Eminem
Curtain Call—The Hits (2 stars)
I defy anyone who wasn't in a coma from 1999 to 2001 to listen to this disc without considering pulling their own "Stan" and driving off the road. Because whether you're an Eminem admirer or a hater, you really don't want to hear these songs packed together the way they are on Curtain Call.
Once upon a time, maybe 5,000 spins or so ago, "Lose Yourself" might have been inspiring, "Stan" poignant and "The Real Slim Shady" humorous. Now they epitomize "played-out," and soldiering through all of them will feel like more of a chore than tidying up your cat's litter box.
Adding to the malaise are three new cuts that range from nauseatingly bad ("Fack") to passable ("When I'm Gone"), along with a questionable "bonus" track: the historically significant but musically tepid rendition of "Stan" recorded by Eminem and Elton John at the 2001 Grammys.
As with any hits package, serious fans with Eminem's four core albums already on their shelves will find Curtain Call altogether useless. And casual fans—for whom this holiday-timed set is ultimately intended—would be wiser picking up 2000's Marshall Mathers LP and downloading the remaining singles they can't live without on a case-by-case basis.
Lindsay Lohan
A Little More Personal (Raw) (2 stars)
Last year, when Lindsay Lohan released her debut album, Speak, I predicted her deep identity crisis would lead to a nervous breakdown within a year, and lo and behold, it's almost exactly a year later and Lohan's breakdown is right on schedule, documented extensively on her second album, A Little More Personal (Raw). As the title suggests, Lohan gets more personal on these songs, starting with "Confessions of a Broken Heart (Daughter to Father)," the painfully painful first single on which Lohan pleads with her estranged father to alternately leave her alone and hold her close, taking daddy issues to a whole new level.
Like Ashlee Simpson on her recent I Am Me, Lohan uses her tabloid-friendly travails as fodder for her lyrics, but ends up coming off as whiny and petulant rather than deep and introspective. While looking inward led to richer material for some recent pop superstars (Christina Aguilera, Pink), the problem is that behind Lohan's outer vapidity lies only a deeper inner vapidity. Robbed of almost all its sense of fun, Lohan's guitar-driven pop sounds tired and strained. In that way, it's a perfect reflection of her career.
Josh Bell
Garage a Trois
Outre Mer (3 stars)
Loosely translated, Outre Mer is French for "Charlie Hunter will behave himself on this disc." Too bad; Garage's last CD, 2003's jazz/funk gem Emphasizer, was considerably goosed by squalls of Hunter's wild-hair guitar. This time, Garage still brings the funk but they don't bring the noise—Hunter mostly keeps his strings in check. Which leaves Outre Mer a Skerik-forward disc, Skerik being the band's honk-happy saxman. This may be because Outre Mer was conceived as the soundtrack to a French film that, like all French films, involved a midget and the meaning of life, clearly a story best backed by blurting sax lines rather than neo-Hendrix squealing. The film thing may have also curtailed the kitchen-sink experimentalism that made Emphasizer such loopy fun.
But because even a restrained Garage is still pretty adventurous, and because Skerik is a terrific saxophonist—silky one minute, avant-funky the next—several tracks bounce just right: the back-alley slink of "Etienne," the perky bop of "Merpati" and "The Dwarf."
Still, Hunter's razor-wire fretwork is tangibly absent; without its intensifying effect, there's measurably less joie in this disc's de vivre. One more thing to hold the French accountable for.