RECORDINGS : Quick Spins

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

LAX

The Game

Having spent his career scowling for the cameras, the Game's face muscles are looking pretty buff. But with "LAX," the Compton, Calif., rapper's third album, that perennially knotted brow finally feels authentic: It's surely the grimace of an artist flummoxed by his own lack of imagination.

The album opens with a few stillborn attempts to re-create the dystopian California streetscapes made famous by N.W.A more than 20 years ago. With "LAX Files," the Game's Los Angeles feels like a cheap Hollywood soundstage -- an environment ripe for tiresome gun talk and directionless threats. Obligatory g-funk synths wheeze and weave through "State of Emergency," and even a cameo from Ice Cube fails to lend much gravitas to the proceedings. "Cali Sunshine" offers more of the same, verses thick with tough talk and a fumbling plea: "Don't you ever, ever leave me out the top 10!"

For a rapper so obsessed with greatness, the Game still hasn't learned that laboriously name-checking his heroes won't earn him a place in their pantheon. The recent single "My Life" takes that bad habit to new lows, making direct or tangential references to Tupac, Biggie, Rakim, Dr. Dre, Kanye West (twice), Mary J. Blige, Common, Erick Sermon, Kurt Cobain, John Lennon . . .

Yet, with any album this stultifying, the slightest left turns can exhilarate. The knotted backing beat of "Ya Heard" rides a glitchy Newcleus sample into the California sunset, while the Kanye West-produced "Angel" provides more sputtery goodness, gleefully bouncing on a nubby g-funk bass line. You can almost imagine the Game's knotted mug unfurling into a grin. Almost.

--Chris Richards

DOWNLOAD THESE:"Ya Heard," "Angel"

SOMEWHERE

Eva Cassidy

Most people in the Washington area who follow pop music know about Eva Cassidy -- about how she beguiled local audiences with her lithe, smoky alto, only to die of melanoma in 1996 (at age 33) and go on to sell millions of records. "Somewhere," the latest of her posthumously released CDs, from Blix Street Records, is the singer's first to contain songs she had a hand in writing.

"Early One Morning," the first of the two originals on the record, is a country-blues-styled adaptation of an old English folk song. The other Cassidy co-write serves as the album's title and closing track, a searching number written with bass player and producer Chris Biondo.

But the real news here, at least to those who never saw her perform live, is her facility and command with such a wide range of material. Culled from live and studio recordings made between 1990 and 1996, the CD finds her moving forcefully from Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools," reimagined as a jazzy romp, to the brassy blues of Bobby "Blue" Bland's "Ain't Doin' Too Bad."

Cassidy also torches up some country and bluegrass-inflected material -- a good decade, it's worth noting, before Norah Jones made it fashionable. Her gauzy take on the Alison Krauss-identified "If I Give My Heart" features her brother Dan on fiddle. Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors," meanwhile, is recast with Anglo-Celtic folk overtones reminiscent of Sandy Denny, another unforgettable singer who died much too young.

-- Bill Friskics-Warren

DOWNLOAD THESE:"Ain't Doing Too Bad," "Chain of Fools," "Coat of Many Colors"

JOIN THE BAND

Little Feat

If nothing else, "Join the Band" -- Little Feat's celebration of its 40th anniversary with help from Dave Matthews, Jimmy Buffett, Chris Robinson, Vince Gill, Bob Seger, Mike Gordon, Béla Fleck, Emmylou Harris, Brooks and Dunn, Sam Bush and other friends -- will keep you guessing:

Is Matthews an inspired choice to handle the lead vocals on "Fat Man in the Bathtub"? (Yes, as it turns out.)

Is Phish bassist Gordon's contribution to Little Feat's cover of "This Land Is Your Land" noteworthy? (Not really.)

Is Brooks and Dunn's take on "Willin' " mostly distinguished by Little Feat guitarist Paul Barrere and his longtime band mate, keyboardist Bill Payne? (Yes, again.)

Are Gill, Bush, Fleck and slide guitarist Sonny Landreth in typically resourceful form? (Sure.)

And will Parrotheads embrace the album's two Buffett-Feat collaborations -- "Champion of the World" and "Time Loves a Hero"? (Like an inflatable shark, no doubt.)

In addition to Matthews's cameo, a few other tracks stand out on this colorful but scarcely compelling session, either because a song perfectly suits a guest (witness Seger's romping version of "Something in the Water") or because a kindred spirit -- Robinson, for one -- clearly clicks with Little Feat. While no guest is more welcome than Harris, who helps revive "Sailin' Shoes," it's also a treat to hear Inara George, daughter of Little Feat's late founder Lowell George, soulfully paired with pianist Payne on "Trouble."

But judged by Little Feat standards, "Join the Band" isn't long on soulful pleasures -- just big names.

--Mike Joyce

DOWNLOAD THESE:"Something in the Water," "Sailin' Shoes"

FORTH

The Verve

By the time it finally got around to breaking up in 1999, the Verve had released the masterly album "Urban Hymns." Its members also seemed to dislike each other with the sort of withering intensity usually reserved for professional cage fighters, or members of Oasis.

Obviously, a reunion was inevitable.

The band's fourth disc, "Forth," follows the First Law of Unnecessary Band Reunions (otherwise known as the Why Don't We Just Play Coachella and See How It Goes theory), which holds that the more sacred a group's legacy, the more likely its members are to return and muck it all up.

"Forth" wants to have it all -- the shambolic weirdness of the band's first discs, the relatively compact hooks that characterized hits like "Bitter Sweet Symphony," all wrapped in the studio wizardry of the present day. But like its similarly reunited brothers-in-space-rock Spiritualized, the Verve hasn't improved as much as it's more firmly become what it already was.

"Forth" is as dreamily pretty as the band's best discs, but as woefully unfocused as its worst: For every track like the buzzy, sample-happy lead-off single "Love Is Noise," there are countless longer-than-they-need-to-be experimental pop songs (such as the alarmingly literal "Noise Epic") that go nowhere slowly.

"Forth" feels like an exercise in disillusionment and regret in both the lyrical and literal sense, and the increasingly Byronic Richard Ashcroft makes no effort to temper the mood: He might as well be holding up a sign that says, I'm not happy about this, either.

-- Allison Stewart

DOWNLOAD THESE:"Love Is Noise," "I See Houses"