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Elvis Costello & The Imposters - Momofuku
(Lost Highway, 2008)
6.5 out of 10
By the chorus of "Turpentine," the third song on Momofuku, I was grinning and actually laughing to myself. Ten minutes into the new Elvis Costello record with his Imposters, it seemed, for some reason, as if he hadn't had this much fun making a rock album in his life. Or maybe — I'd bet on this — I just hadn't had this much fun listening to one this year. Summery harmonies (led by Jenny Lewis, former child-star) crown Costello's still unweathered voice; the tunes are exuberant, expert, and easy; exceptional opener "No Hiding Place" even makes an ending move out of the late-'70s Fleetwood Mac playbook.
These opening three numbers (or side A of the four-sided vinyl release, now two weeks old on the occasion of the CD issue) are the best of what Momofuku has to offer. Since there's nothing even close to unlistenable present here, and the tone remains playful throughout, it could be quite a bit worse. The facts, as I call 'em, cast Momofuku in the role of Costello's weakest pop effort in two decades, but he'll have to slip more than this to deserve a serious judgment. For the most part, Momofuku is no less than a pleasure.
Okay, maybe it's showing: Elvis Costello is one of my favorite singer/songwriters. He's blessed with a remarkable consistency of quality when leading a rhythm combo with his original material. At times, Get Happy!! and Trust have each sat in the #3 slot of "all-time favorites." When I Was Cruel was a post-2000 benchmark, a stellar set, especially for a man who'd been at his craft for a quarter-century; in fact, Costello's hardly ever put out any subpar pop records, and the last one was Spike in 1989, which happens to have about an album's worth of good songs on it. In the '90s, he slowed down the pop output considerably in favor of various collaborations and non-pop dalliances with arguable quality ratings; perhaps that's the magic trick.
Momofuku is Costello's solo-McCartney record, a breezy catalogue of the sounds that have made him who he is, albeit with a bit more noise and higher standards than Paul tends to display. "Mr. Feathers" is the only song that directly evokes Mr. McCartney, the kind of piano-based moment that people throw the words "cabaret" and "parlor" at, when they likely mean Beatles and Harry Nilsson; though "Harry Worth" takes a sideways hit at the Latin accents McCartney occasionally works with (and does it better). "Flutter and Wow" is a mid-tempo 6/8 soul burn at the midpoint, to which I'd give higher marks if it weren't for the semi-unwelcome borrowing from the Beach Boys' "In My Room" for the verse's opening motif; luckily, Costello's not normally one to hang a song on a fragment, and it goes very nice places, the best places since the opening trio, in fact.
The penultimate "Pardon Me Madam, My Name Is Eve" sinks the album below "pleasure" for four minutes with an unfortunate excursion into Bible imagery and a dirgey country tune without any country signifiers in the arrangement. Thankfully, "Go Away" swoops in at the close to re-elevate the mood with a classic Attractions-style (if slower) garage-rock track and Jenny Lewis duetting on the choruses. And though Momofuku stands lacking the mood dynamics of some of his better albums or the blatant consistency of others, it will nonetheless bring a hardcore like me, and likely even casual fans, back to the beginning at least several more times before the newness wears off and a few favorite songs stick.
-Spencer Owen
The Roots - Rising Down
(Def Jam, 2008)
8 out of 10
This band deals, as participant-observers, in turbulence. "The Pow Wow" opens the scene in 1994; we get a glimpse of a band conference call, discussing some shit that went down at a Geffen meeting, pre-major-debut, and quickly shit starts to go down at this meeting, at least one man screaming. Not a shocking consequence of a conversation featuring this sentence: "The Roots' product is not just the Roots' product anymore." At first the screaming fit seems inspired by an inability to grasp the reality of the situation. More likely, however, it is the result of grasping it all too well, and this realization is a vital bridge to understanding the darkly-obsessed act of Rising Down.
The focus of the Roots is now laser-like. At eight studio LPs, thousands of concerts, and roughly two decades of work, the Roots are a beast, a hardened object of consciousness, drums, controlled anger, and deep music love. In concert, the Roots are a party band of showmen and showstoppers, a necessary part of their quest; but on Rising Down, there is no lack of confrontation, no lack of attention to detail, and no present interest in not playing directly over the heads of those in the cheap seats. I've been a Roots fan for some time now, and I actually even had trouble feeling it. My entry point into this album ended up being listening to it very, very loud, over and over again.
Black Thought is the ringleader of the 12 MCs that appear here; he contributes one verse per song. To wrap up the first third of the record, he takes a solo: "@ 15," a notably exceptional high school freestyle straight from Thought's archives, and the follow-up "75 Bars (Black's Reconstruction)," three minutes of constant, refrain-free fierceness from both Thought on the mic and ?uestlove on the kit. A comparison between "75 Bars" and 2004's "Boom!" — both sparse, old-school spit workouts, the latter a much more lighthearted affair — speaks very clearly as an example of the Roots' current razor-sharp embrace of darkness.
The rest of the record's circus of MCs, surprisingly, does not diminish the aforementioned focus; the focus appears to inspire them, in fact. Each vocalist brings their A-game. Both former Black Star members, Talib Kweli ("Lost Desire") and Mos Def ("Rising Down"), sound better than they have in years, and so does Common ("The Show"). The topics of the various characters include Earth-collapse, anti-patriotism, uncontrollable urges, family strife, being a criminal, not being a criminal (just black), and being entirely unapologetic. Yet it is not up to me but the poets to deliver the message, and they do so with enough vibrancy, grace and beat-interaction to completely engage.
The only aspect of the group that keeps them on that interesting brink between full-on conceptual success and utter pop failure is their almost total inability at this stage to create a captivating chorus hook. "I Will Not Apologize," an otherwise exceptional spin on a simmering, laid-back Fela Kuti sample, sounds too upfront in its refrain; "Rising Up," the otherwise exceptional triumphant closer, has a two-bar refrain from singer Chrisette Michelle that could be completely thrown out only to improve the song. Other songs' choruses are live-with-able and varying degrees of appropriate, but almost none of them are evidently necessary. (The marvelous synth-grind "I Can't Help It" and the obligatory party track "Get Busy" [yes, even this album has one] are the exceptions.) Luckily, the band's backing tracks and occasional instrumental interludes are absolutely necessary. So much good taste is on display that the problem becomes negligible.
In any case, what keeps me listening is the combination between the entirely exceptional musical creations behind each song and the thematic foregrounding that ties the LP, and both are as strong as (if not stronger than) ever. "Becoming Unwritten" introduces an effects-heavy, clipped beat that becomes more and more unnerving and built upon before Black Thought delivers three lines and then cuts abruptly at 36 seconds. Later, a fuller version called "Unwritten" begins with a sung chorus from Mercedes Martinez and a verse from Thought, yet the song cuts to silence twice, and the second time it ends the track, even still at only 1:22. Thought rhymes, at the end of both tracks, "The son won't face the father/ The gun won't erase the trauma/ Why you wastin' your time, son?"
Being "Unwritten" in both of these cases gestures to the possibility that though one soldiers on, one could get swallowed up into nothing, due to idleness, due to loss of control in yourself, due to loss of control around you. Here appears to be the theme of Rising Down. On a hidden track, we hear aftermath of the phone conference that opens the record, one voice venting justifications for why such an explosion of frustration might occur and why it would be prudent to watch for it. Then he stops. "Oh, shit," he says. "Somebody just hit the fuckin' rent-a-car." ?uestlove says, calmly, with a laugh: "Someone just crashed the car?" Flaws and all, the Roots keep writing their story and throwing parties.
-Spencer Owen
Comments
Your review is well-written and descriptive enough to engage me even though I still have never heard the group or until now heard anything about them. Good job, Spencer.
all the artists mentioned have been doing exceptional work lately. i'm excited to hear the album as a whole; more so after reading this review. thanks Spencer!
Al Green - Lay It Down
(Blue Note, 2008)
7 out of 10
Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson did not make his love for Amy Winehouse's Back to Black a secret when it first came out, before "Rehab" was an international smash. He claimed on his Myspace blog that Black was the record he wanted Christina Aguilera to make. Thompson supposedly also wanted to produce the comeback of Bill Withers, but instead ended up with the Al Green project. Thompson's fascination with the feeling of some old rhythm records is not surprising. He is foremost a record collector, a DJ, a drummer who learned by studying records: a man who lives the music he loves enough to unapologetically let the obsession define, often, the music he makes.
I have listened to and deeply admired Thompson's work with the Roots for some time now, but my knowledge of Al Green's discography consists of 1972's I'm Still in Love with You, 1973's Call Me, "Let's Stay Together," "Take Me to the River," "Tired of Being Alone" ... let's say that's probably it. That, and I've heard snatches of his last two albums, which constituted a comeback to some degree, apparently, what with a reteaming of Green and vintage producer Willie Mitchell, though not a retrieval of the timbres and feels that the early '70s made seem so effortless. ?uestlove, his production cohort James Poyser, Al Green and Blue Note Records would all probably agree that this album, now, Lay It Down, were any of his post-classic works to grace my ears eventually, is the one for someone like me.
Willie Mitchell — I reiterate — did not, on this decade's I Can't Stop and Everything's OK, return to the sumptuous sound of his canonized Al Green productions. The buzz here, on this year's Lay It Down, is that Thompson and Poyser have pulled a Ronson/Dap-Kings and turned on the time machine, and then hired the Dap-Kings' horn players, one of those fabled "good measure" tactics. The buzz seems about right. The sound is warm 'n' funky, smooth 'n' heavy, just the way Mitchell turned it out on "Love and Happiness" (the stew-stirring train groove of which is nodded to at the coda of "No One Like You"). Everything is very subtle. Old-time session player, the now-late Chalmers "Spanky" Alford, joins the crew of youngsters and plays the guitar about as beautifully as I'd like someone in soul music to do; I had to instant-replay the sultry arpeggios in the not-as-slow-jam (they're all kind of slow jams, aren't they?) "What More Do You Want from Me," actually my favorite song on Lay It Down. John Legend, Anthony Hamilton and Corinne Bailey Rae show up and don't screw anything up. Meanwhile, idiots all over the world are losing bets against the odds that ?uestlove would deliver a flawless drum performance and sound, worthy of Mr. Green's stature.
Al Green? He writes and sings all over the damn thing and sounds like he did back when he made those inescapable records, and I mean inescapable now, I mean it's funny how I really just keep hearing that classic Al Green and people just can't get enough of it. Am I one of those people? Maybe you can tell by now that, oddly, no, I'm not. I am not sure what it is. It is a well-aged R&B thumbprint that pleases me, and it doesn't really penetrate that surface-level pleasure. It strikes me as oddly cerebral, a thing to appreciate for its arrangement, its uniqueness, more than a thing to move me. Perhaps it's that I gravitate towards James Brown, Prince, Sly, the more outrageous takes on R&B energy. Perhaps it's that the Reverend is the type of artist who seems to live and die by the sound of his records, no matter how much soul he puts out there through his singing or how many decent chord progressions his band can run through. Me, I listen to Lay It Down more as an appreciator of the varied efforts of Mr. Thompson, who does an undoubtedly exceptional job, and so does Mr. Green and so do their whole band 'n' crew. You can safely envision a higher level of enthusiasm from someone who more idolizes the work of this perennial artist.
-Spencer Owen
Lay It Down comes out on 5/29.
Comments
Being in parent land, I wasn't even aware of a new release. Then I saw that he was opening for the Police. Damn, that might just be a good show. Although I hate Sting's post Police output, I love The Police. I am hesitant about any reunion, though. But E.C. is still one of the best concerts I've ever seen. So that alone would probably be worth it. He's one of those artists that generally seems to have fun playing, and you can tell.
I absolutely loved "When I Was Cruel", and would describe that album with the wourds you used, "...as if he hadn't had this much fun making a rock album in his life." The summer I bought it, it was on constant rotation. Of course his first five albums or so are classics as well.
I was disappointed with "Delivery Man", but you just never know with E.C., since he can veer so wildly with each release. You definitely have me curious, and maybe digging deep in my pockets to go catch him when he comes to town. I will definitely be checking this one out. I love to see the man on his game. Always a treat. Thank you.
You're welcome!