetition of the song’s title before ripping into an expertly executed chorus that definitely achieves the epic goals the song sets out for itself.

Of course with great aspirations come great risks for blunders and Adel is handed some pretty big dud lines on The Unforgiving. “Fire and Ice” is the first of the album’s many ballads and it sets a precedent for regretful melodrama with a chorus that goes, “And I still wonder / Why heaven has died / The skies have all fallen / I’m breathing but why?” When Adel names off things she would do to keep her love life from falling apart in “Shot in the Dark”, she suggests breathing underwater and acknowledges this exaggeration with this clunky couplet: “I’m so sad / I’m so damn sad.” The thing is that these lyrics, while cringe-worthy, fit the attitude of The Unforgiving and, while they don’t make the album any better, their transgressions can be largely forgiven given the catchy context in which they are placed. Considering how bad these types of albums tend to get, The Unforgiving may very well establish Within Temptation as the best lyricists of their entire genre.

Unfortunately, though, the album sags significantly after its first four songs. No symphonic metal album would be “complete” without some ballads and The Unforgiving has quite a few, not one of them being particularly memorable. The chorus to “Lost” recycles that of “Shot in the Dark” and the boring anonymity of “Stairway to the Skies” is an unfortunate way to end the album. The Unforgiving’s mid-tempo songs are always good for at least one impressive chorus, but songs like “Where Is the Edge” and “A Demon’s Fate” may not stand the test of time after an initial listen. That being said, aside from those aforementioned lyrical slipups, all of The Unforgiving at the very least sounds nice and will certainly please if ever played in the background.

So my ultimate advice on The Unforgiving depends upon your familiarity with this genre of music. If you’ve been a longtime fan of symphonic metal, then you will most likely enjoy the entire album, as it’s the best of its kind I’ve heard in quite a long time. However, if you’re not a fan, then I would just get the album’s second, third and fourth songs, maybe “Murder” and “Iron” if you’re feeling zesty. And if you’re not even a metal fan, all the better, because The Unforgiven is so poppy, an argument can be made that it is just a touch softer than traditional hard rock. With its flaws, The Unforgiving is still in the top tier of symphonic metal albums, so, if you somehow have the urge to get into the genre, this is probably the best introduction you’re going to find.

Within Temptation - The Unforgiving: B+

Blood Ceremony - Living With the Ancients: B

"The Great God Pan"

I read while doing some research on Living With the Ancients that some believe Blood Ceremony’s sophomore album signals a revival in 70’s-aping hard rock/metal sounding bands with female vocalists that also play the flute, a sentiment that made me laugh outright and fear a little bit for the current state of music. I hardly think that we are at the point that baseball is now where we are so desperate to prove our relevancy we are infinitely compartmentalizing our achievements into exponentially smaller and more meaningless subgenres (True story: At a Yankees game I attended, people celebrated that it was the first time that two consecutive foul balls were hit directly down the right foul line into the crowd. It was kinda sad.). And when I hear something like that about Blood Ceremony, I can’t imagine this supposed “revival” consisting of more than one or two other bands that just so happened to put out an album within a year of Living With the Ancients.

Not to mention that Blood Ceremony’s is hardly anything revolutionary. I was surprised to find, a minute and a half into first track “The Great God Pan”, that Blood Ceremony was helmed by female vocalist Alia O’Brien, but that novelty soon wore off as Living With the Ancients congealed into a relatively bland aesthetically pleasing blues rock album that took more than a few cues from Clutch, Jethro Tull and Aleister Crowley. If you’re looking for an album to satisfy your cravings for the Sabbath sound that Sabbath was too diverse to constantly write (After, all The Sword can only release so many albums), you will enjoy Living With the Ancients. As for me, I’d rather move onto other less outdated modes of rocking out. Who knows, perhaps this album will spawn a revival in mediocre ‘70’s-hard rock/metal sounding bands with female vocalists that also play the flute, but you won’t see me giving two shits when that train rolls around.

Blood Ceremony - Living With the Ancients: B

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues: A-

"Helplessness Blues"

The narrative surrounding the second album from Seattle folk rockers Fleet Foxes has been that it is a lot more dark and pessimistic. Frontman Robin Pecknold opens the album with this depressing contemplation: “So now that I’m older / Than my mother and father / When they had their daughter / Now what does that say about me?” and elsewhere he speaks of life and love with a sense of futility that penetrates each of the songs on Helplessness Blues down to their very hooks. The album is called Helplessness Blues after all, a title that implies accepting and reveling in defeat, perhaps an admission by the group that they could not overcome an inevitable sophomore slump coming off of such a critically acclaimed album as their self-titled debut.

However, look closer and this impression of Helplessness Blues holds little water. In fact, I would be so bold as to say that this is the most optimistic album I’ve heard all year. While it is true that Robin Pecknold sings that first line in “Montezuma,” he does not sing it with the heavy-handedness that one would assume. Pecknold sings the line with the same innocent tenor that has become characteristic of his group, and this is not unintentional. “Oh man what I used to be,” goes the chorus of that same track, in which Pecknold sings of disappointments that may come with his death. “Oh man oh my oh me.” While the song is no positivity bender, the lyrics are treated differently than they would let on in text. That chorus makes Pecknold’s ruminations sound like abstract thoughts as opposed to an organized front of dejection. He sees these events unfolding as curiosities, but laughs them off with a playful refrain that seems to chalk it all up to the flaws of life, because, after all, every person has felt helpless at some point in their lives. In this way, Pecknold seems to answer his own question posed by that first line, saying that his life has not turned out better or worse than that of his parents’ but just different. It’s an interesting message and one that carries on throughout Helplessness Blues.

The title track similarly deceives in its worldview. “I was raised up believing / I was somehow unique / A snowflake, distinct among snowflakes / Unique in each way you can see,” Pecknold sings with only an acoustic guitar supporting him. The line seems to exemplify the diminishing returns of age that can come with a person entering their mid-20’s, but Pecknold goes on. “And now after some thinkin’ / I’d say I’d rather be / A functioning cog in some kind of machinery / Serving something beyond me.” Again, Pecknold does concede a loss in individuality, an emotionally crippling realization, but he instead focuses that hopelessness into a goal that is different, not necessarily worse but perhaps even better. The song then becomes a beacon of hope in the way that it suggests the presence of countless opportunities of which we may be unaware. It builds, adding harmonies and instrumentation, before Pecknold has a confident enough footing to reveal his mission statement, channeling what could have been lost ambition into a revelation, making for the album’s clear highlight. “What good is it to sing helplessness blues?” he asks. “Why should I wait for anyone else?”

And yet this is the genius of Robin Pecknold as a centerpiece. His voice is nasally and often defaults to an unassuming intonation that blends wonderfully with Fleet Foxes’s trademark group harmonies, but his lyrics are so clearly thought out for their meaning and effectiveness that it’s an extra surprise the guy sings beautifully, because Helplessness Blues could be a spoken word album and still make me cry. In “Blue Spotted Tail,” he plays that pessimism fake-out trick expertly, asking rhetorical questions with his acoustic like “Why is life made only for an end? Why do I do all this waiting then?” around what feels like the most serene campfire you could imagine. Like in “Mykonos,” in my opinion their best song, Fleet Foxes are greatest when they transcend the Appalachian folk archetype they have clearly mastered, and such is the double-take-inducing moment in “The Shrine / An Argument” when Pecknold howls in nearly empty space. Helplessness Blues consolidates Pecknold’s power as one of the most shyly brilliant songwriters of the new decade, a savant with just enough humor to place his talents right up there with the folk rock luminaries of which he pays homage.

Musically, Helplessness Blues does not stray far from the “play every folk subgenre possible in the span of fifty minutes” style that the group established with their debut album. Fans of that sound need not worry that the group has evolved so much that they stretch themselves thin; with the exception of a diminishing in group harmonies in exchange for a more prominent Pecknold (With which I’m sure you notice I take no umbrage), the production and arrangements are as rich and grassy as ever. “The Cascades” is a civil Celtic instrumental and “Sim Sala Bim” descends into an acoustic jamboree decorated with mandolin frills, probably the best musical moment on the album. As their backslashes would suggest, “The Shrine / An Argument” and “The Plains / Bitter Dancer” are two-part songs, and while the latter is mainly a vocal introduction that transitions into the main tune, the former is an 8-minute behemoth, ebbing and flowing from sinister acoustics to grouped thumps to an abrupt comedown that fades out in a cacophony of brass. And to think that I’m referring to a song by a band that nobody would bat an eyelash to say were indie folk. What’s great about Fleet Foxes is that they are still Hell bent on pushing the envelop in a genre that is hardly known for it.

I’ve mentioned a lot here, but Helplessness Blues houses many more examples of fantastic songwriting and impeccable vocals that may prove to be your personal album favorites and will justify my obvious man crush on Robin Pecknold. Aside from maybe a couple boring transitional instrumentals and the forced a capella vocals that try to make “Grown Unknown” a transcendent album closer, the group’s newest is more mature if not quite as good as their debut album. But if the group’s philosophy as conveyed by Pecknold’s lyrics are any indication, Helplessness Blues is just the beginning of Fleet Foxes’s journey as a restlessly expansive group into the new decade. It may not be better, it may not be worse, but here’s hoping it’s always different. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Fleet Foxes - Helplessness Blues: A-

Explosions in the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care: B+

"Postcard From 1952"

What the fuck is this? I fucking came to this thing thinking I was going to hear some good old-fashioned instrumental rock SANS vocals, and what is this? Voices? Singing?!!!!!!! I’m offended in so many ways. This is not how Explosions in the Sky should be making music; they have completely fallen off the wagon. I can’t fucking believe this shit. Fucking unconscionable.

Yeah, I don’t actually care that “Trembling Hands,” the third and shortest song on Explosions in the Sky’s first album in four years, Take Care, Take Care, Take Care features a few “oh”’s in the background. I’m really just bringing attention to it, because that aspect of the album was the only one that legitimately caught my attention while I was listening to it. Take Care features the Texas outfit playing the same soft-LOUD-soft crescendo-by-numbers shtick that has become somewhat of their trademark over the years, but, on this album, it comes dangerously close to becoming the stalest of patterns. Granted, the massive climaxes Explosions in the Sky can create are the stuff of pure bliss (Just ask fans of their 2003 album, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place), and there are some similarly enormous musical builds to be found on this album with which you can reaffirm your love of life and music, but claims from critics that it is formulaic are not, by any means, unfounded.

While I can enjoy Take Care for its ornate structures and rich production, it just doesn’t have enough moments of tension. Those familiar with Explosions in the Sky know that the group tends to play long songs, the lengthiest on their newest running just over ten minutes. And while many of Take Care’s songs are, as background music, quite good, boredom would not be an unwarranted response to the vast lulls that occupy a majority of the album. Although “Last Known Survivor” switches from a solid 4/4 beat to a delicate 3/4 about a third of the way in and does increase in tempo, when it drops out with no distinct release, it can prove to be frustrating. This is true with “Be Comfortable, Creature” as well. While I don’t have a great problem with either’s technique, those expecting a distinct payoff will feel like it was time wasted. And with both songs clocking in at a total of more than seventeen minutes, there goes over a third of your album.

“Postcard From 1952” begins with the band’s standard prettily flecked guitars and skittering percussion before it picks up incrementally into a fanfare that sparkles with a well-placed descending guitar line. It’s Take Care’s best song and an excellent indication that the group can still dazzle with post-rock catharsis. While I find nothing particularly objectionable about Take Care, more moments like that would certainly not hurt.

Explosions in the Sky - Take Care, Take Care, Take Care: B+

Prefuse 73 - The Only She Chronicles: A-

"The Only Hand to Hold (feat. Shara Worden)"

By looking into the details of The Only She Chapters, one would think that Prefuse 73’s newest album was a very harsh and depressing forty minutes. Its vaguely obsessive title, the fact that every one of its 17 tracks starts with the ominous finality of “The Only” and that songs are given such cheerful titles as “The Only Valentine’s Day Failure” and “The Only Guitar to Die Alone” suggest that the album was born from some crippling event that descended upon 73’s main man, Ahmad Szabo. From perhaps an ugly break-up or the loss of a loved one, the album sounds like a mixtape a spiteful Tyler the Creator would release or if Kanye West’s 808’s and Heartbreak had been more unhinged. However, The Only She Chapters does not have a definite mission statement. It’s neither a vilification nor a celebration of man’s better half, but, rather, a series of beautifully dystopian electro-ambient songs. And I’m reviewing it just in time for Mother’s Day.

“The Recollection of Where Life Stopped,” the first track of The Only ends with the slamming of a door, an excellent audio accompaniment to the listener’s introduction to Szabo’s perverted utopia. Somewhat of a surreptitiously chopped and screwed trip to Medieval Times and somewhat of a mechanized dreamscape, the album throws sounds at you constantly to the point where you’ll get nauseous trying to keep up. At times, making the best of the aural beating is in your best interest. The bass is steady and pounding and Szabo makes good use of the fact that you have two speakers at your disposal, hurling noises from seemingly every direction like you’re standing in the middle of a spherical firing range. It’s definitely music for headphones, and, even if it is clearly confrontational at times, it’s nice to have this type of music slap you around a bit for a change.

The Only She Chapters features about half a dozen singing voices, all of which are female. Their contributions to the album range from the decorative to the center-stage. Niki Randa adds some ethereal coos to “The Only Boogie Down” that, honestly, anyone could have performed and Zola Jesus, probably the biggest name on the album, hollers in an echo chamber somewhere in the multiverse on “The Only Direction in Concrete,” but she’s so low in the mix, you won’t notice her if you’re not looking for her. While these tracks in particular are still good, they can be forgettable and are responsible for the more unremarkable tracks on The Only. However, Adron’s French singing is excellent on “The Only Guitar to Die Alone,” Szabo adding some characteristically discordant accordion to great effect and Shara Worden, coming off some prime cameos on Colin Stetson’s newest album, teases with harmonized aplomb on “The Only Hand to Hold,” probably the most single-worthy track on the album. These feminine influences of varying prominence both soften The Only’s structural clutter and provide excellent contrast to Szabo’s cut-and-paste technique, making for a release that can be both challenging and calming when you want it to be either.

The fact that The Only She Chapters never makes an attempt to constrain itself to the boundaries of tracks lengths may be daunting to those who decide to listen to the album, but trust me: When you put those headphones on, you’re not going to want to take them off until the album has finished, lest you abruptly disrupt the gloriously flawed euphoria that Szabo continuously concocts with ease. The album does not thrive through distinct tracks but a well-planned and unified mood of which’s variations are few but valued when they appear. For an album with so few spoken words, I’ve never felt so many messages communicated to me in one release before.

Prefuse 73 - The Only She Chronicles: A-

Peter Bjorn and John - Gimme Some: B+

"Second Chance"

If you like your pop rock poppy, and I mean REALLY poppy, you need not look much further than Peter Bjorn and John’s newest album, Gimme Some to get your 2011 fix. I swear, some of these songs are so saccharine, they could soundtrack a Dora the Explorer episode and no one would bat an eyelash. But it sounds fantastic. The one-two-three punch of “Tomorrow Has to Wait,” “Dig a Little Deeper” and “Second Chance” are great fun, perfectly fusing simplicity with a clear sense of melody, even though each song’s lyrical content isn’t necessary the most optimistic. “I don’t think you are sorry for what you did,” goes the first line of the album and the chorus of “Dig a Little Deeper” is “All art has been contemporary,” ostensibly a criticism of less creative artists that think they’re just as original as everyone else. Nevertheless, I guarantee the majority of Gimme Some will satiate your need for a well-executed hook. “Eyes” shines with Vampire Weekend guitars, handclaps and call-and-response harmonies, “May Seem Macabre” sounds like prime U2 and “Lies” is cutesy romance dipped in distortion. Throughout the album, PB&J admirably balance art and commerce.

It’s just when the group attempts to transcend that poppiness does Gimme Some falter. Not that a moment of Gimme Some is particularly bad, but several of its songs diverge into styles of which it is clear the group is not quite comfortable playing. “Breaker Breaker” is the album’s first track that doesn’t immediately dazzle (Thank God it’s only a minute and forty seconds long!) and “Black Box” sounds like meandering Spoon (Thank God it’s only forty seconds long!). Full Moon Fever-era Tom Petty does not suit the group particularly well on “(Don’t Let Them) Cool Off” and “Down Like Me”’s emulation of The Magnetic Fields’ baroque-pop with splashes of depression (“Rest when you are dead / Like me”) is good, but a rare disruption in the album’s flow. These “bad” tracks make up less than forty percent of Gimme Some, but they drag it down enough to not have me rave about it as a whole. Regardless, though, if you like pop, you will like most if not all of Gimme Some. It’s definitely the most listenable of its kind released this year, and that’s a compliment, considering Never Say Never came out this year. You see that movie? Shit was tight.

Peter Bjorn and John - Gimme Some: B+

Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges: B+

"Fear of the Unknown and the Blazing Sun"

“What war is that? What town could this be?"

Laurie Anderson asks this question two tracks into New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges, and with it, exemplifies what I imagine most people were thinking at that point into the din of Colin Stetson’s second album. On paper, Stetson sounds like your standard classically trained musician, a bass saxophonist that has played with orchestra-friendly artists like Tom Waits and Arcade Fire. However, I guarantee that Judges is an album you have never heard anything like, and, furthermore, I guarantee you will never hear anything like it ever again. Stetson does not play anything like modern classical with the three or four instruments featured on Judges. Instead, he forges dark, bizarre landscapes that both confound and fascinate. You know those one man bands you see on street corners that make children laugh when they step, triggering a hit to the bass drum on their back? Put Stetson on a street corner and watch in glee as children run in fear of the monstrosities he concocts with just himself and a tangible frustration with the complacency of modern music.

It should be noted that, aside from some vocal performances and one trumpet ensemble, all of New History Warfare was taped live and in one take, with no overdubs whatsoever. That’s right. Except for the performances by Laurie Anderson and My Brightest Diamond’s Shara Worden, every sound that comes out of your speakers is coming from one guy, all at the same time. Let’s take “Judges” for example. That tribal backbeat of percussion and harmonized bass? That’s the sound of Stetson fingering the keys at the bottom of his saxophone, not only creating those notes, but that tactile clinking. That voice? It’s Stetson literally singing into his instrument, picked up by a mic placed deep into the saxophone’s opening. You see, the sound of New History Warfare is the intricate mixing of many tracks, all taking in the same sound of the same man sitting in the same room, but placed in radically different places; inside Stetson’s instrument, on the man’s neck, on opposite sides of the room. As a result, New History Warfare is not just the sound of Stetson’s saxophone, but of Stetson himself. We can hear him whet his mouth at the end of “A Dream of Water,” rhythmically breathe through his nose on “In Love and Justice” and violently smack his reed to create the ping pong-like percussion of “Red Horse (Judges II).” Stetson’s body is its own instrument, and Judges utilizes this principle in the first “meta-instrumental” album I have ever heard.

So it’s clear that New History Warfare is a crowning achievement of instrumentation, one of the most impassioned performances of all time, and I truly mean that. But, as I listen to the album more and more, it becomes more of a concern to me as to whether or not Stetson’s arrangements are actually translating into coherent songs. Unfortunately, for the most part, they do not. When taken out of the context that Judges is the most unique album in quite a few years, its cracks begin to show as an album that may take the “experiment” in “experimental” a little too seriously. Many songs hardly evolve from the ornate melodies that Stetson initially lays down. Too often, he defaults to a wallowing drone and the beauty of “The Righteous Wrath of an Honorable Man” is diminished when considered that it is the third song on Judges that features very similar flittering alto saxophone arpeggios.

Unsurprisingly, the best moments of New History Warfare are when Laurie Anderson and Shara Worden pull Stetson’s arrangements toward a meaningful end. Worden’s filtered voice fits perfectly over Stetson’s sepulchral drones in “Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying Sometimes.” The original song is a blues number from the 1920’s, but Stetson and Worden bring it to a new level of sinister, striking spine-tingling gold when Worden quietly bellows, “When she first left me, I thought I’d grieve for a little while.” Anderson’s spoken-word poetry works well with Stetson’s beatnik arrangements and she gets in some truly fantastic lines on Judges. “And here they come, the people from the Bible,” she neutrally observes as a choir ebbs and flows for an enlightening thirty-seconds. Anderson's performance in “A Dream of Water,” where she repeats that line that so well embodies Judges, is excellent, her couplets getting more frantic as Stetson’s swirling notes become more belligerent.

Worden and Anderson team up for the album’s highlight “Fear of the Unknown and the Blazing Sun.” “Of all the wires, it was the wires / That were the wires of empathy,” Anderson proclaims, with a wonderfully subtle hint of vulnerability in that last word, and so begins Stetson’s funeral dirge of clanking keys and shapeless voices. Anderson gives devious advice to the listener as Worden’s disembodied coo floats in and out to complete the narrative of true deliverance through negativity. Like many of New History’s best tracks, it ends a little too early, but it’s the most perfect song Stetson could have written that utilizes his most notable techniques without tediously repeating them.

Ultimately, New History Warfare may be remembered for Stetson’s performance, not so much the songs he creates. People will probably say, “Oh my god, the guy’s so good with the saxophone,” rather than, “Oh, remember that one song?” Honestly, to be one of the greatest instrumentalists this or any decade has to offer is enough of an accomplishment, and those who read my problems with Judges should not disregard the entire album because of them. With the immense amount of effort that Stetson clearly puts into each and every moment of Judges (just watch him perform one of his songs live), it’s almost criminally unfair to criticize him for what he has neglected. The bottom line is to listen to Judges, because it is an album that will deservedly be remembered for years to come, and you can completely disregard my opinion on anything if I don’t take note of it come December. If anyone tells you that nobody’s making original music anymore, promptly shove Judges so far up their asses they won’t need a saxophone to squeal like a motherfucking banshee.

Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges: B+

Gucci Mane - The Return of Mr. Zone 6: C+

"Hell Yeah (featuring Slim Dunkin)"

Close to the end of The Return of Mr. Zone 6, Gucci Mane brags that 2011’s going to be his year. The song’s hook, which goes “It’s my year,” is actually sung by Mane. Copious amounts of Auto-tune are added to his voice and his performance is accompanied by swirling moans that I can only imagine someone at some point thought were harmonies. The song’s shamelessly trite execution coupled with such boasting made me laugh out loud and is, by far, the most entertaining part of The Return. Really Gucci? This is your year? Seems like this guy has been on the verge of some semblance of fame for a while. “Lemonade” was pretty popular, “Shine Blockas” is a fantastic song and I heard “Gucci Time” playing in a department store once, but the works that were supposed to consolidate his prominence, The State vs. Radric Davis and Georgia’s Most Wanted, have received modest reviews and Gucci’s 2010 prison sentence kept him from properly advertising them aside from the release of a couple mixtapes. Now that he’s back, the guy’s received more press for his new ice cream cone face tattoo (featured prominently on the cover of The Return) than anything he’s done in the past. And if the ambling quality of The Return at this point in his career is any indication, it’s that Mane’s talent is slipping with his popularity, and his attempts to get back to late 2009 are becoming noticeably desperate.

Let me be clear: I don’t listen to Gucci Mane for his rhymes. For the most part, I don’t even listen to his songs for their production, although DJ Drama’s work on Ferrari Music was a pleasant surprise. No, I listen to Gucci Mane because, for forty minutes or so, I can act like a total moron. Mane’s lazy cadence over hilariously cheap beats sounds like knowingly mindless rap-by-numbers, going out of its way to sound as ignorant as possible. Gucci Mane is music for fat men in Hawaiian shirts to jiggle/dance to, like if Drumma Boy made a career out of making hundreds of “Crank That” remixes.

The Return of Mr. Zone 6 takes the “fun” out of “dumb fun.” Gucci stubbornly remains the same in almost every aspect, and, as a result, it is clear that a fellow Brick Squad member is overshadowing his penchant for the boorish and rude. Wacka Flocka Flame sounds positively retarded singing the chorus to “This Is What I Do” and his guest verses are delectably awful. With just a debut album under his belt, Wacka has already eclipsed Mane’s popularity, and his performances on The Return show that he is beating his mentor at his own game.

The album’s songs, in general, circumvent stupid-clever hybrids and go straight for the lazy. The chorus for “Mouth Full of Golds” is the repetition of “Rich-ass nigga with a mouth full of gold” an innumerable amount of times and “Shout Out To My Set” is just the same. “Pretty Bitches” and “My Year” attempt to “branch out” by incorporating Auto-tune, but they cross the line from innocuously brainless to unlistenable. And Mane’s attempt at hollow schmoozing in “Better Baby” is particularly disingenuous immediately following “I Don’t Love Her,” a boring ode to loveless sex.

I don’t think that The Return of Mr. Zone 6 is just an outlier in a rapper’s catalogue that has been admittedly consistent up to this point. I honestly believe that the release of The Return is a sign of the decline of Gucci. The guy had his chance and, through his legal troubles and ridiculous antics supported with few quality products to justify them, he appears to have gone too far off the edge to ever get back to the Lil’ Wayne-sized popularity bubble the man was on more than a year ago. I only see the release of more albums like The Return in Gucci’s future, and, if fans of his know what’s good for them, they should just give up the idea of the man ever releasing any sort of magnum opus and go out and buy a Hawaiian t-shirt.

Gucci Mane - The Return of Mr. Zone 6: C+

The Strokes - Angles: B

"Taken For A Fool"

I don’t know about you, but March seemed like an especially depressing month for established acts releasing new music. Lupe Fiasco released an abhorred third album (that I didn’t actually find that bad) and the members of Rise Against might as well have expressed the same ennui that Julian Casablancas did before releasing Endgame, which was clearly a middling time-placer. And now we have Angles, the new Strokes album that I had great skepticism for since its release was announced. From the frequent indifference to the album’s making that frontman Casablancas expressed in his promotional interviews to the justifications for its release by the band’s other members that basically amounted to, “People said we should make a new album, so we did,” Angles came off as obligatory before it even hit my hard drive. It sounded as commercially motivated as the most egregious boy bands and worse than the recent Pixies reunion tour in that The Strokes weren’t just going to play old songs but release albums for the sake of releasing albums. And it’s not like The Strokes have released ten albums up to this point. With just three fantastic albums behind them, the band isn’t even close to justifying defaulting to Cruise Control; I don’t care how many years have passed since First Impressions of Earth.

The actual music of Angles does come off this way in that The Strokes seem incredibly concerned with covering all the sounds that they have explored in their career in an attempt to please fans of them all. The jagged riffing of “Metabolism” recalls the raucous tracks on First Impressions of Earth, “Gratisfaction”’s jazzy swing sounds like a polished remix of an Is This It track, and, although I was never as keen on “Under Cover of Darkness” as others were, it is no doubt a throwback to the group circa Room On Fire to near comical proportions, Casablanca’s voice pushed laughably far back in the mix in an attempt to give it the “singing-through-a-phone” quality of the group’s first two albums.

Casablancas sounds particularly noncommittal. What made the man so interesting on Is This It was his blasé approach to singing, but within the context of the fact that the man recorded the vocal parts of Angles separately and sent them to the group as electronic files, Casablancas’s lyrics sound revealingly indicative of his attitude toward the album. The chorus of “Games” goes, “Living in an empty world,” and Casablancas concludes, “Everyone goes every damn place they like” on “Taken For A Fool.” “Everybody’s been singing the same song for ten years,” he sings on “Under Cover of Darkness,” as if to acknowledge and indirectly justify the middling quality of Angles. It’s pretty clear that Casablancas knows the album is the half-assed fleshing out of a romanticized era that has long since passed. His obvious apathy seems to beg the question, “The fuck did you expect?”

And, of course, the result of Angles’s blatant pandering isn’t something that every Strokes fan will like. People have their qualms with First Impressions of Earth, but few can deny that the album was the consistent sound of a group that was moving in a direction. Angles has no such reliability. The album is disjointed, cluttered with both attempts to resurrect the magic of Is This It and electronic jaunts like “You’re So Right” and “Games” that sound like slight improvements on Casablancas’s positively awful solo album, Phrazes of the Young. The best tracks of Angles are the ones that sound like what The Strokes would logically release after First Impressions. “Taken For A Fool” utilizes both computerized percussion and improved production to create a good song that doesn’t look back once. “Call Me Back” is the album’s “Ask Me Anything,” as it’s the most obvious respite, but, although I hated its analogous song on First Impressions, here it is my favorite track. The quiet refrain of ominous guitar and vocal harmonies sounds weird, but it’s interesting and unlike anything the group has done in the past. If Angles were the legitimate sound of an evolving band, I would not complain if it were a hint at a technique that the group would expand upon in future releases.

Angles is, by no means, a bad album, but let me put my opinion of it this way: If the delay of Albert Hammond Jr. working on new material is facilitated by this reunion and the release of more albums like Angles, then I don’t think the group’s reentry into the collective consciousness is particularly worth the time. Does Angles have redeemable qualities? Sure. But its lows are much more noticeable than its highs and one leaves the album with minimal lasting memory and that much less excitement to hear the news that the band’s already working on a follow-up. I figured that, after Oasis broke up, a band would fill that vacuum of established artists releasing career albums, but I never thought it would be The Strokes. The only difference, now, is that I like the sound that Oasis made slight tweaks to with each album they released. After ten years, it’s hard to tell whether The Strokes have figured out their own identity and relevance in a musical landscape that may just not need them anymore.

The Strokes - Angles: B

New York Dolls - Dancing Backward in High Heels: B

"You Don't Have To Cry"

New York Dolls and R.E.M. should tour together. Both groups have released albums this year that would be bearable, if the people leading them did not take it upon themselves to try to be as clever as possible, telling inane parables that nobody could or would ever want to understand. While David Johansen does not reach the comical lows that Michael Stipe entrenched himself in on R.E.M.’s Collapse Into Now, far too often on Dancing Backward in High Heels, the third reunion album New York Dolls have released, the man overreaches his tongue-and-cheek digs at nobility and sexuality into the realm of parody that other critics have described as similar to Johansen’s work as Buster Poindexter (“Feeling Hot Hot Hot.” Yeah, he was that guy). Except I wouldn’t say Johansen sounds like his late-80’s outlier. To me, he comes off as more of a Bender from Futurama-type character, one devoid of any sense of irony or scruples as to what you can or cannot safely put on a record. With little to anchor his wild ramblings, Johansen is on the wrong side of ridiculous when calling Mari Antoinette an “old baguette” on “Streetcake,” stealing the drums from “Lust For Life” on “Round and Round She Goes” and naming a song “Funky But Chic” (Think about it).

The good news is that Dancing is a lot more easy listening than Johansen would allow. The group sounds best when they tone their shtick down, recalling the playful sinfulness of their prime in “Talk To Me Baby” and forgivably ripping off the melody of “Temptation to Exist” from 2009’s ‘Cause I Sez So to make the album highlight “You Don’t Have To Cry.” While Dancing does not sully the image that the Dolls so well established with their first releases, they’re on the verge of turning their unique style into a caricature of itself, and it would be a shame to chalk up the aesthetic of one of the best punk bands of the 70’s as a fluke.

New York Dolls - Dancing Backward in High Heels: B