MUSIC BOX |
Scott Dickensheets
Martin Stein |
RYAN ADAMS
(3 stars)
ROCK N ROLL
The ridiculously prolific Ryan Adams has reportedly recorded something like four albums' worth of material since his 2001 breakthrough Gold, and his record label clearly doesn't know what to do with him. A collection of demos (Demolition) was released last year, and now Adams has put out Rock N Roll, his "official" follow-up to Gold. Adams fans who gravitated to his rootsy, alt-country sound will be thoroughly baffled by Rock N Roll, though, which finds Adams sounding like he heard some garage-rock records and figured he might try to jump on that bandwagon this week.
That is, it sounds just as tossed-off as Demolition, and while Adams is a strong enough songwriter and musician, you can't help but feel that Rock N Roll is just another lark. Clearly influenced by The Strokes, Interpol and The White Stripes, Adams ends up aping '70s and early-'80s rock with none of the life that those bands bring to it. He sounds like Elvis Costello ("Burning Photographs"); he sounds like early U2 ("So Alive"); he sounds like Tom Petty ("Wish You Were Here"). Rarely, however, does he sound like Ryan Adams.
Josh Bell
GARY NUMAN
(1 stars)
MUTATE-SPECIAL EDITION
Ever heard the sound of dead men singing?
Word of advice to Gary Numan: stop the pain.
Get back into flying, take care of your newborn, dote on your wife. But do one thing most of us who suffered through Hybrid, a collection of old Numan "favorites" remixed and remade, and its accompanying Mutate DVD, are now begging you to do.
Stop the pain.
Back in, oh, 1980, we high-school boys had already started making fun of that new techno background sound that seemed to be the focus of every new Euro-band with a synthesizer: doop-doop-KAH, doop-doop-KAH. So imagine my chagrin to hear the same, by-now-classic bass beat shaking my rearview mirror. That's not to say Numan, who reached the zenith of his career with that wonderfully herky-jerky ode to introversion, 1979s "Cars," hasn't grown. He has. He's now reached, say, the level of 1980s Spandau Ballet.
As for that taste of the funereal? Nothing like a monotonic rendition of "Cars" to let you know Numan's singing career is 6 feet under.
Joe Schoenmann
THE BEATLES
(3 stars)
LET IT BE. . .NAKED
As Beatles aficionados have pointed out, in ways big and small, this is a misleadingly titled release. But there has always been controversy tied to attempts to release music from the hours upon hours of Let It Be tapes the Beatles and George Martin walked away from in 1969.
This is the third attempt to salvage the tension-fraught, yet highly productive sessions. The first was the heavily bootlegged Get Back, which mirrored the band's original view of Let It Be as a back-to-basics project. Then came the official Let It Be, where producer Phil Spector added his trademark Wall of Sound to the session tapes.
Falling halfway between, Naked creates a seamless experience out of the work-in-progress tapes while removing all of Spector's unwelcome additions. Highlights include McCartney's "The Long and Winding Road" without strings and Lennon's "Across The Universe," in which Spector had slowed the tape, restored to its original speed.
Richard Abowitz