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

Beady Eye - Different Gear, Still Speeding: B+

"The Beat Goes On"

Somewhere along the line, I significantly lowered my standards for Oasis. I’ve never disliked an album they’ve released, and I still listen to all the work they’ve released in the past fourteen years with equal measure. I thought that Dig Out Your Soul was pretty good with one astounding track in “Falling Down,” Don’t Believe the Truth was excellent and Heathen Chemistry was a legitimate classic, one of my favorite albums of the 2000’s. I’m the kind of person that will like anything that Oasis puts out, because their sound makes me happy, and it takes a lot to phase that complacency out of me. I say this about Oasis albums, because Different Gear, Still Speeding, the debut album from former Oasis member Liam Gallagher’s new band, Beady Eye, might as well be an Oasis album. The only aspect of it that is unlike something the group would have released after Dig Out Your Soul is the absence of Noel Gallagher’s voice, which was unique enough to temper the group from full-on Beatles worship.

Other than that, though, there’s not much else to say about the album. Half its title is true, because, although Liam maintains the consistency of Oasis’s more pedestrian material, it’s hardly any different than what would have resulted if Noel had just left Oasis instead of disbanding the group. Fans of Liam’s mainstay will be satisfied. Those who particularly enjoyed Noel’s vocal contributions may find his absence and Liam’s at times questionable lyrics (“I get the call / You get hung up / I’m standing tall / We’re fucking tough”) grating, but will ultimately be thankful that the album isn’t nearly as bad as Oasis baiters have made it out to be.

Beady Eye - Different Gear, Still Speeding: B+

Britney Spears - Femme Fatale: D

"How I Roll"

I know, I know, too easy right? True, Mrs. Spears has accrued quite a bit of derision from music fans over the years, but, when you consider that she’s been in a public spotlight that Kanye could only dream of for more than a decade now, it’s a surprise that Britney hasn’t been in more controversies in the past couple years since her “return,” which has been going on for almost five years. Perhaps it’s a good sign that Britney’s declined from the public eye, preferring instead to release chart-topping jams and touring after them every couple years before continuing her life as a mother, but any trace of humility that may be derived from that description is unequivocally demolished on her newest album, Femme Fatale. It is clear that people loosening up their obsession with Britney has not given way to artistic freedom, but a laziness of epic proportions.

It’s a bit of a specious point to solely characterize Femme Fatale, but there is something to be said about the fact that the album has twenty-six writing credits, and not one of them is Britney Spears. Pop extraordinaire Dr. Luke and Canadian producer Billboard helm the project, the latter famous for writing “Since U Been Gone” and most of the pop songs you enjoyed last decade and the former a co-producer on the third installment of Robyn’s Body Talk series. The rest of the credits go to people who have worked with pop luminaries like Kylie Minogue and Robyn and four out of the five people who wrote “Dynamite” (the fifth one is Taio Cruz). While these people have worked on some pretty excellent recent pop releases, Femme Fatale just ends up sounding like a shameless rehash of Kylie, Robyn and “Dynamite.” “Hold It Against Me” and “I Wanna Go” are blatant in their copping of Taio Cruz’s flagship track and “Big Fat Bass” and “Trouble For Me” sound like tracks that Kylie would (deservedly) reject for Aphrodite. The only reason “How I Roll” is the solitary saving grace of Femme Fatale is because it sounds like a decent Body Talk B-side (How convenient that it’s the only song on the album written by Bloodshy & Avant, the Swedish duo who wrote “Toxic”). To Ke$ha’s credit, (Never thought I’d ever write those three words), her co-written “Till the World Ends” doesn’t sound like one of her own songs, but it sounds a Hell of a lot like “Dynamite” and is just as boring and generic as anything else on Femme Fatale.

You may have noticed that I have not referred to Britney Spears as an actual musician by this point. Well, this is because, while in the past, Spears has at least emoted in her songs (“Toxic”, “I’m Not A Girl, Not Yet A Woman”), Femme Fatale features a voice so monotonous and synthetic, it’s debatable whether Britney showed up to the studio at all. Her voice is manipulated into such an artificial coo that it could be the vocal work of Colin Firth’s King George VI in The King’s Speech for all we know (heyoo!). Femme Fatale’s only two interesting vocal performances are that of the male vocalist in “How I Roll” (Which is admittedly intriguing) and Sabi, who has a guest verse on “(Drop Dead) Beautiful,” (“I don’t need your money / I just want your D.” Fucking poetry). Will.i.am is also on this thing, but he doesn’t view himself as a human at this point, so why should I?

Ultimately, I leave Femme Fatale with the same feeling I have when I learn about the in-depth workings of the movie industry: appalled and depressed about how many hands can mess with a project to make it far more disjointed and formless than anything the original makers could have intended. Do I think that Britney Spears is incapable of releasing (Not writing, don’t get ahead of yourself) a good song? Hey, anything’s possible. But I came into Femme Fatale expecting something processed and oversexed, and even I was surprised to find how uninspired the music industry can be. Remember when Britney was a trendsetter? Times change, I guess.

Britney Spears - Femme Fatale: D

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong: B

"Belong"

My opinion of Belong can best be exemplified by my thought process when faced with the pause before the third chorus of “Heart in Your Heartbreak:”

“Ugh, I know exactly how this is gonna go. They’re just going to pause for a second to give a little bit of silent tension before they go back into the chorus of the song. I’m pretty sure I can guess exactly what they’ll do, too. The singer will go “She was the” and the drummer will hit the toms and snare three times before the rest of the band comes into the mix on “Heartbreak” and go through the exact same chorus that they’d been playing up to this point. Wait, the chorus hasn’t come in yet? Well I guess I—oh, no, there it is. That was a slightly longer than normal pause, though.”

While none of Belong is unpleasant, the album comes off as derivative and unoriginal far too often. The band is decent at writing pop songs, but rarely do they stick and the barely-there vocals of Kip Berman in addition to his tendency for lyrics of cheese-tastic John Hughes worship (“Everyone is gentle and gone / But everyone’s just everyone”) make it even harder to pay attention. I know a lot of people got a kick out of this group’s debut, but I don’t think anyone’s going to remember Belong any more than the majority of boring indie pop we are forced to sift through. There are some sporadic moments of greatness (the title track’s chord progression mostly), but I don’t think even the pseudo-prestige The Pains of Pure of Heart have gained will protect Belong from sinking out of the collective consciousness in a matter of months.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart - Belong: B

Rise Against - Endgame: B-

"Help Is On the Way"

For better or worse, Rise Against have always evolved as a band with every album they’ve released. Revolutions Per Minute focused the feral hardcore punk of the group’s debut, The Unraveling, into one of the 2000’s first punk classics. Siren Song of the Counterculture was an uneven venture into the realm of mainstream punk. The Sufferer & The Witness was the group’s magnum opus, perfectly balancing the hardcore tendencies of their first albums with their knack for throat-shredding choruses that they had developed somewhat on Siren Song. Appeal to Reason was an expansion of that sound, borrowing more of the visceral fear from Revolutions into a rousing clarion call that got surprisingly close to matching the quality of Sufferer. Endgame, Rise Against’s first album in three years, does not feature any evolution of the group’s sound. Instead, it is a retread of the elements of Appeal to Reason put into songs that aren’t nearly as affecting or catchy. Instead of rousing, the group comes off as burnt out and tired, the first time where I can bring up the term, “lazy” for anything the group has ever released.

The band’s lethargy is made apparent from Endgame’s choruses to frontman Tim McIlrath’s vocal performance. Throughout the album, McIlrath attempts to replicate the haphazard wail that made Appeal to Reason so special, but, for the first time, he sounds strained and exhausted, as if he hadn’t bothered to change his vocal style as he had done with his group’s last five albums, which turns out to be a very unfortunate decision. His fatigue comes off in his lyrics as well. “Storm the gates / Raise the flags / It’s just the same old story,” he sings in “A Gentleman’s Coup,” as if he’s lost faith in the rebelliousness that defined the group on songs like “Re-Education (Through Labor)” and “Prayer of the Refuge.” In “This Is Letting Go,” he all but admits defeat, spelling out the formula for the band’s sound by singing, “This is the part where the needle skips and the chorus plays like a sink that drips,” which only brings up images of meaningless repetition that can be extrapolated to just about every song on Endgame. “Once upon a time I could take anything,” he sighs on the same track, succumbing to the disappointments that have become a requisite of the state of things in recent years.

Elsewhere, Endgame’s sonic arrangements sound like their treading the water that Appeal to Reason left for them. The bass-driven verses of “Make It Stop (September’s Children)” sound like ripoffs of “Long Forgotten Sons” and the framework of “Disparity By Design,” right down to the guitar solo that opens the verses is a blatant bite of “Kotov Syndrome.” The band’s boredom in their craft is also apparent in the random experiments they attempt sporadically in Endgame. McIlrath’s voice sounds out of place over the palm-muted hard rock attempt, “Midnight Hands,” a song much more suited for Dark Horse-era Nickelback than anything hard-edged Rise Against has written in the past. You can tell a band is aimless when they write a hollow bluesy waltz (AFI, Muse), and “Broken Mirrors” is just that track. And whoever thought that putting a children’s choir over “Boulevard of Broken Dreams” guitars was a good idea liked Siren Song of the Counter Culture WAY too much.

Overall, Endgame comes off more obligatory than anything else, a collection of Appeal to Reason never-were’s that the band thought they should record after touring under their last album for so long. With a few exceptions, the album isn’t terribly bad, but the lack of originality in all its songs does not bode well for what the group’s going to come out with in the new decade. If Rise Against they can just tack on some “HEY!”’s to some duds and make an anthem, they are sorely mistaken, and Endgame proves pretty well that you just can’t half-ass post-recessional teenage angst.

Rise Against - Endgame: B-

Travis Barker - Give the Drummer Some: B

"Let's Go (feat. Yelawolf, Twista, Busta Rhymes & Lil Jon)"

Give the Drummer Some, the debut album by Blink-182 drummer, Travis Barker, has a lot of surprises, one of which is not the fact that Blink-182 drummer, Travis Barker, has made a hip-hop album. The guy’s been knocking elbows with rap types since 2007, when he made a “rock” remix of Flo Rida’s “Low” and has been expanding his contact network ever since with more remixes of increasingly higher profile artists, his tour with the late DJ AM and his performance on Lil Wayne’s 2010 shit sandwich, The Rebirth. With the Blink-182 tour completed and there being a lull until their reunion album comes out, Give the Drummer Some was the logical extent to which Barker was going to take all the connections he’d made in order to pass the time.

What’s most surprising about the album is that most of it is not a Rebirth re-hash. Songs like “Beat Goes On” and the opener, “Can a Drummer Get Some” (which actually features Lil’ Wayne), are laughable genre-hybrids, but a lot of the album leans toward traditional hip hop, Barker often ceding airtime from his live drums to artificial beats that are not just accompanied with synthesized guitars playing four-note riffs. “If You Want To” pops with pocket brass and live drums, “Cool Head” broods on an ominous bassline and “Devil’s Got a Hold” is such pitch-perfect late-90’s/early-00’s grit, it starves for an Eminem verse.

What’s also surprising about Give the Drummer Some is how very extensive Barker’s network of friends is and how good he is at building a beat around them that suits their personalities. The album’s most surprising cameos are Lupe Fiasco on “If You Want To” and RZA and Raekwon on “Carry It,” but Barker doesn’t attempt to force either to rap over the faux-rock that made the guy famous in this field. In fact, the beat of “If You Want To” sounds more like traditional Lupe Fiasco than the guy’s latest album, Lasers. The beat of “Cool Head” fits Kid Cudi’s drawl excellently, even if the guy’s actual verses are just as face-palm worthy as anything off The Legend of Mr. Rager (“So menstrual psychology / Tamponic” Are you fucking kidding me?). “Let’s Go” has the why-hasn’t-this-happened-before appeal of having fast-talkers Busta Rhymes and Twista in the same song. Yelawolf’s the newest in this lineage, and his verse is really good, adhering to the straightforward flow he implemented on his debut with no cringeworthy lines to be heard.

Give the Drummer Some is not without its fair share of messes, Ludacris’s irrelevance-confirming verse in “Knockin’” and Tim Armstrong’s painfully awkward hook in “Saturday Night” coming immediately to mind. Overall, the performances of all the artists ranges from adequate to pretty good, and it’s a pleasant surprise to say that this is the best thing to come out of the Barker cannon in nearly a decade (And yes I’m counting Meet the Barkers. Remember that shit?) While not as good as most of the Blink-182 discography, Give the Drummer Some is a solid release with some legitimately good highlights. If anything, it’s a testament to the versatility of a member of one of the most wrongly castigated artists of the ‘90’s and a justification for all the shameful diversions Barker’s gone on in the past.

Travis Barker - Give the Drummer Some: B

Egyptrixx - Bible Eyes: B+

"Recital (A Version)"

Bible Eyes is an album that’s slow to start. Not that the proper debut from this Toronto dubstep artist doesn’t immediately establish the guy’s lurching style within the album’s first track, but the first couple songs of Bible Eyes do not leave particularly strong first impressions. Bible Eyes is one of the few albums that I can say radically improves as it progresses.

“Start From the Beginning” and the title track establish Egyptrixx’s style, but exhibit them in a way that exposes their flaws. “Start From the Beginning,” while bolstered from interesting-sounding cymbals and a booming bass, becomes old very quickly, as Egyptrixx (real name: David Patsutka) finds solace in repetition and provides it with very little variation, making the track feel a lot longer than three minutes. “Bible Eyes” is more promising, beginning with a traditional dancefloor-ready thump, but what makes it unique is what also brings it down in quality. Within a minute, a dissonant synth line fades in and increases in volume to a blare as it progresses. Unfortunately, from that point on, the song is almost all repetition, Egyptrixx sticking to that line that starts out intriguing, but ends up downright annoying. At six minutes, it’s a hulking mass of discord, and it could very well justify taking oneself out of the album, entirely.

But it’s surprising how well Egyptrixx recovers from this point on. “Chrysalis Records” deservedly flaunts its presence of verses and choruses that have proven difficult with other electronic artists. While not necessarily a must in those terms, a competent dabbling into song writing can be an indication of the versatility of the musician. “Chrysalis” mixes the traditional modes of pop with the less flexible dubstep well while incorporating a singing voice, creating a product reminiscent of the songs with vocals on Guido’s dubstep debut, Anidea. It is clear at this point that Egyptrixx possesses a unique bag of tricks, but needs a little more practice arranging them into a palatable product.

And from there, the record only gets better. Egyptrixx incorporates his distinct cacophonous synths on “Naples,” but softens them with reverb so that they are less grating and are more appropriate for the rest of the song’s more danceable context. “Rook’s Theme” and “Recital (A Version)” are bona fide ragers, the former led by a warped pan flute melody and the latter a waifish vocalist away from being the best song School of Seven Bells never wrote. While both utilize repetition (“Recital (A Version)” is over seven minutes long), they’re both based around damn good foundations, reaching a pleasant equilibrium in which the beat could go on forever and party people would never mind it.

The second half of Bible Eyes leans towards the ruminative. “Fugi Club” and “Recital (B Version)” both feature off-kilter vocals (I keep imagining the voice in the former being Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon) and “Liberation Front” and “Barely” explore more of Egytrixx’s disjointed melodies, but never so far off as to become deleterious, as in the case of the title track. Yes, it would appear that, as “Liberation Front” fades out after seven minutes of never getting boring to conclude Bible Eyes, Egyptrixx has more than made up for the buffoonery he observed in those first couple tracks.

The closest contemporary Egyptrixx has is probably the London dubstep duo, Mount Kimbie. However, while both do have a penchant for oblique samples (To go back to “Liberation Front,” much of its track time is spent revolving around what sounds like someone chopping and screwing an IED explosion), Bible Eyes is not merely dorm room funk, but an album that could actually make some people lose their shit on a dancefloor. While, again, that’s not exclusively criterion for good electronic music, do you think I’m not going to count that aspect of Bible Eyes in Egyptrixx’s favor? I’d be lying if I said I didn't.

Egyptrixx - Bible Eyes: B+

Couldawouldashoulda: March 2011

Hey guys. Here’s the first of a series of segments I want to do for Check Your Mode. When we see the lists of the top 20 or 50 albums of a given year, we may also see something called the “Honorable Mentions” section, a place to note albums that were great, but not quite great enough to make it to the final cut. Seeing that I had quite a few “couldawouldashoulda”’s in my greatest fifty albums list last year, (about fifty more to be exact), I decided to have a monthly showcase of five albums that just barely fell out of the running for being in my top fifty albums of the year. Of course, initially, the Couldawouldashoulda’s will not be particularly good, but, as we near the end of the year, my guess is you’ll see some pretty contended releases pop up in this section, of which, of course, there may be plenty of debate.

In No Particular Order…

Amplifier – The Octopus

Original Review Here

The sophomore release from this British prog rock group is nothing if not ambitious. At nearly two hours, The Octopus has a vague concept involving the eponymous cephalopod and houses songs that frequently exceed the 8-minute mark. However, its songs are not loaded with the superfluous genre experiments and masturbatory guitar solos that one has come to expect from albums like these. In fact, the songs of The Octopus are surprisingly straightforward and tempered. But, alas, a ten-minute piano ballad is still a ten-minute piano ballad, and it isn’t long before the album begins to seriously sag. On a track-by-track basis, The Octopus is bearable, but as a dense whole, it’s far too much waiting for very little payoff. While not quite on the same dreadful level of Judas Priest’s concept album, Nostradamus, The Octopus does very little favors in digesting an album that is both too long and too boring; one of the most potently disparaging combinations in music.

Wanda Jackson – The Party Ain’t Over

Original Review Here

Anyone expecting another Van Lear Rose was sorely disappointed. Hell, anyone expecting another Consolers of the Lonely was disappointed. Jack White’s 2011 musical clock-in was an unfortunate musical accommodation for a singer who, admittedly, did not have much of a strong voice to begin with. Amidst White’s trademark fuzz and a rather intrusive horn section, Wanda Jackson sounds uncomfortable throughout The Party Ain’t Over, awkwardly shuffling through the blues (“Thunder on the Mountain”), bosa nova (“Rum and Coca-Cola”) and Amy Whinehouse covers (“You Know I’m No Good”). This isn’t the worst thing that White’s put his name to (The Stripes’ tactless genre stretch, Get Behind Me Satan, is a tad worse), but it’s a genuine surprise to see someone as talented as he finding so many ways to tamper with an album that could have been pretty good despite its innate weaknesses.

Minks – By the Hedge

Original Review Here

As background music, it’s pretty innocuous, but when closely inspected… it’s still pretty innocuous. Which I guess is fine, but I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t have the time to listen to the kind of nebulous shoegaze that I could find in the records of far more talented bands. Sure nothing on By the Hedge is outright offensive and “Indian Ocean” is a very pretty instrumental, but I’m seeing the forest for the trees here and all I’m seeing are the sprouts of what could be passable shrubberies.

Rise Against – Endgame

Original Review Here

This is an unfortunate way to break this to all you Rise Against fans out there, because my review for this album has yet to be posted, but Endgame, the sixth album from Illinois punks Rise Against, is the band’s worst. The good news, though, is there is a reason for this, and it is for lack of trying. When Rise Against experiments, at least something good comes out of it (the good tracks from The Unraveling and Siren Song of the Counterculture), but Endgame finds the group treading some serious water, trying to scrap up the remnants of the near-perfect Appeal to Reason and coming up with something crass and uninspired. Rise Against sound rudderless on the album, something that I can imagine would be incumbent upon a band coming off two fantastic releases. I just hope the group can shape up for the new decade, because their type of firebrand punk rock is still a necessity in these increasingly trying times.

Social Distortion – Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes

Original Review Here

And speaking of underwhelming punk stalwarts, what was Social Distortion doing in the seven years since they released an album? By the sound of Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes, it was a steady diet of lollipops, rainbows and Teletubbies reruns, because Social Distortion sound downright peppy on their newest release. A choir? Optimism? Last time I checked, I was a lazy, smelly, unemployable loser with nothing to hope for but a pair of jeans and a beer when I’m twenty-one, not the fucking light of the Earth Mike Ness pretends to purport me to be. Although, overall, pretty decent, Hard Times and Nursery Rhymes is a startling turn for a group that laid such a large claim to making passive rebellion sound genuine.

Couldawouldashoulda: March 2011

Lupe Fiasco - Lasers: B+

"The Show Goes On"

On October 15^th, 2009, fans held a rally in front of Atlantic Records headquarters to spur the label to release Lupe Fiasco’s third album, whose release date had been pushed back for nearly two years. Surprisingly, Atlantic complied, resolving to release Lasers in early 2011. That news was a huge boon to Lupe Fiasco fans that were tired of waiting for his follow-up to 2007’s The Cool, and was a testament to the power of audiences to influence the often enigmatic policies of labels. However, when I heard this news, I was incredibly disheartened. The fact that Atlantic and, to a certain extent, Fiasco, had to have fans organize in their front yard in order to release Lasers signaled to me that, for one reason or another, either or both parties did not feel that the album was ready to be released to the public. So I approached Lasers with quite a bit of trepidation, seeing it as an album that either was not quite up to snuff for an artist who has proven himself to be one of rap’s formative geniuses through his first two albums or was just not the right sound he was comfortable with releasing.

Ostensibly, the delay of release for the album could be due to both. Lasers sounds nothing like a Lupe Fiasco album. It is loaded with modern hip-hop signifiers such as Euro-pop textures and Auto-tuned choruses. Its backdrops sound more like that of the next Taio Cruz album than the follow-up from a guy whose two best singles on his first album were about skateboarding and robots. The trite vocal manipulations and rinkydink synths in “I Don’t Wanna Care Right Now” sound like the hollow reggaeton Pit Bull would rap over, and the compressed guitars of “State Run Radio” approach Rebirth levels of clumsiness. Gone are the frequent Fiasco collaborator Matthew Santos and any reference to the supposed trilogy that Lasers was supposed to bookend. Lasers reeks of studio intervention (how the Hell else would Trey Songz appear on this thing?) and it sounds like the biggest outlier Fiasco could have released at this point in his career. With all this said, one can understand why the man and the label would be uncomfortable with releasing it.

However, if I were a musical ideologue, I could say the same for almost half the releases I’ve reviewed in the past year and dismiss them all. Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid” was a last-minute songwriting request from Vertigo to have another single and the reworking of “Love Reign O’er Me” to fit a single sounds better than the original version that appears on The Who’s Quadrophenia. Sometimes, the amoral habits of labels can result in something good, and Lasers, to a certain extent, is a reflection of this.

Although the scenery of Lasers is completely different from anything the man has released in the past, the Lupe who is conflicted on the state of both hip-hop and his worldview is still very much intact. Where, on past works like “Hurt Me Soul,” these conflicts would rage within a song, Lasers is more emotionally polarized from track to track, to almost a comical degree. “Words I Never Said” is the most vitriolic screed Fiasco has ever gone on, the man reeling off heavily pessimistic one-liners, one after another. Where Big Boi, another rapper whose most recent release was dogged by delay, opened his album with this bit of off-handed criticism, “Then who you voting for Republican or Democrat / Take no second doesn’t matter cuz that’s how they stole the last one,” Fiasco blows him out of the negativity water by opening his album by seething, “Limbaugh is a racist / Glenn Beck is a racist / Gaza Strip was getting bombed / Obama didn’t say shit / That’s why I ain’t votin’ for him / Next one either / I’m part of the problem / My problem is I’m peaceful.” Props to Lupe for having the gall to open the second track of his album with, “I really think the War on Terror is a bunch of bullshit.” It’s definitely is an attention grabber, even if the track, itself, comes off a little too preachy.

Elsewhere, Lupe is a lot more hopeful, as on “The Show Goes On,” (Yeah yeah the world is yours / I was once that little boy / Terrified of the world / Now I’m on that world tour”) but it isn’t long before he bogs down again in the next track, “Beautiful Lasers (2Ways),” wallowing in self-depreciation like Kid Cudi hijacked his lyric book. Fiasco has always been a great rapper, but I’ve always been more enamored by the beats on his albums, so I’m more likely to forgive him for not having as many memorable lines on Lasers than on The Cool or Food & Liquor.

Especially considering, (and here’s the part where I really piss off the Lupe Fiasco fans still reading), I think Lasers is a better album than The Cool. Where the highs of the latter far surpass that of Lasers, Fiasco’s newest isn’t bogged down by transitional filler to suit a storyline, every one of its tracks memorable and, at the very least, fun. “The Show Goes On” interpolates Modest Mouse’s “Float On” into a communal toast that Rihanna may have set a trend for with her “I’ll Drink to That.” “I Don’t Wanna Care Right Now” sounds like Taio Cruz, granted, but more like the shameless hands-in-air party fare of “Dynamite,” and “All Black Everything” is cute and clever in imagining a world where slavery never existed (“The Rat Pack was a cool group of black men / That inspired five white guys called The Jacksons”).

However, considering the tongue-lashing he has received from both critics and fans, it’s doubtful that Fiasco will attempt an album as blatantly commercial as Lasers ever again. However, keep in mind that the album is not the cacophony that many others have made it out to be. Lasers is an admirable attempt by Fiasco to move away from constantly repping the underground. If anything, it solidifies his talents as a rapper, as it shows that he can be smart and clever while pretending to be a genre-defying pop star, even if it’s just going to be for one album.

Lupe Fiasco - Lasers: B+

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath: 1972: B+

"In the Air: I, II and III"

Maybe I just don’t get it. All I’ve read about Ravedeath, 1972 indicates that it’s an album that is supposed to soundtrack a dystopian wasteland, fraught with despair and forgotten sounds. However, when I listen to Ravedeath, 1972, rarely do I hear anything particularly negative. I find the songs cool, I ruminate over the washes of ambience that Hecker crafts for this fifty-minute product, but barely do I perceive the arrangements to resemble cacophony. “No Drums,” true to its name, is docile and unassuming. The three “In the Fog” tracks are swashes of major chords played through undecipherable instruments. “Analog Paralysis 1978” ends with vague guitar finickry and slight pitter-patter and “Studio Suicide 1978” begins with what sounds like the New York Philharmonic warming up from an echo-y broom closet adjacent to the amphitheater. While these sounds are fascinating, rarely are they vicious. At worst, they are ominous, as in the “In the Air” series that concludes the album, but, even then, the last of them ends on a solitary piano that drifts off into the distance, signaling to me not disintegration but a hope for a better future. Like I’ve said before, Ravedeath 1972 and most ambient works are what you perceive them to be. The album’s great fodder for pondering your life, and, based on your own proclivities, Hecker’s songs can either affirm or disavow it. The album forebodes at times, but that does not mean it has to be depressing.

Tim Hecker - Ravedeath: 1972: B+