New music from Alejandro Escovedo, 3OH!3, Kylie Minogue (original) (raw)

Critics’ Choice: New CDs

Straightforward, Straight-From-Texas Rock

July 4, 2010

ALEJANDRO ESCOVEDO
“Street Songs of Love”
(Fantasy)

Alejandro Escovedo’s “Street Songs of Love” lives up to the direct monosyllables of its title, then transcends them. It’s a set of 12 midtempo, clear-cut, guitar-driven songs and a closing instrumental, usually with just three or four chords, in the style that was once mainstream and is now called classic rock. All the lyrics have something to do with love, as Mr. Escovedo sings and shouts, in his thick, earthy voice, about lust, devotion, jealousy, obsession, parental affection and higher purpose. “You gotta have faith in the one you love/You gotta have faith in the mystery above,” he hollers in “Faith,” with one of his fans, Bruce Springsteen, belting alongside him.

Mr. Escovedo, a longtime local hero in Austin, Tex., and his songwriting partner, Chuck Prophet, stick to the structural basics that have been the through-line of Mr. Escovedo’s music since he was a punk-rocker in the 1970s, even as he has dipped into hard-rock, alt-country, Tex-Mex, folk-rock and string quartets. “Street Songs of Love” has a little of them all, strings excepted, as it juxtaposes hard-riffing rockers — “Tender Heart” socks the tom-toms, cranks up the fuzztone and pounds a piano — and ballads like “Fall Apart With You,” which vows “All I want is to fall apart with you” over a girl-group bolero beat and women singing la-las.

The producer Tony Visconti, who honed David Bowie’s most durable albums, relies on the sinew of Mr. Escovedo and his band — two guitars, bass and drums — augmented with handclaps here, soul-style backup vocals there. Yet in this staunchly straightforward music, each song takes some memorable leap.

Lyrics that start out routine turn incisive and surreal. “Poured the poison, drank a toast to health,” Mr. Escovedo sings in “Undesired,” an anthem about love found and betrayed. In “This Bed Is Getting Crowded,” over minor chords hinting at Tom Petty, he wonders, “Am I here with you, are you here with me?/Or are we both here with him?”

“Street Songs” envisions a girl “Dancing on a beachland night/Movin’ for money on some bad advice” as a slinky bass line implies every shimmy. Mr. Escovedo is kindly in “Down in the Bowery,” a song to his teenage musician son that has Ian Hunter of Mott the Hoople as a guest. And he’s elemental in the galloping garage-rock of “Silver Cloud,” shouting, “I’m a fool for your love — come on, fool me!” and then wrenching guitar chords off the beat to joust with his lead guitarist, David Pulkingham. In song after song Mr. Pulkingham’s subtle variations provide a lift; he makes “Tula,” which could have been a standard one-chord Texas boogie, a phantasmagoria of funk, blues and Celtic modality, abetted by Hector Muñoz’s percussion and someone hooting jungle birdcalls.

In another, less fragmented pop era, this would be the album of thoughtful but radio-ready love songs to finally get Mr. Escovedo the big national audience he deserves. Could it happen now? JON PARELES

3OH!3
“Streets of Gold”
(Photo Finish/Atlantic)

If the sound of a petulant child badly in need of punishment could be captured in song, that song would be “I Can Do Anything” by 3OH!3. Over a beat built from heavy drum thwacks and video-game bleeps, Sean Foreman, the band’s lead vocalist, runs down a list of roles he might play: a presidential candidate, a model and so on. Whatever he chooses, though, will require commitment. “We can do an album or we can do it viral,” he offers. “Spread it like an S.T.D. you got back in high school.”

A band like 3OH!3 — the Boulder, Colo., duo of Mr. Foreman, whose nasal, sneering, callous raps set the mood, and Nathaniel Motte — isn’t an accident, though it often sounds like one. It is a Frankenstein monster built wholly from borrowed pieces, taking the accumulated lessons of years of hip-hop assimilation, the sophomoric attitude of frat-rock and the dense, dance-friendly electro-pop of the moment and grinding them into an oppressive and convincing wall of sounds. It’s all there on the admirably stupid “House Party,” from the Beastie Boys shtick to the Lil Jon energy to the Rick Rubinesque drums. On “R.I.P.” Mr. Foreman even sings like Dashboard Confessional’s Chris Carrabba, emo’s onetime great pop hope.

Produced largely by the band with Matt Squire (and a couple of key assists by Dr. Luke), “Streets of Gold” is full of expert, pathological juvenilia. “I Know How to Say” details cities and the women in them. (“There’s underwear on the mic stand in Iceland.”) On the rudimentary and infectious “My First Kiss” 3OH!3 teams with another sloppy pseudo-rapper, Kesha, over a bed of cheerleader handclaps.

All this carousing must get tiring, no? In moments here impending misery creeps in. “I’ve hit on all these girls/I’ve heard the same conversations,” Mr. Foreman raps emptily on “Déjà Vu.” That song fizzles, though, largely because this is a band that sounds better and more relaxed the more puerile it gets and the heavier its panting is. Toward the end of the album there’s a bizarro sentimental number, “I’m Not the One,” followed by the perplexing, aimless title track, both of which threaten to harsh the group’s aggro.

But it quickly rights itself, following them with “See You Go,” a pulverizingly direct fantasy. “She stopped me in the doorway/She kissed me on the lips,” Mr. Foreman boasts over walloping drums. “I don’t even know her/That’s just the way it is.” JON CARAMANICA

Image

Alejandro Escovedo, left, with the bassist Bobby Daniel and the drummer Hector Muñoz at City Winery in Manhattan last week.Credit...Brian Harkin for The New York Times

KYLIE MINOGUE
“Aphrodite”
(Astralwerks/Parlophone)

Kylie Minogue still sounds like Madonna’s nicer, blander kid sister on her 11th studio album, “Aphrodite,” which starts with the airy declaration, “Dance — it’s all I want to do.” In her long, buoyantly superficial career, her songs have rarely had much more than that in mind.

Through ups and downs and an arty moment or two, Ms. Minogue, 42, has been a pop presence worldwide since the late 1980s, particularly in her native Australia and Britain. Her elfin voice, the body she’s proud to flaunt and her decent average in finding catchy songs and hopping on bandwagons have sold her tens of millions of albums, though mostly outside the United States. She made her first North American headlining tour only last year.

“Aphrodite” is part of a pop moment that’s reviving dance beats from 1970s disco on into the 1990s, perhaps calculating that dance music thrived in past economic downturns. “I know life is hard, so we’re living for the weekend,” Ms. Minogue offers in “Better Than Today.”

She has joined Black Eyed Peas, Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Shakira, Christina Aguilera, Kelis and even Miley Cyrus in latching onto club sounds; only Ms. Cyrus sounds less dangerous. Even in “Get Outta My Way,” which stages a voyeuristic ménage à trois — “see me with him and it’s turning you on” — the music goes bounding along, chipper and indifferent.

The album’s executive producer is a certified Madonnaologist, Stuart Price, who produced Madonna’s 2005 “Confessions on a Dance Floor,” which harked back to her 1980s beats with hints of soul searching. For Ms. Minogue, however, positive thinking rules. Her “Put Your Hands Up” isn’t a holdup; its chorus continues, “If you feel love tonight.”

The album draws on Scandinavian, British and American songwriters, and some of the committee-written tracks are so generous with hooks they might be multiple tunes merged into one. But the music ends up chasing Madonna’s coattails (along with some Abba here, some Janet Jackson there, and at times enough overdubbed vocal harmonies to suggest a disco Enya).

Madonna’s old bouncing-ball beats, without the overpowering kick-drum bottom of latter-day club music, are back on this album; so are the smoothly rounded keyboard tones of “Like a Virgin” Madonna and the flickering reverberations of “Ray of Light ” Madonna. “Illusion,” written by Ms. Minogue and Mr. Price, echoes the chorale of “Like a Prayer.” There’s just no avoiding the resemblances.

In the title song of “Aphrodite,” Ms. Minogue sings, “I got spirit you can feel/Did you think I wasn’t real?” No one’s asking for reality in this pop bubble — just a little bit more innovation. JON PARELES

CAREFUL
“Oh, Light”
(Sounds Super Recordings)

Eric Lindley’s small-scale music sounds equally invested in what draws you in and what throws you off. It’s appropriate that he’s recording under the name Careful: Mr. Lindley sings his abstract pop songs about as quietly as he can while holding down a clear, confident tone.

On “Oh, Light” — out now on iTunes and later this month in physical form — that voice jumps right in your head. It’s from a tradition of unnervingly confidential, light-voiced male singers: João Gilberto, Arthur Russell, Lou Barlow of Sebadoh, Elliott Smith, Jamie Stewart of Xiu Xiu. Beyond the singing, bare but surely played acoustic-guitar patterns hold down the songs. Here and there, as in the track “Every Epiphany,” he uses some of the obdurate strategies from electro-acoustic minimalism — loops, drones, digital pops as percussion — and makes gorgeous, multitracked, even gently Auto-Tuned surfaces.

Mr. Lindley, who studied with the highly conceptual composer James Tenney, seems taken by the idea of music as research and experiment; from track to track he plays relentlessly with the textures of his backgrounds. But somewhere in there is a singer who loves pop innately and purely. Recently he put a slow, echoey version of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” online; it’s not on this record, and possibly wouldn’t have worked there, but it raises one’s hopes for an album of covers.

The least effective of Mr. Lindley’s talents are his lyrics, which sift through grab bags of vernacular speech. “Draw a little mouth where the ear should be/I have some bad news, I have some bad news,” he sings on “Oi, Etc.” Or, from “Carnival” : “The kicker is I’m down to the end of this song/it’s a curse or something, I didn’t listen right/How’s Joanna?” It’s hard to quote only a few lines and transmit a sense of his language; they add up only in full. But then you can’t really take in a full song’s worth of his lyrics. You’re likely to be too interested all those closely miked phonetics: every rocky K, or liquid S or puffed W. BEN RATLIFF

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