AMG review round-up, volume II

just a (hopefully) handy dumping ground/teaser sampler/link collection for the writing i've done at the wonderful all music guide. since 1) nobody who's interested would ever be able to track down my pieces otherwise, 2) it's a lot easier for me to access them this way, should i ever need to, and 3) just perhaps you'll take some interest in the insights and recommendations conveyed in this writing (if so, please do click through to read the full reviews!)

these are most of the artists and albums about which i wrote this january. the first installment (covering november and december) is here.

Sugababes: Three and Taller in More Ways reviews

"Sugababes' straightforwardly titled third release may have lacked a single quite as striking as "Freak Like Me," the tremendous electro-clash/mash-up cash-in smash from their breakthrough sophomore set Angels with Dirty Faces, but otherwise it improves on that album in many respects. Following the same essential template -- tuneful, R&B-inflected dance-pop with fresh-sounding but accessible productions, along with a healthy smattering of big droopy ballads -- with an expanded stylistic range...

[...] It may seem incongruous for such unabashed sentimentality and frankly conventional arrangements to coexist with electronic dance-pop so thoroughly modern in sound and sensibility -- and indeed it's easy to imagine listeners attracted by one aspect of Sugababes' pop-craft being turned off by the other. But ultimately they are two sides of a coin -- timeless if sudsy ballads and flashy novelty dance tunes -- both very much in keeping with the great interpretive pop tradition, of which Sugababes are among our most consummate and sophisticated modern exponents."

Linda Sundblad: bio and Oh My God review

"Oh My God sounds like a bit of a throwaway as an album title, but it works perfectly to reflect the handful of recurring lyrical topics (religion, sexuality, and teenagerhood) and to allude to the '80s influence that pervades the album -- the most obvious touchstones being early Madonna and Cyndi Lauper, both of whom Sundblad bears a substantial resemblance to vocally as well as visually. "We're the babies/Born in the '80s," she sings in "Pretty Rebels" -- Sundblad was born in 1981, which means she was eight when Like a Prayer was released, and 26 at the time of this recording. Even if the generational math doesn't quite add up, there's a compelling sense of nostalgic juvenilia that informs both the music and lyrics, most of which deal with love and relationships. It's standard pop subject matter, of course, but Sundblad approaches it with a uniquely teenaged sensibility, alternating between enthusiasm and desperation..."

Aberfeldy: Do Whatever Turns You On review

"In 2007 they landed the distinctly '00s-style promotional coup of having one of their songs (the infectious "Summer's Gone") featured in a widely seen commercial (in keeping with a time-honored rock & roll tradition, it was an ad for Coke), but even as like-minded Europeans such as Peter Bjorn and John and I'm from Barcelona were racking up stateside accolades, Aberfeldy's 2006 sophomore album still failed to see a U.S. release. And it's a crying shame, because Do Whatever Turns You On is, if anything, more immediate than its predecessor: it's bigger, bolder and shinier, without sacrificing a single ounce of charm -- a larger recording budget meant they weren't limited to a single microphone this time out, but it still sounds wonderfully intimate and welcoming -- and most crucially, without losing their penchant for endlessly hummable indie pop melodies."

Sally Shapiro: bio and Disco Romance review

"The cover photo for the North American edition of Sally Shapiro's Disco Romance depicts the Swedish singer in winter, her cheeks rosy, her blond hair and eyebrows dusted with snowflakes, smiling to herself in spite of the chill. It's a fitting image for this undeniably wintry album, conjuring not just the glacial sweep and frosty twinkle of producer Johan Agebjörn's synthesizer fantasias, but also the faint but glowing presence in the heart of the blizzard: Shapiro's soft, fragile voice, which is so thin and devoid of inflection that it ought to be impenetrably icy, but is somehow instead as warm and enticing as a cozy fire in the dead of February. A closer examination of that cover image reveals that what look like snowflakes are in fact tiny stars, computer-generated pentagrams (though they almost look hand-drawn) that could be read as a subtle reminder that the intimacy and poignant sincerity of these songs came about, in a sense, only through layers of artifice."

R. Kelly: Double Up review

"Yes, Kelly's familiar, almost cartoonishly overstated brand of sex-obsessed misogyny is as rampant here as his increasingly eccentric humor -- more so than ever, on both counts. So if you're not of a disposition to stomach the 40-year-old (whose still-pending child pornography trial was set to commence several months after the album's release, before being delayed yet again) boasting about his plot to seduce a pair of "freaky" first cousins for a ménage à trois (in the title track), or warning listeners to steer their girlfriends clear of his restlessly prowling libido (in "Flirt": "the moral of this story is 'cuff your chick'"), this could be a painfully long and humorless listen, or worse. But cut the man a little slack, at least on record -- or allow him the indulgence of his already comically blatant perversity (at least he doesn't present himself as someone who expects to be taken very seriously) and it's either an absurd explosion of standard R&B tropes (nightclub bangers, baby-makin' slow jams, overwrought breakup songs) or simply a treasure trove of questionable-taste comedy gold."

Lucky Soul: bio and The Great Unwanted review

"Pitched somewhere in between the Pipettes' campy, winking co-optation of 1960s girl group pop and soul and Camera Obscura's more understated, less mannered evocation of same, Greenwich sextet Lucky Soul's debut album represents an exemplary model for retro revivalism in the context of modern indie pop. It hardly shies away from its readily apparent stylistic touchstones -- the timeless, immaculate popcraft of Phil Spector and Motown; the Anglified sophistication of Dusty Springfield and Sandie Shaw -- but neither is it slavishly imitative. Crucially, the style never overwhelms the substance, which is to say that as extravagant as the lush, period-appropriate orchestrations get -- and they're pretty extravagant, with all the horns, handclaps, strings, and auxiliary percussion (bongos, tambourines, cowbells, castanets) one could hope for -- it's all in the service of some top-notch songwriting."

Candie Payne: I Wish I Could Have Loved You More review

"In a year when everything 1960s was hip again -- at least when it came to female-fronted semi-indie pop music -- from Amy Winehouse's stylized, Motown-appropriating crossover R&B to Lucky Soul and the Pipettes' peppy girl group revivalism to Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings' pedigreed retro soul, Liverpudlian singer Candie Payne emerged with a debut album that drew from an under-plundered side of that golden decade's pop landscape: the arch sophistication of British soulsters Dusty Springfield and Petula Clark and the cinematic decadence of Nancy Sinatra and Shirley Bassey. [...] Curiously, just as the scrupulously clean production approach nevertheless yields a beguilingly murky atmosphere, the profusion of '60s signifiers -- never obtrusive but always apparent -- winds up sounding unexpectedly modern, a potent cocktail of classic sounds with contemporary indie rock and electronica flourishes: the strangely familiar and the familiar made strange. For the most part, the songs themselves, while pleasant enough, don't quite hold up to the intriguing potential of their constituents, making this something of a victory of style over substance; an album that still sounds great with repeated listens, but doesn't necessarily grow much deeper."

Billie the Vision and the Dancers: bio and Where the Ocean Meets My Hand review

"Yes, the cutesy index is predictably high -- it's not irretrievably cloying (it doesn't quite reach I'm from Barcelona levels, for instance), but it's certainly pervasive enough to dissuade most anyone with a weak stomach for twee (you know who you are). Unless they're particularly good at ignoring lyrics: much of the cutesiness comes through in lead singer/songwriter Lars Lindquist's [(not Billie, though he is unmistakably a vision: a statuesque transvestite with blue eyes and shocking, fiery red-gold hair)] story-songs, most of which revolve around real or imagined encounters with fellow musicians -- the Pipettes, Erlend Øye, the Ark's Ola Salo, Jeff Buckley -- or possibly invented characters named Pablo and Lilly."

Nôze: bio and How to Dance review

"Parisian techno knuckleheads Nôze serve up a barrage of outlandish but propulsive dancefloor workouts on their second long-player.... How to Dance...offers at best a somewhat unconventional outlook on its titular concern. Its herky-jerky, mechanistic grooves -- slightly demented strains of what might broadly be termed minimal electro and microhouse, though they seem unlikely to concern themselves with subgenre niceties -- are just nervously funky enough for the floor, but they're unlikely to assuage the tentative.

...the gruff, muppet-like sprechtstimme of "Tulip Schnaps" and "Kitchen" is in a class unto itself, though in the latter case the goofy kitchen-seduction narrative and inane refrain are merely the jumping-off point for some psychotic overdriven synth and inside-the-piano mayhem."

The Ark: We Are The Ark, In Lust We Trust, State of the Ark, Prayer for the Weekend and Racing with the Rabbits reviews

"Like Scissor Sisters and the Darkness (both of whom the Ark predated by several years), they took considerable inspiration from the theatricality of '70s glam rock, especially in terms of visual styling, but musically too, with their gleaming guitar leads, frequent falsetto vocals, and liberal use of choral and orchestral accompaniment. [...] Sure, it all smacks of the ridiculous, and usually more than faintly. Salo acknowledges as much in "It Takes a Fool": "If you think I'm corny then it will not make me sorry; it's your right to laugh at me." In a sense, the Ark's willingness (and ability) to embrace that silliness, without sacrificing either their consummate musical artistry or their profoundly personal content -- their insistence on having it both ways -- is what makes their work so daring and so effective."

"Lyrically, In Lust We Trust moves beyond We Are the Ark's somewhat introspective focus on self-exploration and assertiveness for a more outward-looking but no less personal approach that effectively amounts to -- as the title suggests -- a political manifesto on sexual and romantic themes. As with Canada's similarly oriented Hidden Cameras (it's no coincidence both groups were featured on the soundtrack to John Cameron Mitchell's polysexual, controversy-mongering Shortbus), the sexual-personal is the socio-political for these guys, and even if they're not quite as graphic about it, they're certainly just as enthusiastic. Sometimes it's topical: "Father of a Son" is doubtless the highest-charting -- and most ebulliently self-vindicating -- song ever written about homosexual adoption rights, and if the gorgeous, unabashedly romantic "Disease" is truly not about AIDS (as Ola Salo, the band's openly bisexual lead singer and songwriter, has claimed), it sure sounds like it. [...] But as the spirited summing-up of the album's concluding track reminds us, even these commonplace romantic pursuits can take on a political significance: "The Most Radical Thing to Do," Salo croons, "is to love someone who loves you." If that's a sentiment you can get behind, and as long as you're amenable to hyper-meticulous, hyper-melodic post-ironic pomp-pop of a somewhat histrionic persuasion, it would be practically treasonous not to fall for this album."

"State of the Ark is a tour de force from start to finish, and one of the most perfectly-crafted pop or rock albums, Swedish or otherwise, to appear in the 2000s."

[also: "one of the finest pop albums of 2004, 2005, or 2006 -- depending on where you live and how closely you follow glitzy, chart-topping Scandinavian dance-rock"]

springles!

[eta:]

hey, let's talk about some music, shall we?

there may still be some color coordination issues to work out, but i've finally got my little podplayer set up, and i even made it so it doesn't start automatically when you get to the site now. nice of me no? the innaugural playlist (of this iteration) features some of my favorite singles and songles of the spring/year so far, mostly in the pop realm(s)... 2007: first quarter favorites (except it's really the first third at this point, but who's counting.) nothing tooo over the heads of the sorta folks who hang around the stylus singles jukebox and the iltp (toiletpaper i mean teenpop) thread, where i heard of most of these in the first place. speaking of the styjuke, i was just invited to join the crew there, so bully for that. let's call this practice.

lil mama - "lip gloss"
this is something like my single of the year so far - at least i can't think of anything in particular that has dominated me more so far in '07 (i figure "give it to me" is disqualified for having been on my year-end mix, even though only now is it getting the response it deserves), so until something better comes along... anyway it's pretty ridiculous that i haven't gotten sick of this considering how mindblowingly minimal the beat is (literally the same two elements, in the same two bar pattern, looped for the whole thing.) (extra) credit due, then, to lil mama, and her kinetic frenetic sing-song braggodocio, skipping deftly around and atop that beat and keeping the whole thing fresher than fresh. the lyrics, of course, are absolutely key - but i feel like they speak for themselves at least as well as they've already been written about elsewhere. (basically, the important thing is that she really is singing (er, rapping, whatever) about lip gloss; it's not a metaphor, or a come-on. srsly.)

i can't figure out whether or not this is (becoming?) an actual hit - i did hear it blasting out of several car windows (in succession; all tuned to the same station) in west philly this weekend, so that's a good sign. fingers crossed we get to see how well it withstands legitimate (rather than simulated) overexposure.

stephanie mcintosh - "so do i say sorry first"
took a little while to figure out what kind of song this is. at first i thought it was country, for some reason (the generic specificity of the lyrics? actually, save perhaps for some of the production touches late in the song, i still think it could pass.) but, no, duh, it's a rock song - a rawk song, even - although it has clean girly vox so we're not supposed to call it that.

all i know about ms. mcintosh is that she's an australian soap star. which bodes well in my experience. (hm, i'd never really thought about "australian pop" as an entity before.) but this sounds less like that other aussie soap star (who records in the uk anyway), more like those aussie rockers who, oh yeah, recorded my favorite song of 2006 (er, in sweden.) it's maybe even harder (rawer) than the v's - especially the opening moments, though the chorus gets a little bit mannered. certainly its anger and intensity seems to come from a more genuine, recognizable place - tempered as they are by a certain playfulness. this and "4ever" both employ irony to some extent, but there it was winking and here it's practically wincing.

some of the lyrics are frustratingly wonky ("i can't hear words when you scream like you do"?), but the conceit is original and works, especially the resounding chorus (though i always want to sing "or do i say sorry first," which i think makes more sense - like she's pretending to try to remember the sequence of events she and her lover have "rehearsed.")

linda sundblad - "lose you"
just gorgeous. this is one of those lush, creamy electroacoustic tracks that just seems to glide by effortlessly. like goldfrapp's "black cherry" or air's "universal travel" - but beatier - something like "heartbeat" i suppose (and its sister-songs, "time after time" and "heartbeat." also "with every heartbeat" - did i ever think to group that in with those?)

the lines about heaven also make me think of rachel stevens' "i will be there," which also fits in that swoony, mellow but danceable category. [that line also resonates nicely with the religious subject matter that linda's sort of made her calling card (q.v. "oh father"), but does it actually make any sense? why exactly does losing somebody make her think she's in heaven?]

wait a sec, attending more closely to the lyrics ("pounding heart on a saturday night"?), this song is really reminiscent of "heartbeat." it's like the same song in an alternate universe: with basically the scenario (well, it's sat instead of fri) but with a completely opposite emotional perspective on it, so that it ends up heartbreaking rather than euphoric.

i need to give it some more spins for a full assessment, but this album could be the next anniemal - (it's at least as good; more varied, tho less electro) - except of course it won't be. why did the hipsters decide to stop caring about scando-actual-pop anymore? and what happened to annie, annieway?

natasha bedingfield - "i want to have your babies"
they're all like "omg, she actually means it" - but to me the crazy thing is not necessarily that she's singing about wanting to have "random men's babies," as somebody said on iltp - i don't think anything in the lyrics suggests that random men or even multiple men are implicated - they must have got that from the video. granted, if it'd really scare the guy that much, he probably doesn't know her very well.

aside from the initial greatness of the whole premise (which is admittedly great), what really makes this awesome is how cleverly the song is structured, so that it actually enacts the very (flimsy) division between her interior thoughts and her exterior speech that she's describing - and that division gets transgressed (as she bursts uncontrollably from the "mm-mm-mm" bit into the chorus) in the process of describing it ("whoops! did i say it out loud?) that's...so cool. plus there are a lot of great individual lines. i especially love the scary middle-eight, wherein tashbed momentarily breaks into soul diva mode. and the music is really fun and silly and springy. this is an excellent springtime song, in case you didn't notice.

i still think she should say "serious like rabies" though.

hilary duff - "dreamer"
i know, enough with the blondes already, right? hils isn't blonde on the cover of her new record, actually - and these people never seem to keep their hair the same color for two seconds anyway, so i can't really keep track. whatever.

i'm gonna call it and say dignity is the paris of 2007 - not that it's as good, or as favorite, though it comes within spitting distance of dance-pop full-length gold. (a slight resequencing and a couple of judicious omissions - 14's too long anyway - might do the trick.) it's enough of a reinvention that it feels like a debut. and i've already got a possibly irrational soft spot for it that's going to necessitate a good deal of 'splaining. plus it seems to take many of its cues from ms. hilton's dubious success (that's h-duff's best parisian huskifying at the opening of this 'podcast) - and she's followed her to #1 on the dance charts, so i guess it works.

"dreamer" is not a single (nor is "danger" or "never stop," which is currently in rotation on mymyspage) but it's the one that's been in my head the most recently (actually now "between you and me" is overtaking it.) and it is officially awesome, even if the chorus isn't nearly as good as the verses (in terms of melody, arrangement and lyrics.) the "bum bum bum" bit, in particular, is brilliantly multivalent, suggesting carefree insouciance, bored annoyance, and the workaday routine (all resonant with the lyrics) while also calling out the object of the song as a bum bum bum himself. it may be snide ("i go to bed and i wake up/isn't that interesting?") but it's also possibly the mildest, most polite kiss-of to a stalker ever penned. instead of being a creepy violent weirdo, he's simply a "dreamer" who just doesn't happen to believe the same dreams as hilary does. (compare this to the venemous title track, directed at paris and her ilk - well, lindsay specifically - and remember, hilary actually had a creepy violent stalker.)

aberfeldy - (do) whatever turns you on
here you go, these guys aren't blonde. they don't have a US record contract either. even superfan tim sendra seems to have forgotten about them. boo hoo.

well this might not be a single either (i guess that's "hypnotised," which is good too - it lacks the poppy synth hooks, but has a great bit where the back-up singers say "shut up!") but it's the (almost?) title track of their latest album, which came out in the uk last year, and as far as the internet can tell doesn't seem to be coming out in the states... (even though they've recently hit the big time here.) i really hope it does though, cuz from what i've heard it's just as lovely as their lovely lovely lovely debut. erm. this song is self-explanatory, bouncy keyboard pop, with a message! i don't need to write about it - just listen for yrself and if you donnae like it phbbbbt! ok.

fyi: according to their website, aberfeldy is named after the scottish town of the same name, aberfeldy.

tracey thorn - raise the roof
does anybody actually say "raise the roof" anymore? it makes me think of early high school, specifically jeremy cooney. and that makes me think of julia stiles, and "change the world" by eric clapton and babyface, and lauryn hill (c. the score, not miseducation), and that one day we hung out at the amusement park with karen and merre. anybody else not feeling me?

ok, this one's also not a single (that's it's all true, which sounds exactly like a tracey thorn single should); it's perfectly situated as the last track on a beautiful album. but i wanted to share it cuz it's the one that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.

which tracey has a way of doing better than almost anyone... i'm so glad this album is out; even if it's hard to imagine it bettering walking wounded or "protection"...it comes darn close. both lyrically and musically - one wonders why she and ben watt didn't work together on this, but she's found some suitable substitutes for her husband. (ewan pearson is a surprisingly sympathetic collaborator - his production work here is subtler than what i've heard from him before. and it's sweet that she's working with darshan jesrani, even if it's just one track.) "grand canyon" and "falling off a log" are also standouts, as is the arthur russell cover.

you know, i feel like people think that this is music for boring adults...and yeah, it is sophisticated and "mature," whatever that means...but tracey's no more of a has-been than madonna has been - their careers are just as old - and she's got more indie electro cred, and i don't see why she shouldn't be just as revered and celebrated. she's not much of a go-getter, i suppose. sigh; i just think it's a shame that walking wounded isn't more widely acknowledged for the perfect album that it is... i'll stop now.