Category: Album Reviews

The most famous of Frank Sinatra’s pioneering Concept Albums all come from his Capitol and Reprise years, but he did make a few during his early tenure at Columbia records. The two that get the most attention are The Voice of Frank Sinatra (arguably the first Pop album ever to have a truly unified sound) and Swing and Dance with Frank Sinatra (his first Swing album and the one that first showed the world he was capable of more than just ballads), but I think this one deserves some attention as well. It has never been released on CD in its original form (for this review, I had to recreate it from tracks on the Complete Columbia Recordings box set), but I’d argue that in its own way, it was just as influential at the time as the aforementioned other two releases.

This album has a particularly clear concept even by Sinatra standards…all but one of the tracks consist of love songs addressed directly to the listener. This had been done before in songs, of course, including some that Sinatra had already recorded, but never in such a focused and deliberate manner. In this fundamental innovation, the album may well have set the stage for virtually all subsequent Teen Pop (take a look at how many boy-band ballads in later years would be addressed to a non-specific “you”). The production now sounds dated as all Hell, with its florid backing choirs, but Sinatra’s actual singing, which is obviously the main attraction, is still as electrifying now as it was when this album was released. Imagine all the erotic vocal tone of a David Bowie, combined with the passion and sensitivity of the greatest romantic actors, and you may have some idea of what an effect this album has.

The first two cuts on the album are slightly more obscure than the rest of the material. The opening track, “The Music Stopped”, is in particular a lovely and lyrical gem that deserves to be better known. The flowing melody and exquisitely poetic lyrics, combined with Sinatra’s hushed and tender performance on the song, get this album off to a quietly stunning start.

The second track, “The Moon Was Yellow (And the Night Was Young)”, would be rerecorded over a decade later for the Moonlight Sinatra album on the Reprise label. But the version of the song on that album is more delicate and atmospheric, whereas this version is hungrier and more intense, emphasizing the romantic and erotic elements of the song far more than the later version…as you’d expect on an album with this concept.

Two of the songs are drawn from Wright and Forrest’s pasticcio Operetta based on the music of Edvard Grieg, Song of Norway. “I Love You” is the one song in the score with music taken absolutely verbatim from Grieg’s original; it is essentially a translation of the extremely famous love song Grieg wrote for his wife to sing. Sinatra throws himself particularly passionately into this one, offering one of the most convincing declarations of love ever heard in Pop music…and aimed, like the rest of this album, directly at the listener. The other Song of Norway tune, “Strange Music”, was supposedly drawn from Grieg, but in such a contrived way that it is essentially an original Wright and Forrest composition. It is one of the most rhapsodic Operetta ballads out there, and Sinatra’s ringing, ecstatic performance enhances that effect into a nigh-overwhelming romantic sweep.

“Where or When”, from Rodgers and Hart’s Babes in Arms, is delivered in a more low-key manner here, with a quiet, melting tenderness that makes a nice contrast to the intensity of the previous tracks. Sinatra sounds relaxed and at ease here, like he’s actually having a sweetly sensitive conversation with you, and the effect is perhaps the most irresistibly charming of any song on this record.

The album’s one flaw is the inclusion of “None But the Lonely Heart”. It’s a lovely song, with a melody taken from an art song by Tchaikovsky, but it doesn’t really fit into the album’s concept…the word “you” never even appears in the lyrics. On top of that, at the point in his career at which this album was recorded, Sinatra hadn’t really figured out the art of the torch song yet. Of course, he would later become the undisputed king of that song model…indeed, he would make an infinitely more moving recording of this very song for the darkest and most despairing of his torch albums, No One Cares. But during his RCA and Columbia years, while he was phenomenal when it came to caressing love songs, he couldn’t yet capture the real depth of sorrow found in his later work. The consensus among those who knew him seems to be that his split with Ava Gardner in 1954 was his first experience with real heartbreak, and that it taught him how to project real romantic despair because he could now draw on personal experience (it is worth noting that his first truly great album of torch songs, In the Wee Small Hours, came out in 1955). Unfortunately, his performance here, while certainly beautifully sung, is uncomfortably insincere, even phony, and stands as the album’s only real sour note.

On “Always”, Sinatra doesn’t really make much attempt to ‘act’ the song, letting his lush vocals and the song’s legendary Irving Berlin melody carry the track. It isn’t the most compelling cut on the album, but it’s so gorgeous as pure music that it still holds its own. The album closer, “Why Was I Born?”, is traditionally delivered as a torch song, but Sinatra’s honeyed vocals turn it into more of a piece of shameless flattery. The attempt at manipulation is far less subtle than on the rest of the album, but it’s still exceptionally sweet, and given Sinatra’s aforementioned trouble with torch songs at this point in his career, this was probably the wisest strategy to take for this song.

I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to be a hormonal teenage girl in 1950 and be exposed to this album, but I’m genuinely surprised there are no reports of any of them literally bursting into flames. In any case, if any of you have ever wondered how the stereotype of the bobbysoxer swooning at the very sound of Frankie Sinatra’s voice came into existence…this is how.

Lukas Graham were a Danish Soul-Pop band (named after their frontman, Lukas Graham Forchammer), falling more or less within the Adult Alternative genre umbrella, who had a handful of hits from their second album on the U.S. charts in 2016. From a content perspective, they were clearly aiming for the same niche as Twenty One Pilots had with their album Blurryface the year before. However, while Twenty One Pilots favored a kind of light Rap-Rock sound, Lukas Graham’s musical idiom was most heavily influenced by classic-era Motown acts such as the Miracles and the Temptations.

This self-titled release was originally their second album in their native Denmark, and was later adapted into their first international release, with a few songs dropped and a couple of interpolations from their first album included. This album has its flaws (we’ll get to them), but at its best, it contains some of the finest Adult Alternative music of the decade. Eight of the tracks are absolutely amazing, with a rich Motown-esque Soul sound and a depth of introspection and profundity that Twenty One Pilots never even approached.

The lead single, “7 Years”, got some backlash after a prominent internet critic with an irrational hatred for Adult Alternative called it the worst song of 2016, and a number of impressionable internet idiots took his pronouncement as the gospel truth. In reality, it is very probably the best hit song of that year (its only real competition for that title coming from Adele’s “When We Were Young”, another introspective retro-Soul track). The backlash it received can be in large part chalked up to the fact that the band’s frontman is white, Danish, and looks absolutely nothing like most people’s mental picture of a Soul singer, so the fact that he pulled off this sound so flawlessly threw a wrench into many people’s compartmentalized view of the role of ethnicity in music.

Other high points include the scorching “Take the World by Storm”, the glowing “Don’t You Worry ‘Bout Me”, and the bittersweet “Happy Home”. Particularly poignant is “Better Than Yourself (Criminal Mind Pt. 2)”, which relates the story of a real-life friend of Forchammer’s who wound up behind bars. The singer acknowledges that he knows his friend is guilty, but still loves and misses him and believes he is ultimately a good person. Less relevant to the album’s overall point is the breakup ballad “What Happened to Perfect”, but its melody is so exquisitely beautiful that it’s hard to complain.

The album dwells heavily on the then-recent death of Forchammer’s father, which is discussed most directly in the heartbreaking “You’re Not There”. And while Twenty One Pilots’ Blurryface never really came to any resolution at the end, this album does, with “Funeral”, the singer’s exhortation to the people at his own wake to celebrate his life. This is a man who is satisfied with his life and who ultimately has no regrets, which is frankly a much more satisfying way to close out an album that the unresolved angst expressed at the end of Blurryface.

That said, the backlash this album got is not entirely undeserved. This album is a study in extremes: Its best moments scale sublime heights, but it also contains five of the worst songs I’ve ever heard on a Pop album.

It doesn’t help that the incredibly annoying “Mama Said” and the idiotic “Strip No More” were both released as singles. The former sounds like the most grating Jackson 5 pastiche imaginable, with its shrill vocals and infuriatingly perky melody. The latter is the narrative of a self-involved idiot who has convinced himself that a stripper is in love with him, and then acts betrayed when she leaves her job.

“Drunk in the Morning” (one of the aforementioned interpolations from their first album) isn’t much better. It’s possible to write sympathetic songs about calling someone in the middle of the night to ask for sex (look at Lady Antebellum’s classic “Need You Now”, for example), but this smug, self-satisfied gloat isn’t how you do it.

The two songs exclusive to the Danish version of this album are arguably even worse. “Hayo” is one of the most asinine songs of the decade (its message is essentially “Your girlfriend is a slut that’s cheating on you, and by the way I think that’s hilarious”). Meanwhile, “Playtime” is perhaps the most laughably unconvincing attempt at a sex song since the early Justin Bieber singles: at least with “Strip No More”, you could make a case that the band is somewhat aware of what an idiot the protagonist is, but no such hint of self-awareness is visible here.

Still, as wildly uneven as it is, this is nonetheless one of the most important albums of 2016, an immensely ambitious achievement that, say what you will about it, had a massive impact on almost everyone who listened to it. The fact that even the bad songs are spectacularly bad is, in its own way, just another tribute to the album’s level of ambition and intensity. In any case, in spite of its occasional clinkers, I can still unreservedly recommend this album to almost anyone…the sublime tracks more than make up for the bad ones, and it’s just such an obviously important album that anyone who has any interest in modern Pop music whatsoever should really hear it.

This album has received an absurd amount of negative press, mostly from amateur internet critics, but while it does unquestionably have its flaws, I chalk most of that up to the grudge that half the internet seems to have against Meghan Trainor. As far as I can tell, this grudge all boils down to her having released “Dear Future Husband”, which, while not an especially bad song, featured a somewhat old-fashioned view of romantic relationships which sent the online political correctness fanatics into an insane frenzy and which they haven’t forgiven her for to this day. And as we know from the example of Robin Thicke and the “Blurred Lines” controversy, the political correctness types are very good at either brainwashing or browbeating the internet into enthusiastically supporting even their silliest vendettas.

But enough politics…you’re here to read about the album itself. Here, Trainor casts off the authentic retro-Doo-Wop that had been her trademark before in favor of an equally authentic late-Nineties Pop sound. If this album is inferior to her first (and to be perfectly honest, it is), it’s probably because the thing she’s imitating here is simply not as good a field of music as the thing she was imitating then. That said, her achievement in capturing the desired sound is just as uncanny as ever, and if, as seems likely as this point, she becomes one of those artists who take on an entirely different musical idiom for each new album, I’m more than okay with that.

Really, the album’s main problem boils down to a very misguided choice of sequencing, because when you get right down to it, there are only two truly terrible songs on this album. The first is the painful brag rap “Watch Me Do”, wherein Trainor proclaims that she’s “got nice curves/nice breastesses” (I won’t venture to disagree with your thesis, Meghan, but did you have to phrase it that way? That particular made-up word already sounded asinine when Jay-Z used it, and it sounds even worse coming from you). The second one is “Me Too”, which features awful instrumentation straight out of a bad late-career Jason Derulo single (think “Wiggle” or “Get Ugly”), and a repetitive spoken sample that is annoying on about twenty different levels at once.

That said, the rest of the album is mostly decent-to-good, and these songs might have been blessedly lost in the shuffle if the record’s producers hadn’t decided to make them the first two tracks on the album. The prior bias against Trainor notwithstanding, I can almost understand people hearing those first two tracks and deciding they’re going to hate the album right then and there.

The third track, the album’s lead single “No”, is a perfect demonstration of Trainor’s powers of pastiche, an uncanny imitation of a late-Nineties Pop-R&B kiss-off single that might have been recorded by someone like Destiny’s Child. Granted, it isn’t the best track on the album, mostly because the style it captures so flawlessly is one that hasn’t really aged all that well, so the song is ultimately more an impressive feat of pastiche than a great Pop song. Still, you have to respect the skill it must have taken to capture that era’s sound with such uncanny accuracy.

The album’s highlights are “I Love Me”, a collaboration with beloved up-and-coming Rapper Lunchmoney Lewis, and “Champagne Problems”, a tongue-in-cheek, self-mocking twist on the ‘first world problems’ meme; even Trainor’s biggest detractors have proven largely unable to resist those two tracks. But there’s plenty of other strong material here…the truth is that most of this album is actually pretty solid. “Hopeless Romantic” and “Kindly Calm Me Down” are very fine ballads, the former even coming close to her best hit, “Like I’m Gonna Lose You”, in both sound and quality. “Dance Like Yo Daddy” is a highly enjoyable dance jam with some endearingly goofy lyrics, and “Mom”, co-written by Trainor’s younger brother and dedicated to their mother (who actually appears on the song) is beyond adorable. The title track is a collaboration with Reggae fusion duo R. City; it has a similar sound and theme to their earlier hit “Locked Away”, and is of comparably fine quality.

Granted, not all the material is this good. The other Reggae-influenced track on the album, “Better”, is dragged down by an uninspired guest verse by Yo Gotti, though until that verse comes in it’s actually rather striking. The ‘Girl Power’ anthem “Woman Up” is fun but still pretty obvious, and the dreary “Just a Friend To You” and the tepid “I Won’t Let You Down” don’t really offer much of interest (the former actually resembles the, er, title track of Trainor’s first album Title, only with the air of a resigned doormat in place of that song’s feisty defiance).

Still, apart from the first two tracks, nothing else on the album reaches the level of the truly awful, and the good tracks ultimately outnumber the bad. I will admit this album does come as something of a disappointment…it’s certainly not as good as her debut, and being frontloaded with its two worst tracks probably hasn’t help its case much (especially since those tracks wound up being the first promotional single and the second full single, respectively). But while Thank You is ultimately merely good rather than great, it’s certainly not the fiasco than Trainor’s detractors are trying to pretend it is, and if you like her work (as much of the general public does, despite what the critics try to claim), then for all its flaws, it’s actually well worth checking out. Just remember to skip the first two tracks, and you’ll be fine.

Lady Gaga’s brief reign as the Queen of mainstream Pop music came to an end over the course of 2011 for two reasons. One was that Adele showed up that year and immediately made her look like a poser. The other was the quality of her work that year. I don’t know how much of her actual target market listened to entire albums at all at the time, but I have to believe that her fall from the top was at least partly a judgment of artistic karma for making this album.

Lady Gaga was never remotely the genius her followers touted her as at the time, but her first album, The Fame, did contain quite a bit of good material, and her second release, The Fame Monster EP, was actually one of the best mainstream albums of 2009. This trainwreck, however, was completely unworthy of what talent she did have, and the fact that it was one of the best-selling albums of 2011 thanks to her pre-existing stature at the time is still one of the more embarrassing memories from an otherwise excellent year in music. And even after all these years, this is still easily Lady Gaga’s worst album…even her disappointing ‘comeback’ album, Artpop, was at least more competent than this.

Admittedly, this record does contain a handful of gems. The Steinman-esque Rock anthem “The Edge of Glory” and the Pop-Country pastiche “You and I” are two of Lady Gaga’s all-time classics, and the House Music-influenced “Marry the Night”, the wildly intense “Hair” and the Latin-flavored “Americano” also hold up well. But the rest of the album is a ghastly mess of cliched songwriting and unlistenable overproduction. And frankly, apart from perhaps “The Edge of Glory”, even the good songs don’t entirely escape the album’s pervasive production issues.

The production on Lady Gaga’s first two albums, by unsung genius RedOne, made the material seem better than it really was, but the production on this album is absolutely horrible, reaching near-Skrillex levels of migraine-inducing static. There are also a couple of extremely ill-advised attempts at a Heavy Metal sound here (like the aptly named “Heavy Metal Lover”), which have all the power and sophistication of Limp Bizkit on an off day.

The songwriting is better than the production, but not by much. This album was evidently intended to be some kind of love letter to Pop music in general, with varying attempts at pastiche of every variety of Pop music in history. Unfortunately, like all of Lady Gaga’s work (at least in her Pop era), it didn’t have the substance or talent to fulfill its supposed ambition, coming off instead as derivative and scattershot. At times she even seems to be copying herself…for example, “Judas” is just a blatant retread of earlier Lady Gaga songs like “Bad Romance” and “Monster”, only with all the qualities that made those songs interesting removed. Also, I can’t be the only person to notice that the chorus to “Highway Unicorn (Road to Love)” is just the hook from “Poker Face” with different lyrics.

The lyrics are even worse, loaded with clichés and incredibly cheesy but also painfully earnest and self-important, clearly believing they’re articulating profound truths with lines like “I’m a nerd/I chew gum and smoke in your face/I’m absurd”. “Bad Kids” is one of the most generic attempts at a youth rebellion anthem I’ve ever heard, which is no mean feat. “Scheiss” is clearly trying to be Rammstein, with its faux-German nonsense-word chorus, but without that band’s Heavy Metal intensity, it never manages to capture the campy thrill of the original, coming off more as straightforwardly embarrassing.

“Government Hooker” apparently managed to get Lady Gaga in actual trouble with the government, but it’s just another in a long line of controversy-baiting cries for attention, using a lot of shocking buzzwords without ever actually saying anything. At least when Green Day did this kind of thing, they set it to music intense enough to obscure their lack of real content (of course, it also helped quite a bit that said music was actually listenable).

There are also tons of self-consciously positive messages spread throughout this album, which are apparently supposed to make up for the quality of the actual music. Hell, it seems to have worked, at least so far as the title-song is concerned…it became extremely popular for a few years because people felt its message was important, despite the fact that virtually no-one seems to like it as a song. Not only is it a blatant plagiarism in both melody and subject matter of Madonna’s much better song “Express Yourself”, but it is hopelessly cheesy in lyrics and delivery and features the worst case of overproduction on the entire album.

“Black Jesus + Amen Fashion” is even more ridiculous. I can see how the concept sounds progressive in theory, but any attempt at meaningful content is ruined by moronic jokes like “Jesus is the new black”. The result is not only inane, but also insufferably pretentious, which is something of a perennial problem for this album as a whole. It’s like the progressive movement’s gospel according to Paris Hilton.

Of course, judging from the singles alone, many Pop listeners may not have been aware of what a travesty this record was, since most of the very worst material never made it onto the charts. Still, this thing did set sales records as an album, so I think it still probably had a major role in destroying (or at the very least, vastly diminishing) Lady Gaga’s career as a mainstream Pop singer.

This has actually had some positive side-effects, since the quality of her work significantly improved after she stopped trying to regain her old stature as a Pop star and settled into making things like standards albums and socially-conscious Oscar Bait songs and drawing her influences from Classic Rock and Country. Indeed, I imagine we can also indirectly thank this album for a lot of the positive developments in Pop music around that time, given that it helped kill the Club Boom of 09-10, making room for more interesting material to enter the mainstream consciousness. Still, five good songs are not enough to make this a good album, at least when the rest of the material is this appalling, and despite its short-term commercial success, this ranks as one of the spectacular career-destroying disasters of the decade, arguably on a par with Miley Cyrus’ Bangerz.

Now, like everyone who’s even tangentially aware of the internet music criticism scene, I had heard the abundant rumors that this album was an abomination. I had never quite believed them before, partly because I quite enjoyed the album’s lead single, the Fleetwood Mac-esque “West Coast”, and partly because many of the critics who thought this also hated her first album, Born to Die. Besides, the professional critics didn’t seem to have any particular problem with it, several even putting it on their “Best Albums of 2014” ranking, and while the published critics have their blind spots too, I tend to trust their judgment more often than that of the amateur crowd.

Now, for the record, I consider Born to Die to be a modern masterpiece, and one of the finest albums of 2012. But having now listened to the entirety of her follow-up album…yeah, this is just as awful as everyone says.

Remember, Lana Del Rey’s music is in the Baroque Pop style, like Tori Amos or Arcade Fire, and that style absolutely requires flowing, fairly traditional melody for it to work. Well, her first album had that kind of melody in spades, but apart from the deceptively decent lead single, there’s hardly a single tune on this whole album.

“Sad Girls” sounds like one of the saddest attempts at jazz singing I’ve ever heard, while “Cruel World”, “Guns and Roses” and “Florida Kilos” manage just enough melody to be intensely annoying. Granted, “Brooklyn Baby” does have a pretty tune, but unfortunately, it’s the tune of “Summertime Sadness” off her first album (seriously, the melodies are almost identical). By the end of the album, these non-tunes blend together into exactly the kind of musical wallpaper Del Rey’s detractors have always accused her of making. And the final track, “Is This Happiness?”, is wimpy enough to come off as an anticlimax even after this album.

On top of the dreary, tuneless music, the lyrics on this album are terrible. At best, they’re clumsy and uninspired, with none of the biting pith of the lyrics on her first record. At worst, they’re idiotic and unutterably simple-minded (“I’m a sad girl/I’m a sad girl/I’m a sad girl/I’m a sad girl/I’m a bad girl/I’m a bad girl”, for example, or “All those special times I spent with you, my love/They don’t mean shit compared to all your drugs”). , There’s even a song literally called “I Fucked My Way To the Top”—I’m pretty sure that’s meant to be a sarcastic statement, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid as a song lyric.

The most uncomfortable moment on the album is unquestionably the title-song, built around a word coined by the movie A Clockwork Orange to describe extremely brutal sexual violence; it also references the infamous Phil Spector composition “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)”. I gather Del Rey has been through some unpleasant experiences in her life, but this song isn’t creepy in the dramatically effective kind of way…it’s just unpleasant and kind of sickening.

Like I said, I still considered Born to Die one of the finest Indie Pop crossover albums of the decade, but after hearing this garbage, I suddenly understand much more clearly why there are people who don’t like Lana Del Rey as a musician. Fortunately, her next two albums, Honeymoon and Lust for Life, seem to represent a return to form, with all the melody and lyrical wit that seemed to be lacking on this record. Still, I can’t say the internet critics were wrong when they dubbed this one of the worst albums of the current decade, and it’s actually quite hard to believe that the woman who made Born to Die could go so far downhill in the space of one album.

This album opens with a spoken message, saying that it is best listened to “At night, and alone”. And indeed, that is exactly the overall atmosphere of the album…a private, pensive look into the psyche of a gifted songwriter with a fascinating story to tell.

This album is probably more famous for the hit dance remix of its lead single, “I Took a Pill in Ibiza”, than for anything on the album proper. This remix did work surprisingly well, but while it conveys quiet despair with a kind of Plastic Soul feel, the original is more philosophical and ultimately sounds at peace with its sad narrative of a lonely, forgotten one-hit wonder. It is the album’s opening track, and serves as a kind of microcosm for the album as a whole, which is mostly devoted to fleshing out the themes alluded to in “Ibiza”…the romantic loneliness, the bittersweet and fleeting nature of worldly success, and the quiet, philosophical acceptance. The latter in conveyed on the two most beautiful songs on the album, “Be As You Are” and the closing track “Buried in Detroit”, both of which are easily on the same level of beauty and depth as the best actual hit song of 2016, Lukas Graham’s “7 Years”.

The album has been jeered by certain amateur critics for its acoustic Folk-Pop sound (the lower grades of internet critics have a certain reflexive bias against anything played on an acoustic guitar), but it doesn’t really sound much like the usual targets of this group such as John Mayer or Jason Mraz. Posner himself, with his usual charming self-effacement, described the album’s sound as his “trying to make Country music and failing”. What the result actually sounds most like is Baroque Indie Folk, the kind of music made by such bands as Bon Iver, the Decemberists, or Iron and Wine. Only two songs diverge heavily from this sound…the haunting “Only God Knows”, which sounds almost like a throwback to Woody Guthrie, and the blistering Blues-Rocker “Jade”.

Posner himself comes across as immensely charming here. He’s always projected the persona of a humble, down-to-earth everyman; that was a liability early in his career, because at that point he was trying to market himself as a Pop-R&B showbiz personality in the vein of Trey Songz or Taio Cruz, and his persona was laughably inappropriate for that pose. But what was unsuitable for his early efforts proved ideal for a confessional singer-songwriter, and this album shows him to his absolute best advantage. He does indulge in a little boasting of his power on the penultimate track “(I know how to write) One Hell of a Song”, but by that point, he’s earned it. Even Posner’s singing here is the best it’s ever been: he was never a great vocalist, but the bizarre vocal stylings he attempted on his first album (which he describes as his attempt to “sing Hip-Hop”) convinced most of the public that he was a far worse singer than he actually is, and his vocals here, while a little thin in places, are actually quite pretty most of the time.

It’s worth noting that while most of the public had forgotten Posner’s existence between his hit “Cooler Than Me” in 2010 and the success of “I Took a Pill in Ibiza” in 2016, he had actually carried on a thriving career as a behind-the-scenes songwriter in the meantime, as he details on “One Hell of a Song”. The best of his efforts in that vein was the sublime “Beneath Your Beautiful”, a UK Number One hit for British singer Labrinth. Perhaps to repay Posner for writing one of the best songs of the decade for him, Labrinth joins Posner here for the biting “Silence” in the only featured credit on the album proper.

As fine and indeed nearly flawless as the original album is, the deluxe edition does mar its perfection somewhat with a string of ill-advised dance remixes. Granted, the “Ibiza” remix had worked, but it made a certain kind of sense, given that it was already about the pain beneath the mask of the Pop star. The other remixes just come off as out-of-place and unnatural, and do nothing but make the original songs much less interesting. The remix of “Buried in Detroit” does feature a surprisingly good guest verse by Big Sean, but it still doesn’t even approach the impact of the original.

Still, this is easily one of the best albums of 2016…which is saying more than those who only follow the Hot 100 would know, since 2016 was one of those years with a wealth of great Pop albums that was not really reflected by the singles charts. I might even go so far as to call this the best Folk album of its year, since that is what it is at heart…old-school confessional Singer-Songwriter Folk, telling the story of one man’s personal journey with understated music and heartfelt, intelligent lyrics. It’s a classic of a high order, and while Posner’s follow-up to it, Mansionz (a collaboration with his former songwriter partner Blackbear), unfortunately dove straight back into the “singing Hip-Hop” approach that made his first album such a joke, Posner has still established enough clear songwriting talent by now that I’m certain we haven’t seen the last of him yet.

Mandy Patinken is in many ways the Michael Bolton of the Broadway Musical scene. In both cases, the singers are acknowledged even by most of their detractors to have fine voices, but their sometimes frighteningly hammy performance style causes them to get wildly polarized reactions: people either love them or run screaming from the room every time they are played.

For those who are novices to the subject and might be outraged at the comparison I just made, the similarities become a lot clearer on Patinken’s albums than they are in his actual Broadway work. Apart from the LaChiusa Wild Party and the Concert cast of Follies, Patinken usually tones down his trademark mannerisms in his actual Broadway shows…this is particularly true of his two most famous roles in Evita and Sunday in the Park with George. But on his own albums, he tends to let the crazy out, and perhaps no album epitomizes his sheer Mandy-ness as much as this one. The album alternates between slow, drawn-out, almost lugubrious legato singing, wildly hyperactive patter sections and flat-out insane screaming. So if that doesn’t sound like your idea of a good time, this album is probably not for you. If, however, you’re one of the faithful (like me), by all means read on, because I’ve got a treat for you.

This album is the perfect illustration of how to build a true Concept Album entirely out of pre-existing songs. This practice used to be quite common…indeed, when Frank Sinatra essentially invented the Concept Album, this was the approach he used…but it has fallen to the wayside in these singer-songwriter-dominated days. This album is far more than just a standard songwriter anthology…it’s a single unified whole, almost one continuous song, with most of the tracks flowing directly into the next without a break. To illustrate the extent of this, the album was recorded before a live audience, and there are a total of maybe five tracks with applause on them, simply because those are the only places where Patinken stopped singing long enough to allow for it.

I’d argue that of all the Sondheim anthologies I’ve ever heard (and this includes the famous ones that have actually played Broadway, like Side By Side By Sondheim or Putting It Together), this one encapsulates the scope of the man’s artistry better than any other. This is partly becausePatinken sings it like a manic-depressive lunatic, which is exactly the perspective Sondheim generally writes from, but there are certainly other factors.

For one thing, the album frames the entire catalogue with the one Sondheim show Patinken actually appeared in on Broadway, Sunday in the Park with George, beginning and ending with the opening and closing lines of that show. Beyond being something of an obvious choice for Patinken, this has significance because, while Sondheim has never admitted this, the 20^thCentury descendant of George Seurat who is the focus of Sunday’s second act is quite obviously an author avatar for Sondheim himself.

The album focuses primarily on the first eight of Sondheim’s ten peak-period shows. There are only three selections from his Sixties Broadway productions, one from each of the three (“Free” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, “Everybody Says Don’t” from Anyone Can Whistle, and “Take the Moment” from the Richard Rodgers collaboration Do I Hear a Waltz?, the only song here not written solely by Sondheim). Oddly enough, the obscure television musical Evening Primrose gets two selections here (“If You Can Find Me, I’m Here” and “When?”), although given that Patinken was the first to make that score available on recording back in 1990, that’s probably not too terribly surprising.

There is also one song from the Dick Tracy film included (interestingly, Patinken opted here for “Live Alone and Like It” rather than the song he himself had performed in the film, “What Can You Lose?”). For some reason, nothing from the last two shows of Sondheim’s peak era, Assassinsor Passion, was included. Granted, the songs in Assassins are probably too situation-specific for this album’s purposes, but it seems a shame to exclude Passion, as songs like “Happiness”, “I Wish I Could Forget You”, and “Loving You” would have been natural choices for this kind of project. Perhaps Patinken simply saw them as too obvious, given that Passion is already structured in much the same way as this album.

As the album’s neurotic torment gradually seems to grow quieter and more peaceful over the course of the second disc, culminating in an exquisitely gentle solo rendition of the central chorus number “Sunday” from Sunday in the Park with George, it feels like the climax to a hard-won journey toward inner peace. And the closing lines of the album…the same as the lines that close Sunday’s second act…have never sounded as much like Sondheim’s personal credo as they do here: “White—a blank page or canvas. His favorite. So many possibilities”. If you are looking for a way to get the full impact of the Sondheim experience without actually listening to his entire catalogue of cast albums, then, 1. Why? but 2. This album is probably your best bet. And even if you’re not looking for that kind of shortcut, or have already heard the catalogue of works in question, this album is well worth hearing just to further refine your understanding of both of the artists involved.

In 1999 and 2002, Liza Minnelli performed a pair of one-woman concert shows in Broadway and West End theaters. Both were recorded as live albums, and they form a fascinating pair of opposites…the low point and the high point in the autumn of a musical legend’s career.

In theory, 1999’s Minnelli On Minnelli sounded like a great idea for a show—Liza Minnelli performing a tribute to her father, the great Hollywood director Vincente Minnelli, made up entirely of songs from his many classic musical movies. But due to a combination of unfortunate factors, the end result turned out to be one of the biggest embarrassments of Liza’s career.

This is particularly odd because Minnelli is especially famous for her spectacularly great live albums. In fact, the best albums of her career other than her Broadway cast albums and the Cabaret soundtrack are all live albums…the London Palladium concert with her mother, the Winter Garden album, the Carnegie Hall recording, Liza With a Z…the list goes on and on. But this is easily the worst live album Minnelli ever made (trust me, I own all of them). The entire show and the recording it left behind is just a sad spectacle all around, and one of the few blemishes on a truly great performer’s otherwise illustrious career.

First of all, she’s in absolutely terrible voice here…she sounds like she has a severe sore throat and can’t seem to catch her breath. On top of that, she slurs her speech so much that she sounds like a stereotypical drunk in a bad comedy (her version of “Taking a Chance on Love” is particularly problematic in this regard; it’s become something of a running joke among those who know this album to refer to it as “Chakin’ a Shansh on Love”). For all I know, given the well-known problems she’s had with substance abuse, she may actually have been drunk on stage. To be honest, I actually hope she was, because frankly, I don’t want to live in a world where a legend like Liza Minnelli could give a performance this bad sober.

This wasn’t just an issue of one unluckily-timed bad performance on the night the recording was made, since album was recorded over two nights and she sounds pretty much the same throughout. And you can’t blame it purely on her advancing age, either…obviously her voice wasn’t going to be what it was in her prime by this point, but I’ve heard recordings by her made a decade later than this one that sound far better.

Compounding the problems with the performance itself are the poor choices made in structuring the material. Most of the songs are compressed into fragmentary medleys, so even if Liza had been in better form, very few of the songs last long enough to give her the opportunity to really stop the show.

She also relies much too heavily on her backup chorus here…there are times they seem to be carrying the songs more than she is. The only place where she seems to be having any fun is on an amusing rendition of “I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore”, complete with a set of new lyrics written specifically for her (“I don’t even flinch each time I see/a seven-foot drag queen dressed like me”).

Apart from “Taking a Chance on Love”, the other low point comes at the climax, where Minnelli sings a desperate-sounding duet with a recording of her mother on “The Trolley Song”. Granted, she has a personal connection to the dead person she’s singing with, just like Natalie Cole did, so the result doesn’t come across as disrespectful like so many “duets” of this kind. Still, not only is the duet-with-a-preexisting-recording format severely unsuited to being done live, but putting Liza next to her famous mother at her professional peak only serves to highlight what spectacularly bad form she was in on this album.

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending…a hard-won one, but that just makes it all the more meaningful. Shortly after Minnelli On Minnelli was recorded, Liza was diagnosed with viral encephalitis, and was told she would probably never walk or speak again, let alone sing or dance. Liza refused to accept this, and after dedicating herself to a regimen of dance and vocal lessons, took the stage barely a year later with the greatest triumph of her later career, the one-woman show Liza’s Back, which was preserved on the album of the same name.

This production, which played first London and then New York, found her in vastly better form than Minnelli On Minnelli. Given the circumstances, her voice is absolutely phenomenal; it doesn’t equal the ecstatic belting of her heyday, but it’s the best she had sounded for quite a while, and she’d certainly never sound as good again. And the songs she sings here, such as “Never-Never Land” and “What Did I Have That I Don’t Have?”, are perfectly chosen to compliment the weary-but-triumphant sound of her voice at this stage.

Liza’s Back offers vintage renditions of her trademark standards (“Cabaret”, “Theme from New York, New York”, “But the World Goes Round”) that could hold their own with the versions recorded in her prime. Particularly impressive are “Mein Herr”, which is preceded here by a superbly delivered dramatic monologue, performed in character as Sally Bowles, and “Maybe This Time”, which gets arguably its most touching performance ever here…it feels like she understands the song’s meaning here on a level she never quite had before.

Her rendition of “Some People” from Gypsy showcases a galvanizing, triumphant energy that seems to be exulting in her knowledge of her own resurgence. She does seem to be losing her breath a bit on her performance of “Rose’s Turn”, but this just makes the song sound more like the onstage nervous breakdown it was always meant to be…rather like Tyne Daly’s version, only significantly better sung.

She also offers a devastating trio of songs about the simple act of crying, and a deeply felt version of “Something Wonderful” supposedly dedicated to her difficult but rewarding relationship with then-husband David Gest. The album’s title-song, a newly-commissioned composition by longtime collaborators John Kander and Fred Ebb, is first-rate, a jubilant and defiant announcement of her return with lyrics that are surprisingly honest and forthcoming about her problems (‘I took my bottle of pills/and tossed them away/I emptied the booze/Went back to AA’).

The show even features a song from Liza’s disastrous first attempt to bring her nightclub act to a Broadway theater, the 1977 Kander and Ebb pseudo-musical The Act. The team’s score for that one was far from their best work, but the showstopping cakewalk “City Lights” is generally agreed to be the best thing in it, and this explosive performance easily outdoes the one on the earlier show’s cast album.

But the most special moment of all on this album is a brief but breathtaking fragment of her mother’s legendary classic “Over the Rainbow”, a song she had always refused to perform before: she capped it with a heartrending cry of “Thank you, Mama!” You can hear from the album alone that the audience at these performances was in absolute ecstasies, as well they should be—this was the Liza we all knew and loved, and the show and its accompanying album were easily the highlight of the later phase of her career.

A year or so before he would make his Broadway debut in Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812, Josh Groban released this album, which consists entirely of covers of Musical Theater songs. I have to assume that he must have already been aware of what his future held, and that this album was meant to serve as a kind of dry run for his attempt to conquer Broadway.

Groban had had a very respectable career up to this point, his music falling somewhere between the ‘Crossover Classical’ acts like Andrea Bocelli and the higher grades of the Easy Listening genre. However, his album immediately prior to this one, 2013’s All That Echoes, had been poorly received due to a higher proportion of underwhelming original compositions and an awkward attempt at a more Pop-friendly sound than his earlier work. That said, it also contained a cover of the song “Falling Slowly” from the then-recent hit Broadway musical Once, which was widely considered the album’s highlight and which marked the first sign of Groban’s growing interest in Musical Theater.

This album, on the other hand, seems to be a reaction to the negative reception that All That Echoes received. The tracklist, obviously, is entirely composed of covers, and the arrangements represent a return to the florid, orchestra-heavy sounds of Groban’s earlier albums, which is much better suited to his voice and singing style. The album opens with a rendition of “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. He uses the same additional second verse that Michael Feinstein used on his album of the same name, and if Groban’s version lacks the subtlety and nuance of Gene Wilder’s original, it is nonetheless eloquently delivered and beautifully sung.

The same can be said for most of the album, in fact. Groban goes mostly for fairly obvious choices, but given that his last album had been poorly received for deviating too much from his usual sound, choosing songs that play to his strengths seems like a sound strategy here. He does stretch himself a bit with his rendition of the jazzy Finian’s Rainbow standard “Old Devil Moon”, and does an impressive job of capturing the sensuality the song requires. And his version of “Dulcinea” from Man of La Mancha, here sped up into a kind of giddy waltz, is a bit unusual, but he manages to make it work.

His renditions of “Bring Him Home” and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” from Les Miserables are particularly impressive…indeed, these might the best versions ever recorded by anyone but Colm Wilkinson and Michael Ball themselves. “If I Loved You” from Carousel is another highlight, although that’s to be expected when your duet partner is the legendary Audra McDonald. And his version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” is note-perfect…he actually sounds like he’s singing it to keep his spirits up while plowing through a storm.

Inevitably, there are a few less successful tracks. His version of “Finishing the Hat” from Sunday in the Park With George is beautifully sung, but he delivers the lyric as though he has no idea what it actually means. And while I dearly love Kelly Clarkson, she was just not meant to sing the part of Christine in Phantom of the Opera, and her unsuitable vocal style lets down her half of “All I Ask of You” on this album. And of course, as always, “What I Did For Love” from A Chorus Line loses most of its actual content when taken out of context, but that’s not really Groban’s fault, and he does sing it nicely.

There are also two song from foreign musicals not much known in the United States included here. “Le Temps Des Cathedrales”, from the French musical Notre Dame de Paris, based on the Victor Hugo novel commonly known as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, sounds worthy to compete with the music from the Alan Menken musical drawn from the same source. And “Gold Can Turn To Sand”, from a Swedish musical by the songwriters from ABBA, is a heartbreaking narrative of grief with a ravishing melody. Both renditions make you want to seek out these works and hear the rest of their scores, which is presumably just what Groban intended. And speaking of the ABBA songwriters, Groban’s earth-shattering rendition of “Anthem” from their musical Chess makes for an appropriately epic way to close out this album.

We don’t get a lot of ‘Traditional Pop’ albums on this level of quality these days (maybe one a year, if that), so it’s best to appreciate them when they come along. Interpretational singing seems like a lost art in these singer-songwriter-dominated days, so an album like this is a rare treasure. Some have quibbled with the unadventurous song choices, but I think it says something positive about Groban that he knows what his real strengths are and is not too proud to play to them. And certainly the singing on this album, even on the few weaker selections, is nearly always gorgeous, and many of the interpretations are genuinely interesting and distinctive takes on these familiar songs. If you love Show Tunes, this album is well worth acquiring, and even if you’re relatively new to the Broadway scene, this could easily serve as a very useful and accessible introduction to some of Broadway’s greatest songs.

I imagine this does not come as news to any of you, but a couple years ago, Katy Perry released a disastrous album entitled Witness. The album actually featured some interesting lyrics, but apart from the lead single “Chained to the Rhythm”, there was hardly a tune on the whole thing. It was as if Katy Perry was trying to be Courtney Barnett, and in addition to the fact that no-one wanted to see her do that, the lyrics weren’t that good…certainly not good enough to carry the album on their own. But my preference, when an established artist who was once good releases a terrible album, is to explore something from their glory days to remind people that they are indeed capable of good work. After all, everyone has weighed in on Witness‘ failure…I, on the other hand, would like to take you back to 2010, and the release of Katy Perry’s one masterpiece album, the monumental Pop smash hit Teenage Dream.

Anyone who thought Disco was dead in 2010 evidently wasn’t listening to the radio, as this album is unmistakably a Disco album. It doesn’t sound like Retro-Pop…its sound is immaculately modern (or at least was when it was released in 2010), but virtually every song is built on a Disco beat. The highlights are the title track, a beautifully constructed, glowing Pop love ballad, and “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.), the party song to end all party songs. Granted, the party jams of the early 2010s Club Boom were not exactly the best trend ever to hit Pop music, but still, being the definitive example of a genre that pervasive has to count for something.

The other singles were less well-received at the time, being widespread targets of mockery by various pop-culture satirists, but most of them have held up surprisingly well today. Granted, “California Gurls” leaves much to be desired in the lyrical department (both the main body of the song and the rap verse), but the superb production and insanely catchy melody make it nonetheless irresistible, and while legendary Rapper Snoop Dogg is clearly phoning in his guest verse in both lyrics and performance, his charisma still gives the song at least a faint touch of class.

“Firework” is one of the cheesiest of the long string of self-esteem anthems to come out of this era, but thanks to its explosive chorus and the way Perry throws herself into her performance, the overall result is actually kind of thrilling. Moreover, despite the sometimes clumsy analogies in the lyrics, it still comes across as genuinely sincere and warm-hearted…Perry genuinely seems to want to provide comfort to people, coming across as far more sympathetic than she had seemed on her more self-involved previous material. Indeed, it may have been the first of the self-esteem anthems of 2011/2012 to be released…remember that long before it became a single, it was already included on the album as far back as August of 2010, whereas most of its peers came from albums that were released in 2011 or later.

“E.T.” had a particularly large faction of detractors when it was released, but I blame most of that on the Kanye West rap verse added to the single. West is admittedly a better producer than rapper, but on his own albums he’s usually a reasonably competent lyricist (or was when this song was released, anyway). However, he seems to be absolutely terrible at improvising (an important skill for a widespread purveyor of guest verses), so he tends to make an ass of himself on most of his guest appearances, and this was a particularly severe case. But heard on the album, without West’s dubious contribution, the song is actually rather striking and arrestingly strange, with its cryptic, ambiguous subject matter and discordant but oddly hypnotic beat. Also, the complex, amorphous melody suits Perry’s voice as much as anything she’s ever sung, turning her tuneless moaning into an asset in a way that seems to foreshadow the success of acts like Future.

The final single from the main album, “The One That Got Away”, received a lukewarm reception even from most of Perry’s fans at the time, with many accusing it of being ‘boring’ and ‘dreary’. While it’s true that it lacks the camp appeal and uptempo excitement of her earlier singles, and that Taylor Swift was doing the same kind of thing much better at the time, this is still a perfectly respectable and even rather touching attempt at a bittersweet love song. The acoustic version included as a bonus track on the album’s rerelease, while it does not flatter Perry’s vocals, does do an impressive job of highlighting the emotional honesty of the song, and indeed is more interesting than the original recording…even Perry’s vocal strains and cracks fit rather well with the song’s emotional content.

Perry has a widespread reputation for excessive use of album filler, but at least in this album’s case, that reputation isn’t entirely deserved. Admittedly, there are two absolutely awful songs on this album…the gratuitously unpleasant “Circle the Drain” and “Peacock”, which may very well be the stupidest song ever written. The latter achieved a sort of meme status, and as a result actually managed to get played on the radio, despite the fact that its “double-entendres” are so blunt that it actually winds up repeatedly saying the word it’s supposed to be merely alluding to (“cock”, for any of you who hadn’t already figured that out). It only barely cracked the Hot 100 and never made it anywhere near the Top Forty, but it was a Number One hit on the Club Dance Charts, otherwise known as the musical kingdom of the damned.

However, the other album tracks were perfectly valid and, in many cases, excellent. The heartbreaking ballad “Not Like the Movies” is probably Perry’s best attempt at a “serious” song to date, and the joyful “Hummingbird Heartbeat” could easily have held its own as one of the singles. But the most notable album track of all is the most obscure, “Who Am I Living For?”. It was never a single, not even a promotional single, never got performed on the Grammys like “Not Like the Movies”, never got any exposure whatsoever outside of the album, but it is, hands-down, the best song Katy Perry has ever recorded. I’m not joking, either…a heartfelt song about spiritual searching set to music that sounds like the theme to a superhero movie, it is easily the most distinguished track of her entire career.

Granted, as is often the case with even good Pop albums, the bonus tracks don’t measure up to the rest of the album. The best of them, the atmospheric ballad “Wide Awake”, is rather pretty in an otherworldly sort of way, rather like a more conventionally euphonious version of “E.T.”, and could have held its own with the original album tracks. But “Part of Me”, another self-esteem anthem, is uninspired and obnoxiously belligerent, with none of the stirring melody or inspirational warmth of “Firework”, and the idiotic “Dressin’ Up” is only marginally less embarrassing than “Peacock”.

There’s a reason Perry isn’t usually thought of as an “album artist”…her other albums have admittedly not held up especially well. Her first release, One of the Boys, featured mostly decent songs (at least apart from “Ur So Gay” and the title track), but Perry herself sounded absolutely awful on it…her producers were clearly still figuring out how to doctor her voice into something listenable at that point. As for her follow-up to Teenage Dream, 2013’s Prism, it was only marginally better than Witness, with its only really outstanding song, “Roar”, being a blatant rip-off of Sara Bareilles’ “Brave”. But this album, in spite of a few duds and the uninspired bonus tracks, actually holds up an an overall ‘album’ experience, and indeed ranks with the great Pop albums of the 2010s. And long after all her late-career failures are forgotten, Teenage Dream will give Perry her longterm legacy…after all, “California Gurls”, “Firework”, “Last Friday Night”, and the title track are still radio staples to this day, and seem likely to stay that way for years to come.