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Published on Monday, Sep 01, 2008
LAX
The Game
Sometimes it seems that the best way to evaluate the Los Angeles rapper The Game is by the names he drops. He is the most reference-thick artist in any medium since Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho — whom he's been influenced by, whom he's beefing with, what he owns, where he's been. Over two strong albums, he has been a charismatic and sometimes mischievous rapper, but the question remains: Is The Game more than the sum of his proper nouns?
On LAX, his third album, for the first time he's a joyless name-checker; it's as if the letters of his album title were all in lowercase. Almost everything here, from the boasting (Money) to the baiting (LAX Files, Cali Sunshine), is pro forma. Worse, The Game, never a fluid rapper, sounds positively lumpy, as if he were delivering verses while running up a steep flight of stairs, or as if the last few years of pugnacity have finally left him winded.
Worse still, gone are the clever hooks of his debut album (written largely, it should be said, by 50 Cent) and the brute textures of his follow-up. Here the production is ponderous; The Game has somehow coaxed a dull beat even from Kanye West, who produced Angel, a limp G-funk tribute.
Crucial to The Game's biography is the time he spent recuperating from a 2001 shooting. It was then that he began his immersion in hip-hop, listening to a string of the genre's classic albums. It might explain his decision to record the bizarre, sometimes galling Never Can Say Goodbye, which he raps from the perspective of three long-gone greats: Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. and Eazy-E. But sacrilege aside, The Game sounds his most vibrant here, matching their vocal rhythms and tics. He sounds as if he's having more fun playing them than, everywhere else here, playing himself.
— Jon Caramanica
New York Times
HOW TO WALK AWAY
Juliana Hatfield
Listening to Juliana Hatfield's new album, How to Walk Away, is like reading the diary of that girlfriend you cruelly dumped, full of melancholy and a little bit of acid.
Hatfield's 10th solo album marks her 20th year as a recording artist and coincides with the release of her autobiography, When I Grow Up. It's as if we've watched her grow up in that time. She came onto the scene in the 1980s with Boston's Blake Babies, a teen looking frail and sweet but tough as nails. In the 1990s she morphed into an edgy 20-something with the voice of an angry fairy.
Two decades later, she's more mature and self-assured, but more vulnerable on How to Walk Away, her first release since 2005's Made in China.
In many ways, this confessional album parallels the emotions you feel after being dumped, alternating from depression to caustic bitterness. Producer Andy Chase brings a lushness to How to Walk Away, with occasional piano and strings that deepen the emotional impact.
The best songs here are the ones in which Hatfield's a little bit angry, like Just Lust, and its chorus that comes like a slap in the face: ''It's just lust/It doesn't mean I love you.'' Or the slamming door of Now I'm Gone.
Depression, a problem Hatfield struggled with even at her most successful, seeps into almost every song and it can be a bummer. And though generally beautiful, it's a hard album to listen to at times. But like Beck's Sea Change or Bob Dylan's Tangled Up in Blue, it's worth wading into, especially if your heart's been broken recently.
Hatfield is at her most upbeat musically and heartbreaking lyrically on So Alone, a song most folks who've battled depression will find distressingly easy to identify with. She sings: ''It's late at night and you need somebody to talk to/But who are those people that you once knew?/And if you called just what would you say/Would you break down right away?/You're so alone, you're so alone, you wanna die and nobody knows.''
— Chris TalbottAssociated Press
PRO TOOLS
GZA
As Wu-Tang members go, GZA is all talent but no flash. He's a lyrical monster — rich in imagery and perhaps the group's most gifted writer — but his reserved delivery is easily overshadowed by, say, Ghostface's manic energy, Method Man's growl, or Raekwon's silent but deadly storytelling.
With Pro Tools, GZA's fifth album (sixth if you count Grandmasters, his great 2005 collaboration with DJ Muggs), he's found an angle: put up or shut up. The title itself is a play on the studio software used to edit recordings, and there's an undercurrent that suggests if you can't do it naturally, and purely, you shouldn't be doing it at all.
Pro Tools both puts up and shuts up. The cryptic beats (0% Finance and Life Is a Movie are incredible) are hand-in-glove with GZA's foreboding, endless rhymes, which are delivered nearly profanity-free. That's not a grab at radio spins or wider sales. And it's not a gimmick. It's just skills.
— Michael Pollock
Philadelphia Inquirer
FAST TIMES
AT BARRINGTON HIGH
The Academy Is . . .
Last year Chicago emo outfit The Academy Is . . . released its second album, Santi, which was many things its predecessor was not: ornate, drawn from a range of musical influences, lyrically mature. And also a flop.
This is not a band built for complexity, and so on Fast Times at Barrington High, its third album, it has trimmed the fat. Gone are the considered ballads, the bits of falsetto, the nods to new wave and goth. This is a streamlined, plain-spoken record full of breaking hearts and sticky choruses, and it's also the band's best.
The frontman William Beckett has one of the great voices in emo — clean, plaintive, resonant — and it cuts a bold swath across these songs, which suggest a hybrid of early Dashboard Confessional and 1980s power-pop like Journey. He's at his best when spurned, as on the vibrant single About a Girl. ''I'm not in love/This is not my heart,'' Beckett sings indignantly. ''I'm not gonna waste these words/About a girl.'' He doesn't fare much better elsewhere, falling to pieces on The Test and learning a girlfriend's secret on Rumored Nights, the guitars swelling just as his illusions shatter.
This album stumbles only when it strays from formula. On the odd Beware! Cougar! Beckett writes a kiss-off to an older woman who has already expressed her lack of interest: ''When you fake a laugh behind the wheel/I know where this road is heading to.'' And Coppertone is the album's most ponderous song, with convoluted lyrics and a tone that wavers between seductive and self-loathing. If only he'd stop thinking so hard.
— Jon Caramanica
New York Times
MEET GLEN CAMPBELL
Glen Campbell
Perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that Glen Campbell, at age 72, would release a collection of songs as ambitious as this. Still, Meet Glen Campbell defies expectations.
The symphonic arrangements aren't unexpected: After all, Campbell hits from Wichita Lineman to Rhinestone Cowboy featured big, majestic backing tracks.
But his choice of material is as unpredictable as can be. Campbell focuses on ballads written by hard rockers and alternative outcasts, putting his deceptively smooth voice to the Foo Fighters' Times Like These, Green Day's Good Riddance (Time Of Your Life), Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' Walls and Angel Dream, and the Replacements' Sadly Beautiful.
These aren't cheesy lounge renditions or tongue-in-cheek overstatements reminiscent of Tom Jones' covers of dance hits. Much like Johnny Cash's late-in-life work with producer Rick Rubin, these are serious recordings where Campbell locates the emotional thread in meaningful lyrics from those with different backgrounds than his. The best cuts — his takes on Jackson Browne's These Days, U2's All I Want Is You and John Lennon's Grow Old With Me — own a timeless beauty that bridges generations and cultures.
In the late 1960s, Glen Campbell and the Velvet Underground represented two sides of the pop-culture spectrum. One was the smiling, aw-shucks host of a TV variety show, the other was an Andy Warhol-endorsed art-rock band singing of drugs and kinky sex. But when Campbell sings the Underground's unsettling Jesus, it proves how a good song melts away differences to reveal the connections between all of us.
— Michael McCallAssociated Press
LAX
The Game
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