Bruce Springsteen
We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (4 stars)
One of the only wrong notes of We Shall Overcome: the Seeger Sessions is the misnomer of the title: Springsteen may have looted Pete Seeger's albums for the songs, but the resulting compilation of traditional folk tunes, ballads, chanteys and gospel hymns are no more Seeger's than anybody else's. It almost as if Springsteen were keeping up a scorecard with Bob Dylan and needed his own influence to match Woody Guthrie.
But the album does feel like it was a long time coming—I find it frankly amazing that we've never heard Springsteen singing over a banjo before. The ensemble—gathered by E Street violinist Soozie Tyrell—is a crowded congeries of horns, strings and rough-hewn percussion that packed into Springsteen's Jersey farmhouse for three impromptu sessions between 1997 and 2006. What they've produced is one long, splendid hootenanny.
The band makes a joyous racket, and on the songs "O Mary Don't You Weep," "John Henry" and "Jacob's Ladder," Springsteen yells and hollers as he hasn't done since the salad days of Greetings from Asbury Park. (It's no coincidence that the most inspiring songs are Negro spirituals.) Actually, Springsteen's voice is one of the least sure instruments in the band. On many tracks, especially the dark Irish ballad "Mrs. McGrath," you hear him over-gravelling and over-growling—in general over-singing to try to give the songs the spleen he thinks they require. But the stridency feels unnatural. It's the countrified folk of "My Oklahoma Home" and "Shenandoah," with their echoes of The Ghost of Tom Joad, that in contrast seem to fall into Springsteen's voice and are the loveliest tracks here.
On the entertaining DVD that B-sides the CD, Springsteen says he's trying to put these protest songs into a new context and give them a modern relevance. I don't think he really has: Campaign woes aside, it's not clear that Springsteen has anything particular he needs to overcome, which is why the title song has all the urgency of a bedtime lullaby. But when the banjo's twanging, the violins are weeping, the tuba's blatting and the Boss is singing "We are climbing Jacob's ladder / We are brothers and sisters, all," it's better not to be thinking about politics.
PEARL JAM
Pearl Jam (3.5 stars)
Fifteen years ago, Pearl Jam helped pull mainstream rock from a trash-heap precipice built upon Poison's "Unskinny Bop" and Rod Stewart's "Downtown Train," infusing integrity and edge into a musical culture sorely in need of it. For the better part of a decade, however, the Seattle quintet has resembled the dinosaurs it once slayed, filling three straight studio projects with generally undistinguished arena rock.
The eponymous title of album No. 8 suggests Pearl Jam hopes to wipe that slate clean and start anew, and in that mission the band largely fails. Where Vitalogy dabbled in oddball experimentation and No Code invited Eastern influences, Pearl Jam sounds like, well, Pearl Jam, rocking out to fist-pumping anthems as the group has since Ten.
This time, though, familiarity doesn't breed redundancy. Tired, formulaic songwriting has been supplanted by the clarity and vigor of PJ's younger days. Opening trio "Life Wasted," "Worldwide Suicide" and "Comatose" fires the disc from a cannon. The seven-minute "Inside Job" caps it off with simmering slow burn. Two of the best cuts, "Unemployable" and "Army Reserve," even demonstrate a rediscovered ability to tuck serious topics into pleasant packages, as Pearl Jam once did with catchy tunes about depression, child abuse and suicide.
Pearl Jam isn't likely to attract many new fans, and it certainly won't alienate die-hards. As for everyone else, there's never been a better opportunity to determine whether that band you used to love is worth loving again.
Tool
10,000 Days (3.5 stars)
Tool is timeless. In waiting so long between albums, the LA art-rockers have transcended the heavy-metal movement they were part of in the '90s, ignoring trends—including the ones they inspired—and forging their own idiosyncratic path. It's been five years since the band's last album, 2001's Lateralus, but the follow-up, 10,000 Days, sounds like a perfect transition, expanding on many of the sounds the band explored last time while bringing some much-needed concision back to their sound.
Which, for Tool, means that the leanest songs still hover around the seven-minute mark, and the only ones shorter than five minutes are the weird filler tracks that they insist on including. But "Jambi," "The Pot" and lead single "Vicarious" are as intense and direct as anything the band's done, and they don't meander like some of the heavier songs on Lateralus did.
Even the ambient noise tracks contribute to an overall sense of otherworldliness, although the album could do without them. And while the epic, 11-minute-plus title track and "Rosetta Stoned" are suitably grandiose, they also are a bit unfocused, which has been Tool's biggest problem as its ambitions have grown. 10,000 Days still doesn't live up to the band's phenomenal 1996 Aenima, but it does prove that the last five years weren't spent in vain.
Thursday
A City by the Light Divided (4 stars)
It's hard to imagine Thursday creating an album denser or darker than its previous effort, the post-9/11 powerhouse War All the Time, but on A City by the Light Divided the New Jersey-based band does just that.
Gone is lead singer Geoff Rickly's hopeful Robert Smith-wail. Gone are the open, spacious arrangements. In their place are thick, layered walls of guitars and keyboards, topped by Rickly's richer, matured voice. The band links to its past with "The Other Side of the Crash," which hearkens back to the band's breakthrough 2001 album Full Collapse, sounding less like a follow-up than a send-off: "Don't look away/I need to know/When will this end?"
On "Running from the Rain," the band pulls a U2, reverb-heavy guitar echoing in the background while Rickly croons earnestly over swelling synths and driving rhythms. "Autumn Leaves Revisited," the epic seven-minute closer, induces chills with its dynamic shades of musical color, ebbing and flowing with a complexity that would not be out of place on a Godspeed You Black Emperor! album.
Thursday has always been a little disturbed about something—hence the band often getting lumped in with "emo" acts. But the sextet's multilayered approach comes from hard-core roots, and with A City by the Light Divided, the band has created something approaching epic—dare we say operatic—proportions.
Alejandro Escovedo
The Boxing Mirror (3 stars)
Alejandro Escovedo understands better than most that the point of life is living. While many artists can't help but create grand conceits for their work while fixating on the quest for success, Escovedo understands that life is already an epic battle without any added complications. So why not just be as happy as possible, write great songs, revel in each moment and let everything else work itself out?
Well, "revel" is probably not quite the right word for a man who can sound a lot like Neil Young and has written a wonderful album largely inspired by his almost deadly battle with hepatitis C. But songs like "Notes on Air" ponder mortality by simultaneously offering the saddest of lyrics—"I had to bury my daughter today"—and defiantly celebratory music. This is a man who understands the point of whistling in the graveyard and his attitude is pretty, well, punk rock. Songs like "Break This Time" and "Take Your Place" are bleak, no doubt, but they're barroom anthems, too.