Bob Dylan
MODERN TIMES (3.5 stars)
Dylan In a radio interview a few years back, musician and semipro Dylanologist Robyn Hitchcock was asked his thoughts on the man from Hibbing's recent work. You could almost hear Hitchcock's discomfort. Yes, the music's great, he said—but how can he be so damned ungrateful? Really, complaining was a central element to the dark, flinty sound of Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft, apotheosized in the soundtrack single "Things Have Changed," that goosepimpling ode to cynicism.
But with Modern Times, Dylan's first album in five years, the world's greatest disappointment artist has temporarily set down his gripes by the riverside. It's his most sweet-natured, soft-toned, romantic production since ... well, you may have to track back to New Morning to find its equal in swooniness. "I've already confessed," Dylan sings on "Thunder on the Mountain," "no need to confess again."
Modern is circa 1936, the era of Bessie Smith and Robert Johnson's gut-bucket blues, of Charlie Chaplin's silent film of the same name, and from whence Dylan has picked up his Theme-Time XM radio shtick. (Only Dylan, the allegedly "topical songwriter," could sing "The Levee's Gonna Break," as though blithely unaware a large levee really did break not so long ago.) The sound is stripped-down steel guitar, bass and metronomic percussion and the results are mixed. "Thunder on the Mountain" and "Rollin' and Tumblin'" set memorable, lively grooves, but the trance-like beat of bare-bones blues becomes monotonous on later tracks.
One variation comes from the Hawaiian guitar on "When the Deal Goes Down" and "Beyond the Horizon," two unabashed love ballads. Hard to believe, but these songs, evoking Paul Anka as much as Muddy Waters, flirt on the fringes of schmaltz, and are perhaps only saved by Dylan's genius for weird, uncategorized lyrics. "There's an evenin' haze settlin' over town/Starlight by the edge of the creek," he sings over tinkling piano on "Workingman's Blues #2," but before the whole thing goes to sap adds, "The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down/Money's gettin' shallow and weak."
Much of this music, you feel, is merely sidelight to Dylan's voice, which is unstoppably beautiful. Who else can croon and croak in a single line? A person's voice shouldn't be able to go honeyed-dulcet and scratched-acetate in the same stanza, but Dylan's does with impossible ease.
On "Spirit on the Water," the best song on Modern Times, everything coalesces—the lovely, steady calm-tide groove, the simple, sincere love lyrics, the voice that purrs and growls. It's a tune destined for mix-tape immortality, and it makes you believe that when a man is in the mood to sing love songs, no one had better complain.
Jessica Simpson
A PUBLIC AFFAIR (2.5 stars)
As she's primarily known for appearing on reality TV and in tabloids, Jessica Simpson's musical career has always seemed like a secondary concern (quick—can you name her biggest hit?). But the title track from her fourth album sounds at first like it could change all that. Breezy, fun and irresistibly catchy, "A Public Affair" strongly recalls Madonna's "Holiday," but in a way that manages to come off more as homage than rip-off. Simpson and producer Lester Mendez concoct a refreshingly unpretentious '80s throwback and offer some hope that Simpson has finally found her own distinctive style.
And the first six songs on A Public Affair make a fairly strong case for Simpson as her generation's Debbie Gibson (or at least her generation's Tiffany). She covers "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)," samples The Cars' "Just What I Needed" on "B.O.Y." and emulates early Madonna and Janet Jackson to great effect, especially on "If You Were Mine," which is almost as good as "A Public Affair."
After that, things fall apart. Simpson abandons the stylistic consistency of the album's first half to indulge in half-baked pastiches of swing ("Swing With Me"), country (the atrocious "Push Your Tush") and hip-hop (the limp "Fired Up"), but she can't touch Christina Aguilera's recent big-band reinvention or Gretchen Wilson's redneck exuberance ("Push Your Tush" features the least convincing "Yee-ha!" ever recorded).
The syrupy ballads are utterly disposable and don't even showcase Simpson's voice very well, although she turns in a nice version of Patty Griffin's "Let Him Fly." But the album ends with Simpson as confused as ever about who she is as a musical performer and, title track aside, she isn't likely to convince anyone that her singing is more interesting than who she's dating.
THE ROOTS
GAME THEORY (3.5 stars)
Though they endure as hip-hop's top live act, The Roots have grown less and less reliable as a recording unit throughout their second decade. Consistently fresh and charismatic in the '90s, the gifted Philadelphia crew has spent the 2000s chasing a sound just beyond its reach, experimenting wildly yet fathering few of the transcendent tracks it once crafted with frequency and apparent ease.
It took a union with Def Jam Records and label head Jay-Z to shake The Roots free of their recent arty tendencies, though, unexpectedly, the end result could actually be the group's least commercial effort since its earliest days. Ludacris and LL Cool J might call Def Jam home, but folks won't be partying to Game Theory this fall, unless they find unrelentingly dark, politically charged lyrics about military buildups, oil policies and the international drug trade cause for celebration.
"America's lost somewhere inside of Littleton/Eleven million children, all on ritalin/Pilgrim, slave, Indian, Mexican/It looks real fucked up for your next of kin," Black Thought announces on lead-off cut "False Media," and the rugged-voiced MC rarely lightens up from there. Addictively disquieting production from studio whiz ?uestlove (including a sample from Radiohead's ultra-creepy "You and Whose Army?"), along with guest spots from ex-member Malik B. and a host of up-and-comers, enhance a supremely cohesive, if somewhat wearying, album that concludes, fittingly, with a heartsick eight-minute tribute to late beatmaster Jay Dee.
Basement Jaxx
CRAZY ITCH RADIO (2.5 stars)
I loved this British duo's first two house-infected albums, but after feeling hammered into the ground by 2003's highly regarded (and, to my ears, ridiculously fatiguing) Kish Kash, I assumed my infatuation had run its course. But then, tagged on to last year's greatest-hits package The Singles was a new song called "Oh My Gosh," and it was fantastic: as far-out-there as any other Jaxx single, and yet it somehow managed to not clobber you over the head with unrelenting enormity of sound. It was actually quite sweet-sounding, and it made me a fan all over again.
And now—well, I'm not so sure. Too true to its title, Crazy Itch Radio has me squirming in my seat and occasionally checking my watch. It's not that the execution is off—Jaxx's mastery behind a mixing board has never been in dispute—it's that too many of their ideas just don't add up. And some are just not great ideas to begin with: For no good reason I can think of, "On the Train" resurrects "Stray Cat Strut"'s walking-down bass pattern, and "Hey U"'s Kurt Weill-to-a-disco-beat, while cleverly constructed, is wholly unappetizing.
There is one crowd-pleaser here, "Take Me Back to Your House," a banjo-bangin' dance-floor hustler that, technically speaking, is first rate. Still, as any wedding DJ worth his salt will tell you, it's no "Cotton-Eyed Joe."
THE MOUNTAIN GOATS
GET LONELY (2.5 stars)
John Darnielle is one of the most prolific American songwriters of the past two decades. Under his alter ego, The Mountain Goats, Darnielle has recorded some 400 songs released on no fewer than 14 full-length discs and a satchel of EPs. But although he's almost universally adored by the critics, I had a hard time fighting through his latest release without diving for my thesaurus in search of adjectives for "melancholy." (See also: brooding, downcast, gloomy.)
The more sensitive listener will go through two Kleenex boxes, minimum, in absorbing these 12 odes to lost love and its attendant byproduct, numbing loneliness. And if that's what you're looking for, great. But Darnielle sprinkles in enough mournful cello and plaintive Hammond organ against his trusty acoustic guitar to make you question whether you picked the wrong week to wean yourself from the Prozac.
It's not that he can't turn a phrase. Lyrics like "Autumn came around like a drifter to an on-ramp" paint vivid pictures of searing heartache. But when the lone up-tempo song backs its bouncy guitar line with a chorus of "Can't get you out of my head/Lost without you, half-dead," you're left looking over your shoulder to the east, just to make sure the sun actually will rise in the morning.