The All-American Rejects (2 stars)
Move Along
There comes a point at which calling yourself "Rejects" is just laughable. With their Abercrombie looks, TRL appearances, swooning teen-girl fans and polished, hooky power-pop, the All-American Rejects are anything but rejects.
Their second album, Move Along, is a bland, safe collection of radio-friendly songs proving that emo can be just as uninteresting and disposable as dance pop, while still being at least twice as self-important.
There is nothing particularly memorable about Move Along, although you may find yourself inadvertently humming the title track or lead single "Dirty Little Secret" in the way you would hum "I Want it That Way" and then feel guilty about it later.
The Rejects are perfectly competent songwriters, adding piano, strings and even a children's chorus to their guitar-driven tunes. But their songs, full of generic angst that's hard to take from such photogenic rock stars, are immediately forgettable.
They may not actually be rejects, but they certainly deserve to be.
Iggy Pop (4 stars)
A Million In Prizes: The Anthology
Iggy Pop's withered body and craggy face embody decades spent rocking his life away: "I Got A Right!" "Search and Destroy," "Raw Power," "Real Wild Child (Wild One)," "Loose," "I Need More." Over the years, Iggy has been a Stooge, a decadent, a glam-rocker, a new-waver, an adult artist, a metal monster and these days he's kicking it with the latest garage revival.
A Million In Prizes does an admirable job gathering exhibits from all of these incarnations, as well as making sense of a career that was consistently exuberant, though never consistent. But as the great philosopher Pete Townshend once noted: It's the singer, not the song, that makes the music move along.
And no matter the band, the material, the decade or the production, Iggy Pop's lust for life pulses through each track, and yes, he really does go to 11.
Def Jazz (4 stars)
Various artists
Buoyed by critical acclaim for his Unwrapped collection—mostly instrumental CDs that melded smooth jazz and hip-hop—producer Tony Joseph follows up with Def Jazz, lending the talents of jazz notables like Gerald Albright, Roy Hargrove, Dwight Sills and others to a catalog of songs from Def Jam Records, hip-hop's version of Motown.
A bit truncated at 10 tracks, Def Jazz is nonetheless an easy, breezy listen that works as well as a CD as it does as a game: jazz lovers, without looking at the liner notes, can try to guess which songs Albright (on the saxophone), Hargrove (on the trumpet) and Stills (on the guitar) perform on. Hip-hop heads, see if you can identify the tunes using only the jazz beats.
Best of the bunch are "All I Need," blessed by Albright and Hargrove; Oran "Juice" Jones reprising his 1985 caught-red-handed-cheating hit, "The Rain," with singer Ledisi; and "Can I Get A ...," which infuses Jay-Z's double-barreled rebuke of gold diggers with Miles Davis' cool.