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All Articles for Rolling Stone Feed: Album Reviews
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Artist:
Disturbed
Review:
In June, these Chicago metalheads had the Number One album in
America. It's not hard to see why: With meticulously constructed
guitar skronk, serrated verses and cathartic refrains on cuts like
"Enough," the album has clear pop appeal in its own dour way.
Singer David Draiman says Indestructible is Disturbed's
darkest record yet — it was partly inspired by the band's
experiences performing for troops overseas — and he does his
best to back up the drama. Wailing like a leather- and...
Rating:
2 Stars
Artist:
Billy Joel
Review:
In 1977, Joel's fourth and best album replaced Simon &
Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water as Columbia
Records' all-time top-seller, establishing Joel as a titan of adult
contemporary America's answer to Elton John. The
Stranger also launched Joel's longterm collaboration with
producer Phil Ramone, who distilled the Piano Man's music to its
essence, a hook-packed blend of AM-radio pop-rock and Broadway
schmaltz. The hit single was the gooey "Just the Way You Are," but
there's impressive...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
David Banner
Review:
Much of David Banner's charm lies in his bulldozer flow, his
political awareness and his innovative production skills: His
xylophone-laden beat for Lil Wayne's "La La" was one of the best on
Tha Carter III. But on his fifth album, Banner battles
with his urge to bring standard-issue Dirty South chart-toppers and
cred-building hardness: The Greatest Story Ever Told is
long on brawling tracks like "9mm," which banks on overbearing
rhymes about gunplay. There are also pop-wise club jams like...
Rating:
2.5 Stars
Artist:
Journey
Review:
If a band sticks around long enough, it turns into a tribute band.
For years, Journey have slogged around the oldies circuit with a
rotating cast of singers trying to impersonate Steve Perry, who
belted out the group's Seventies and Eighties hits. But this
double-CD set, which also includes a live DVD, features the most
unlikely Perry sound-alike yet: Arnel Pineda, a 40-year-old
Filipino who spends an entire disc delivering note-for-note remakes
of classics like "Don't Stop Believin'." On the se...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Black Kids
Review:
It's true: Black Kids know how to get down. The interracial crew's
"I'm Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How to Dance With You" was last
year's hottest indie-rock tail-wagger — a campy mix of
pillow-fight synth-pop and B-52s giddiness. Rerecorded versions of
"Boyfriend" and other songs from the band's 2007 EP, Wizard of
Ahhhs, make up the best moments of their sugary debut LP
— which is a tad worrying. But with Brit-pop vet Bernard
Butler behind the decks, these Floridians still toss...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
Alkaline Trio
Review:
When My Chemical Romance struck platinum, Alkaline Trio might have
wondered, "Why not us?" The Chicago group has spent more than a
decade evolving from a Misfits-inspired hardcore act into craftsmen
of exquisite doom-pop. Having recently signed with a major label,
the Trio grab for the brass ring with Agony & Irony,
enlisting producer Josh Abraham (Linkin Park, Velvet Revolver) to
spin their big-hooked tales of funerals and heartbreak into
radio-friendly cluster bombs. That new sound fits them...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
The Offspring
Review:
If you only remember the Offspring as pop-punk jokesters —
SoCal boys who quip about clueless white guys — then the
band's rather serious eighth album may surprise you. Over
hardcore-punk grooves and a mess of guitar wreckage, the
multiplatinum quartet deliver their thesis: "Stuff is messed up."
That's the title of the ninth track — a smorgasbord of
carping on which frontman Dexter Holland disses the media, the Iraq
War, reality television and, uh, celebrity fundraisers. But th...
Rating:
2.5 Stars
Artist:
Girl Talk
Review:
Big ups to the fair-use principle of United States copyright law:
Pittsburgh DJ Gregg Gillis says that's what allows him to use
hundreds of unlicensed samples in his music. On 2006's
breakthrough, Night Ripper, Gillis proved he was a true
party-starter, effortlessly combining dozens of hip-hop, pop and
rock hits in every song. Feed the Animals ups the ante,
implementing more than 300 samples to make an utterly virtuosic
mash-up record. On "Like This," one 90-second sequence alone works
in...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
Three 6 Mafia
Review:
It's getting easier out there for a pimp. On their first album
since they added an Oscar statuette to the gold-plated goblets in
their trophy case, these Memphis rappers are in a triumphant mood.
"I showed 'em, I showed 'em," bellow DJ Paul and Juicy J in "I Told
'Em." On Last 2 Walk, every track is compelling, with
synthesized strings and the usual depth-sounder bass lines inflated
with reverb into miniature symphonies. Recently, MCs Crunchy Black
and Lord Infamous quit Three 6, leaving the...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
Coldplay
Review:
Coldplay's fourth release has been billed as their experimental
record, as well as their political record. And it is both,
relatively speaking. Viva la Vida or Death and All His
Friends opens with an anthemic riff played not on guitar but
on a Persian santur — a hammered dulcimer common to the
traditional music of Iraq and Iran. The album's lead single,
"Violet Hill," describes a scene in which "priests clutched onto
Bibles/Hollowed out to fit their rifles." Half the album's tracks
float...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
Martha Wainwright
Review:
Part of Martha Wainwright's charm lies in her Tourette's-like
impulse to overshare: Check out her 2005 ode to her
singer-songwriter dad, Loudon, lovingly titled "Bloody Mother
Fucking Asshole." Her folky second album mostly spares family
members, but old boyfriends aren't so lucky. On the dusty-road
rocker "Comin' Tonight," she seeks revenge on a musician/ex-lover:
"I could steal a melody. . . . 'Cause you would never sue me,
baby/It wouldn't look good." Wainwright's relentless self-analysis
and...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
Martha Wainwright
Review:
Part of Martha Wainwright's charm lies in her Tourette's-like
impulse to overshare: Check out her 2005 ode to her
singer-songwriter dad, Loudon, lovingly titled "Bloody Mother
Fucking Asshole." Her folky second album mostly spares family
members, but old boyfriends aren't so lucky. On the dusty-road
rocker "Comin' Tonight," she seeks revenge on a musician/ex-lover:
"I could steal a melody. . . . 'Cause you would never sue me,
baby/It wouldn't look good." Wainwright's relentless self-analysis
and...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
Adele
Review:
Like fellow crooners Amy Winehouse and Kate Nash, Adele Adkins
polished her skills at the Brit School in south London — as
good a finishing academy as American Idol. Her debut,
which topped the British charts earlier this year, lacks the
bad-girl brio of those grads, but it shows off a vocal instrument
that smokes the competition. Check out "Cold Shoulder," a lover's
blues, produced by Winehouse's secret weapon, Mark Ronson: Over
swirling strings and a snare pattern borrowed from James...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Motley Crue
Review:
All the filth and fury of their Eighties heyday, finally funneled
into an album Mötley Cüe have created a cottage industry
out of rehashing their excesses: Their tales of debauchery have
already fueled dozens of books and a standard-bearing episode of
Behind the Music. Now they've woven those stories into their first
album in eight years. Inspired by their 2001 sleazeography, The
Dirt, Saints of Los Angeles finds Vince Neil flashing back to
the band's golden age: gigging on the...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Katy Perry
Review:
"I hope you hang yourself with your H&M scarf/While jacking off
listening to Mozart," Katy Perry tells her metrosexual ex on "Ur So
Gay." Risqué words, coming from the daughter of two
Christian pastors who only let her listen to gospel tunes as a kid.
Now 23, the L.A. singer bucks the WWJD'ers with a debut full of
mall-punky, grrrl-power tunes produced by Glen Ballard (Alanis
Morissette) and Dr. Luke (Avril Lavigne). But her
attention-grabbing doesn't feel very rebellious: On the New Wave-y
club...
Rating:
2 Stars
Artist:
Dr. John
Review:
He's not talking about Cleveland. City That Care Forgot is
the New Orleans soulman's impassioned lament about the natural
destruction of Hurricane Katrina and the man-made tragedy of the
aftermath. Over ominous funk ("Land Grab"), gospel-inflected blues
("You Might Be Surprised") and horn-boosted R&B ("Time for a
Change," featuring Eric Clapton), Dr. John's bourbon-and-sandpaper
vocals reflect the bitterness of a man who can sense that "the
smell of death still hangs on the honeysuckle vine."...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Lil' Wayne
Review:
OK, it's true: he really is the best rapper alive. Lil Wayne made
that claim on his last official CD, in 2005, and since then, he's
unleashed an astonishing torrent of mixtapes, leaks and guest
appearances to back up the boast. So his long-anticipated "legit"
album follow-up feels a bit gratuitous. Still, Tha Carter
III is useful as an exclamation point. It establishes beyond a
doubt that the zeitgeist in 2008 belongs to one artist: a
dreadlocked dadaist poet from New Orleans with a...
Rating:
4.5 Stars
Artist:
Dennis Wilson
Review:
Within the Beach Boys, Dennis Wilson seemed to be the friendly foil
to his visionary older brother Brian — he was the fun-loving
surfer/drummer who loved booze and women. But this solo set proves
he was also a soulful songwriter. Released in 1977 and out of print
since 1991, Pacific Ocean Blue is a cinematic meditation
on loss, both personal and environmental. A trio of wrenchingly
intimate songs about a failed relationship anchor the album:
?Thoughts of You,? a piano-based ballad...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
My Morning Jacket
Review:
"Evil urges, baby," squeals Jim James in the title track of his
band's fifth studio album. "They be part of the human way!" A
slinky funk strut delivered in Prince-like falsetto that blows up
into a proggy Southern-rock guitar duel, "Evil Urges" rallies you
to "Dedicate your love to any woman or man/No racial boundary
lines, no social subdivisions" and notes that "evil" is often in
the ear of the beholder.
But coming from a young band whose first three albums earned
them a reputation as...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
N.E.R.D.
Review:
While writing their third album, N.E.R.D. watched a Discovery
Channel show about synesthesia, a neurological disorder that causes
people to experience sounds as colors or as objects in their minds.
Superproducers the Neptunes (Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo) and
their rapping buddy Shay Haley were inspired to create music you
could envision as a live show. Does that creative concept work?
Hard to say, but the results are experimental and expansive:
Specked with ostentatiously weird groov...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
The Fratellis
Review:
In 2006, this scottish trio burst onto the U.K. charts with their
debut, Costello Music, where they sounded like popwise
lads who'd downed a steady diet of T.Rex, Oasis and beer. Here
We Stand keeps up its predecessor's swagger, but the album's
debts to glam and Brit-rock forbears (there's some Bowie and Clash
here, too) give you a vague sense you've heard these songs before.
Still, that doesn't mean tracks like "Shameless" and "Mistress
Mabel" — both of which pack stellar bar-rock...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Alanis Morissette
Review:
Nothing gets folks on your team like losing your fiancé to a
Hollywood bombshell. So just imagine what Alanis Morissette has
been doing since her ex, actor Ryan Reynolds, traipsed off with
Scarlett Johansson. Writing about post-romantic stress disorder
isn't new for Morissette, but her latest album doesn't rage like
"You Oughta Know" — it sounds more like grief. Producer and
co-writer Guy Sigsworth (Björk) frames Morissette's candid
lyrics with a vaguely New Age grandeur — ele...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
Gavin Rossdale
Review:
"Oh teardrop you know you make me so sad/This heartbeat could be my
last," sings Gavin Rossdale on his first solo album. The former
Bush frontman may share a house with the world's most manically
upbeat pop singer, wife Gwen Stefani, but denominationally, he's
still grunge: a dour rock dude, scowling and growling as he bears
down on another B minor chord. With the help of Bob Rock
(Metallica), Rossdale gives Wanderlust a slick sheen,
swabbing power ballads like "Beauty in the Beast" in a...
Rating:
2 Stars
Artist:
The Ting Tings
Review:
Both members of this U.K. pop duo — singer-guitarist Katie
White and drummer Jules De Martino — used to play in
second-tier teen-pop acts. Their earlier experiences clearly left
them with harsh feelings about the music industry: De Martino has
admitted that their thumping disco single "Shut Up and Let Me Go"
is a breakup song written for their former record label, not an old
flame. But those formative years also gave them an instinct for
industrial-grade pop hooks, which is pr...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
Steve Earle
Review:
All dressed up in his outlaw-biker best, Steve Earle launched a
political fireball with 1988's Copperhead Road. On the
Skynyrd-style boogie of "Snake Oil," he raged against Reagan:
"Well, ain't your president good to you? Knocked 'em dead in Libya,
Grenada too." And he advocates for gun control on "The Devil's
Right Hand," punctuating his message with big drums and ringing
acoustic guitars. But Earle undermined that song's credibility a
few years later when his own handgun accidentally...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
Larry Norman
Review:
Most people who have heard of Larry Norman at all know him
primarily as a sixties Jesus Freak who pioneered today's
multi-billion dollar Contemporary Christian Music industry. But
Norman, who died in February at age sixty, was anything but a
middle-of-the-road musical sheep who followed a prescribed formula
of simplistic shout-outs to Jesus. He was an eccentric, psychedelic
music-loving, politically left-leaning hippie folksinger who also
loved the lord and wanted everybody else to love hi...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
Carolina Liar
Review:
After leaving his native South Carolina in 2002, Carolina Liar
frontman Chad Wolf strummed his guitar in many L.A. coffeehouses
before being rescued from obscurity by an internship with
songwriter Diane Warren and a paid gig dancing in a Celine Dion
video. His story is a typical Hollywood fantasy — which might
be why four tracks from his band's New Wave-y rock debut have
already been featured on The Hills. Fusing the anthemic
elements of U2 and the Killers with the electro productio...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Islands
Review:
On their 2006 debut, this Montreal six-piece were like a pothead
carnival of bloopy synths, African rhythms and pop-culture
references. But on?Arm's Way, gifted singer-songwriter
Nick Thorburn broadens the band's quirk-pop into wonderfully
shambolic arena rock — for an arena of 5,000 people. Guitars
mingle with viola, clarinet and piano, hopping genres and tempos
with an Of Montreal-style theatricality. "Pieces of You" begins
with a gypsy bop, moves into a harmonic bridge worthy of...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Old 97's
Review:
Over the past 15 years, Old 97's have evolved from country-punk
yahoos into master-class rock & roll songwriters. For proof,
see their album opener, "The Fool," a speed-strummed joy ride that
tells the story of two doomed lovers in Day-Glo detail. "He came
from Phoenix in a borrowed VW Bug," sings frontman Rhett Miller,
already breathless; the girl he likens to "a drug/Hallucinogenic
with no hangover at all."
And yet, after some LPs focused more on popcraft than
adrenaline, there's...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
Foxy Brown
Review:
Midway through her fourth album, Foxy Brown claims that her "piss
is clean" — a sensible thing to boast, since she's addressing
her parole officer. Recently released after eight months in prison,
the New York rapper spends much of Brooklyn's Don Diva
covering her pre-jail legal problems and pesky media coverage: On
"We Don't Surrender," she raps, "I got a 32-shot clip aimed at Page
Six." Despite the tabloid-worthy subject matter, a couple of
bangers are invigorating, with Foxy...
Rating:
2.5 Stars
Artist:
Review:
Bono deserves props for global stumping on Africa's behalf. So it's
good that this tribute is a rootsy thank-you, not a world-music
cheesefest. Guinea's Ba Cissoko reinvents "Sunday Bloody Sunday"
with kora-harp ripples, guitarist Vieux Farka Touré turns
"Bullet the Blue Sky" into a dusty Malian blues, and Cheikh
Lô makes "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" into a
chattering Afro-flamenco workout. Great songwriting makes
translation easier.
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Orchestra Baobab
Review:
Reunions rarely rival history. But with this collection of burbling
grooves, these Senegalese legends recapture the Afro-Cuban bliss of
their 1982 classic, Pirates Choice — imagine the
Buena Vista Social Club weaned on motherland polyrhythms. The
secret weapon remains Barthélemy Attisso, a guitar giant
with a touch as delicate and melodically sublime as Jerry Garcia's.
His lines on "Nijaay" and "Cabral" are so chill they'll buckle your
knees.
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
The Last Shadow Puppets
Review:
As the leader of Britain's Arctic Monkeys, Alex Turner creates
spiky neo-post-punk that avoids any revivalist fuddy-duddyism. But
Turner's new side project, a collaboration with Miles Kane of
Merseyside indie-poppers the Rascals, is a shameless nostalgia trip
— and it's still compelling. Their debut pays homage to the
moody symphonic sound of early David Bowie, Lee Hazlewood and other
stars of the late Sixties and early Seventies. While reverb-swathed
acoustic guitars churn in minor...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Tokio Hotel
Review:
It's official: these guys are the greatest German
bubblegum-neo-glam-goth-emo boy band. Ever. On their
English-language debut (they're already huge in Deutschland), the
four fresh-faced lads from Magdeburg unveil a genre-and
gender-bending act that justifies superlatives. Much of the credit
goes to lead singer Bill Kaulitz, an 18-year-old androgyne whose
stupendous electroshock hairdo stands a good six inches taller than
Tina Turner's Eighties coif. Kaulitz is a technically limited
vocal...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
The Last Shadow Puppets
Review:
As the leader of Britain's Arctic Monkeys, Alex Turner creates
spiky neo-post-punk that avoids any revivalist fuddy-duddyism. But
Turner's new side project, a collaboration with Miles Kane of
Merseyside indie-poppers the Rascals, is a shameless nostalgia trip
— and it's still compelling. Their debut pays homage to the
moody symphonic sound of early David Bowie, Lee Hazlewood and other
stars of the late Sixties and early Seventies. While reverb-swathed
acoustic guitars churn in minor...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Phantom Planet
Review:
Phantom Planet claim their fourth full-length was inspired by the
music of Charles Manson and David Koresh — not quite the
album you'd expect from the California boys who sang The
O.C.'s theme song. Still, like those cult leaders, Raise
the Dead gives its macabre subjects (and its lighter ones) an
oddly upbeat spin. Jumping from Bowie glam to disco punk, the band
tosses in synths, arch backing coos and riffing saxes for songs
that are both expansive and strange. "Leader," which is...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Artist:
T Bone Burnett
Review:
The best song on T Bone's relentlessly noir new album is "Kill
Zone," a lyrical, Roy Orbison-style ballad — which Orbison
himself co-wrote right before his death in 1988. That fact only
hints at the oddity of this collection: Burnett, best known as
producer to the stars (Robert Plant/Alison Krauss, John Mellencamp)
and curator of soundtracks (The Big Lebowski, O
Brother, Where Art Thou?), started writing these songs years
ago for a revamped production of Sam Shepard's 1972 play...
Rating:
3 Stars
Artist:
Gavin DeGraw
Review:
Gavin DeGraw first hit it big with 2003's "I Don't Want to Be," an
anti-fronting anthem with the long-winded chorus "I don't want to
be anything other than what I've been tryin' to be lately." Five
years later, dude's still verbose. He packs bizarre metaphors into
the faux-jazzy "Cop Stop": "I won't tell you lies/Or treat you like
a rental car like other guys." (Thankfully, there's no mention of
handling his stick shift.) And on "Medicate the Kids" — a
power-chord-filled rant agains...
Rating:
2.5 Stars
Artist:
Joe Higgs
Review:
Jamaican singer—songwriter Joe Higgs mentored the giants of
reggae music. He taught harmony singing to Bob Marley and Peter
Tosh in the yard of his Trenchtown home, toured America with Marley
and Jimmy Cliff, and wrote "Stepping Razor," which became Tosh's
signature song. More important, Higgs was one of the first Jamaican
singers to bring the ghetto experience to the forefront of reggae.
Yet Higgs never gained much of an international following before
his death in 1999. That's a shame, be...
Rating:
4 Stars
Artist:
Otis Redding
Review:
This two—cd set doubles the pleasure of Otis Redding's third
album with B sides, outtakes, period live tracks and the entire
record in mono and stereo versions. But Otis Blue was
already perfect in its original 11—song edition when released
in September 1965 — an achievement that is even more
remarkable because all but one of the tracks were recorded inside
24 hours, in two lightning sessions at the Stax studio in Memphis,
on July 9th and in the early morning of the 10th. The...
Rating:
5 Stars