Tuesday, June 24, 2008
SAINTS OF LOS ANGELES
Motley Crue
Faced with listening to a new Motley Crue album, one might find the second track's chorus appropriate. "I'd rather be dead!" Vince Neil squeals. "I'd rather be face down in the dirt with a bullet in my head!" Neil, 47, singing through the eyes of a young slacker, is referring to the threat of getting a real job. The confessional continues on "What's It Gonna Take" -- which chronicles the Crue's early struggles -- and more anthems about the good ol' days based on "The Dirt," the group's autobiography. "Do you remember wheeen?" Neil begs during "Down at the Whisky," recalling the Sunset Strip's sleaze mecca. "We never made a dime, but, God, we had a good time."
Rockers reminiscing in rocking chairs? What's a graying hair band supposed to do, pen boneheaded tunes about sex? (The vulgar "This Ain't a Love Song" fits that bill. And sorta rules.) Songwriting mastermind and bassist Nikki Sixx may not be as sharp as a junkie's needle, but he's self-aware. He realizes that the Crue's fans are now dragging their offspring to Rocklahoma and fondly relishing their own skanky pasts.
The riffs aren't quite as lasting as the memories. They easily could soundtrack a kegger, but most stick like temporary tattoos. Guitarist Mick Mars still won't win any shredding contests, and overrated drummer Tommy Lee probably should just marry Meg White. Still, the title track rekindles "Shout at the Devil"-era evil, and the album's boozy memories of girls, girls, girls do sound genuine -- if not downright wistful. Cheer up, fellas, there's always the chance of starring in VH1's "Rock of Love 3."
-- Michael Deeds
Motley Crue plays Nissan Pavilion on July 13.
DOWNLOAD THESE:"Saints of Los Angeles," "This Ain't a Love Song"
REAL ANIMAL
Alejandro Escovedo
Perhaps it is no coincidence that veteran Austin singer-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, who signed with Bruce Springsteen's management company in March, kicks off his latest album with a song that obviously draws from Springsteen's "The Rising." Of course, "Always a Friend" is hardly a copycat. Escovedo's clear Christmas bell of a voice is incapable of resembling anything but itself, and his big-band sound of blood-drawing electric guitars, booming drums and droning cellos is one of the most distinctive in rock. But it benefits from Boss-style pop tightness, well-placed "oh-oh-oh-ohs," a killer string-based melody and lyrics with snakeskin boots.
Escovedo, a not-so-recovering punk rocker who played in the amazing but almost-forgotten bands Rank and File, the Nuns and the True Believers, has always incorporated such hard-edged influences as Iggy and the Stooges and the Velvet Underground into his genteel persona. He has rarely been so explicit about it. On the ferocious "Smoke," over a guitar spitting out one "Search and Destroy"-type riff after another, Escovedo shouts, "Do the stroll!" Later, on the especially damaging "Nuns Song," which looks back to his early days in bands, Escovedo adds: "We don't want your approval!"
The other side of Escovedo is confessional and folkie crooner, and changes of pace like "Sensitive Boys" give the album a soft-spoken country soul. Escovedo can't rock every second, after all; he's 57 and recently overcame hepatitis C, which on "Golden Bear" he calls "the creature in my body." But it was nothing a little raw power couldn't cure.
-- Steve Knopper
DOWNLOAD THESE:"Smoke," "Chip 'N' Tony," "Sensitive Boys"
LUNADA
Thalía
Shortly after Shakira sold millions of copies of her English-language debut, Thalía Sodi, a Mexican telenovela actress, sometime Kmart pitchwoman and Latin pop superstar, launched her own crossover career, one for which she seemed spectacularly ill-suited. After the modest success of "Thalía," the 2003 (mostly) English-language disc that awkwardly positioned her as Ashanti 2.0, she returned to making albums in Spanish, of which "Lunada" is her latest, and best.
Thalía (the wife, it hardly needs to be said, of Tommy Mottola, onetime Henry Higgins to Mariah Carey and Jennifer Lopez) is guileless and likable, unsuited for even Kylie Minogue-level sexual precocity. "Lunada," produced by Emilio Estefan Jr., the king of meticulously rendered M.O.R. Latin pop, seems a natural fit. It's cheerful and uncomplicated, a hodgepodge of neon-colored dance tracks ("Con Este Amor"), modified calypso ("Isla Para Dos") and reggae ("Insensible"), power ballads ("Desolvidandote") and unthreatening urban pop ("Adventurero").
Powered by the sort of bleating synths and standard-issue beats that would have felt dated during the first Clinton administration, "Lunada" fizzes when it should smolder. The disc's pronounced unadventurousness makes Thalía's ostensible rival, Paulina Rubio, seem like Sigur Rós by comparison, but its tameness ultimately works in her favor, preserving the viability of Thalía the brand even as it reduces Thalía the artist to an afterthought.
-- Allison Stewart
DOWNLOAD THESE:"Ten Paciencia," "Será Porque Te Amo," "Con Este Amor"
HERCULES AND LOVE AFFAIR
Hercules and Love Affair
Club kids and/or students of classical mythology, report to the dance floor. Your summer nights have a dazzling new soundtrack thanks to the labors of Andrew Butler, a Brooklynite recording neoclassical disco under the name Hercules and Love Affair. His debut album pulsates with beats and bass lines that hark back to the '70s and lyrics that plead with the gods of antiquity.
Butler's vision is a fantastic one, but he isn't dancing by himself.
The 29-year-old's supporting cast resembles a futuristic Family Stone -- or maybe a cooler, 21st-century C+C Music Factory -- with singers Kim Ann Foxman and Nomi adding chilly coos to "Athene" and "You Belong," respectively, and bassist Tyler Pope double-dribbling across the fretboard during "Blind." But Butler's greatest coup comes with the employ of Antony, the androgynous warbler of Antony and the Johnsons, whose vocal histrionics were made for this kind of music. "My heart it won't stand still," Antony sings on "Time Will," trilling in a register somewhere between bereft house diva and Arthur Russell.
Butler has often stated his admiration of Russell, the late disco maverick who used a panoply of influences to create a dance-floor language all his own. And while Butler hasn't mastered that kind of alchemy here, he's on his way, grabbing fistfuls of shimmering disco, crunchy electro, throbbing acid house, and snapping them together like so many Lego bricks. To hear the final product is to be swept away by it. Polyester toga not included.
-- Chris Richards
DOWNLOAD THESE:"Athene," "Blind," "You Belong"
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