Category: Album Reviews

2016’s Anti has a reputation for being Rihanna’s first completely successful album release, but this isn’t entirely fair. While it’s true that Rihanna’s albums have a seriously uneven track record due to her insanely busy release schedule prior to 2014 (she was basically releasing an album every single year for most of her career), she did have a couple of fairly consistent and coherent albums prior to Anti, and 2009’s Rated R was one of them.

For the very few of you who might need reminding, Rihanna’s entire public life at the time was revolving around a scandal where her then-boyfriend, fellow R&B singer Chris Brown, put her in the hospital. I am well aware that, by now, that scandal was already yesterday’s news six years ago, but its impact on the music of that period created a ripple effect that it still being felt today, so bear with me.

Rated R was conceived as a kind of vague Concept Album through which Rihanna could directly address what happened to her, and even if Rihanna isn’t really a singer-songwriter, she seems to have found the means to select songs that conveyed her emotions on the subject. The lyrics on the album tended to be rather opaque and confusing (although that might well have been a deliberate choice), but their mix of bittersweet love ballads like “Crazy, Stupid Love” and “Photographs” and the violent imagery on songs like”Russian Roulette” and “Fire Bomb” was certainly possible to interpret if one knew about her circumstances.

In any case, the album as a whole had a dark, brooding atmosphere that suited its nominal topic well. It actually bears a strong resemblance to Anti in many ways…the subject matter of dysfunctional relationships, the sullen, somber ambiance, the frequently biting lyrical content, even the presence of an out-of-place Pop single than was little more than a bid for an easy hit and wound up the album’s primary calling-card despite sounding nothing like the other tracks. It makes a certain kind of sense, in a way…Rated R received a fair amount of critical respect, but its quality was overshadowed by its connection to her personal life. So in 2016, after everyone had more-or-less moved on from that scandal, she made another attempt in the same style, and got attention for an album for the first time in her career.

The album overall is built on Electro-Pop influences, a change of style for Rihanna that would influence much of her later career, although it does include one Rock song and one Latin-flavored track. The Rock song, featuring legendary Guns’N’Roses guitarist Slash, is in a Grunge vein rather than the Eighties Hard Rock style Slash normally favors, and was criticized by some for not making good use of its famous guest star. However, Rihanna manages to give it a real sense of swagger and menace, and it is she, not Slash, who really carries the song. As for the Latin song, “Te Amo”, it is a deeply bittersweet narrative about a Spanish-speaking girl who falls in love with Rihanna but is rejected, a kind of sadder, more mature alternative to Katy Perry’s hit “I Kissed a Girl” the year before.

The album’s singles had some success in the international market, and the striking Electro-Hip-Hop anthem “Hard” gave Rihanna her thirteenth Top Ten hit on the Billboard charts. However, the album didn’t produce as many hits in the U.S. as her previous work, and by far the most successful song on it was “Rude Boy”, a raunchy, overtly masochistic sex jam quite out of style with the rest of the album. After this song wound up becoming a Number One hit, her record label apparently decided that trying to milk what had happened to her for masochistic sex appeal sold more records than seriously addressing her story (which probably says something very disturbing about popular culture at the time, but I digress).

That brings us to the other subject of this review. 2010’s Loud consisted almost entirely of songs in the vein of “Rude Boy”, except that many of them take its questionable concept much, much farther. This is why it’s probably her worst album…granted, it contains two good tracks, while her next effort, Talk That Talk, would contain only one, but the bad material here is the worst to be found on any Rihanna album.

The primary problem with the songs on this album is not that they’re offensive (although, to be honest, they kind of are). No, the primary problem is that they’re loud, abrasive, overly strident, and would come off as more creepy than sexy even without the added real-life baggage. They fall very much into the trends of the ’09-’10 “Club Boom”, and like most songs of that era they have the sole redeeming element of a catchy beat, but there’s certainly nothing else good about most of them.

“S&M”, where Rihanna is literally singing about how she likes to be tied up and beaten, is easily the worst offender, but songs like “Only Girl (in the World)”, where she invites the listener to “Love me like I’m a hot ride”, or “What’s My Name”, which features an absolutely disgusting Rap verse from Drake with jokes about “The square root of 69”, aren’t much better.

On top of this, for perhaps understandable reasons, Rihanna delivers every one of these songs like she’s dead inside. It’s like hearing a robot trying to sing about sex, and it multiplies the album’s unintentional creepiness by a factor of ten. She’s also in absolutely terrible voice here, making horrible use of her Caribbean vocal inflections and giving what might be the single worst vocal performance of her career on “Cheers (Drink to That)”. This song’s worthlessness is particularly highlighted by fact that two infinitely better songs which are both about exactly the same subject, Pink’s “Raise Your Glass” and Halestorm’s “Here’s To Us”, came out at around the same time. Probably the strangest item on the album, “Man Down” is about Rihanna actually killing a man who wronged her—there was probably a way to make this song concept satisfying given the circumstances, but this extremely awkward attempt isn’t it.

Even the two aforementioned good songs only serve to make the record as a whole more of a travesty. “California King Bed” is a gorgeous and heartbreaking ballad, and “Love the Way You Lie (pt. 2)” is Rihanna’s collaboration with Eminem (arguably the best hit song of 2010) reworked as an R&B ballad for Rihanna with a single guest verse by Eminem. Her performance is a perfectly fulfilled expansion of her incredibly nuanced delivery on the original, and the result is one of the best songs of her career. Unfortunately, both these songs are blatantly out of place next to the other songs on the album, and serve not only to highlight the inadequacies of the rest of the material, but to turn the overall flow of the album into a disjointed mess.

There are a couple of other attempts at ‘serious’ songs, which try to mine similar territory to the songs on Rated R, but they don’t really succeed. For example, “Fading”, a breakup ballad very possibly aimed at the aforementioned abusive ex-boyfriend, is too lightweight and bland to make any real impact, coming off as forgettable album filler. And “Complicated”, another breakup song that resembles a serious version of Katy Perry’s “Hot N Cold”, might be the most unlistenable song on the album, with its skin-crawling beat and nails-on-chalkboard vocals.

Given the utterly ridiculous furor the internet raised over the far more innocuous “Blurred Lines” in 2013, I imagine that, had this album come out a few years later than it did, the reaction to it would probably have been much harsher. In any case, Rated R still ranks as a minor classic, but Loud is a bad album as well as an offensive one, and even those who no longer care in the slightest about the years-old scandal that wound up birthing it can find an abundance of reasons to hate it based on the music alone.

If you want to know why I’m reviewing Kesha’s first album and its accompanying bonus EP jointly, it’s because they are so similar in style and theme that covering either of them individually would be redundant. Ever since Kesha released one of the best Pop albums of the decade in 2017, people have begun to “re-examine” this album, attempting to convince themselves that it wasn’t the horrific disaster it was seen as at the time. However, there’s a reason that most people were initially convinced that Kesha was the worst Pop singer of all time. While Kesha is hardly the first great artist to make an embarrassingly bad first impression, and while I’m not sure how much of this is Kesha’s fault and how much can be blamed on the notorious Dr. Luke, who was basically managing her career at this point, her achievements since then don’t magically turn this album into a misunderstood masterpiece any more than David Bowie’s mature work turns “The Laughing Gnome” into a classic.

The official claim is that the songs on this album are intended as a satire of glam rap’s materialism and sexual objectification, but the people behind the album haven’t actually put any humor, or any commentary for that matter, into this supposed satire. Reproducing typical glam rap songs with a female singer doesn’t really make you some kind of outrageous visionary, and writing songs where the message comes across as “Women are just as stupid and shallow as men” is more degrading than empowering. This is why I never really bought into the argument that Kesha’s early work was intended as a ‘stealth parody’ of the Pop-music world. I’s not necessarily that I think the claim was disingenuous…I just don’t think it makes any difference, because her ‘parody’ here doesn’t really have a point other than being deliberately worse than any of the things she’s supposedly parodying.

If Kesha is indeed going for stealth parody, then Animal’s lead single “Tik Tok” is virtually the only time she achieved it in any real sense. The intensely annoying “Valley Girl” accent she affects here is still definitely an issue, but the song features a catchy chorus, and the lyrics, while still poor by normal standards, are at least amusing in their stupidity. I can’t really call “Tik Tok” a “good” song, and I definitely think it’s a bad sign that it was the Number One song of 2010, but I can understand why it was a hit, which I can’t say about most of her other singles from this period.

On this album Kesha is deeply entrenched in her performing persona as a shallow, mindless party girl—I’m well aware that this is nothing like who she is in real life, but that just makes this album even more uncomfortable to listen to today. It’s just hard to listen to someone who has since proved to have real talent and intelligence being forced to sing lines like “I threw up in the closet/but I don’t care!” Items like the idiotic and horribly mean-spirited “Grow a Pear” were supposedly intended as ‘female counterparts’ to songs by male singers and rappers that objectify women, but most of them wind up being about on the same level of subtlety and dignity as “Tonight I’m Fucking You” and Akon’s body of work, and I don’t really think we needed another edition of the aforementioned excesses, feminized or otherwise.

There are also a few emotional (if excessively self-pitying) ballads (I know Kesha’s situation at the time was pretty bad, but even “Crawling”-era Linkin Park would probably find “Dancing With Tears in My Eyes” too melodramatic). But most of them are done in by Kesha’s overprocessed vocals…I don’t have a problem with auto-tune if it’s used well, but the production on this album does very ugly things to what turned out to be a perfectly good singing voice.

Then there are some items that are just ridiculous, like “Dinosaur”, a collection of groan-inducing puns and stupid, juvenile one-liners making fun of the elderly, or “Cannibal”, the title track to the bonus EP, which was presumably meant to be a piece of innuendo, but goes into way too much disgusting detail about its chosen metaphor in the lyrics, and ultimately comes across as disgusting rather than sexy.

The low points of this album rank with some of the worst Pop music of all time…the unlistenable and flagrantly inane “Blah Blah Blah” is easily the worst hit song of 2010, a field that does not lack for competition. Her vocals on this song are off-key, overprocessed wailing with the added annoyance of a stereotyped valley girl accent. The lyrics are as unutterably inane as the title suggests, and the music itself is abrasive, sloppily produced garbage. But above all of those things, the one thing that really enraged people about this song was its transparent sense of contempt for the audience. In the post-“Friday” pop world, things this stupid are often done with the intent of picking up an ironic following (e.g. “#Selfie” by the Chainsmokers), but that’s not the vibe being let off here. This clearly feels as if Kesha (or rather, her producers) had such contempt for the general pop-music listener base that they truly thought they wouldn’t know any better, and the fact that for the moment it appeared to work had a lot of people panicking and quoting Idiocracy. The panic has died down, and after almost a decade of positive developments in Pop music, it’s almost been forgotten, but at the time, this song seemed to embody the demise of Western culture, and frankly, in retrospect, it’s bad enough that listening to it now, you can see why they believed that.

“Take It Off” is yet another obnoxious, flip-off-the-listener single from this album, if still not quite as bad as “Blah Blah Blah”. The beat is actually quite good, and this might actually have succeeded in being an uninspired-but-competent Club banger (much like Britney Spears’ more tolerable material) if not for the choice of sample. For those who don’t know, this song lifts its melody from “The Streets of Cairo” (a.k.a. “The Snake Charmer’s Song”), putting it in the same category as “Swagger Jagger” by Cher Lloyd (which samples “Clementine”) and “Play That Song” by Train (which samples “Heart and Soul”), which is not company you really want to be keeping. Granted, the Marcia Ball classic “Snake Dance” is based on the same theme, but it was a complex Blues gloss on the melody, not just a straightforward recycling of a musical cliche. “Take It Off”, on the other hand, reduces this overexposed snippet to its tiredest, most inanely simplistic level, making what might have at least been enjoyably stupid come across as unbearably annoying.

“Sleazy” combines the single worst producer in all of modern R&B, Bangladesh, with Kesha at her most inane. This combination of the Worst Producer and the Worst Singer (okay, she certainly didn’t stay that way, but you see my point) works about as well as you’d expect, with Kesha delivering lyrics like “Rat-a-tat-tat on your dumb, dumb drum/The beat so fat, gonna make me cum”, over one of Bangladesh’s bizarre noise collages that sound both painful to listen to and terrifyingly surreal.

“Your Love Is My Drug” was one of Kesha’s awkward, creepy attempts to write a love song that was compatible with her original persona, here combined with one of her unconvincing attempts to pass herself off as a rapper. It’s not by any means the worst item on this album, but it was still an unwise choice both as the opening track and the third single. It certainly isn’t as decisively horrible as the three above songs, but frankly, it sounds like album filler. This raises the question of why it was released at all, especially given that there was another creepily clingy love song on Animal called “Stephen” that was pretty similar to this, except for being one of the few items on this album that was both listenable and disturbing in a way that was actually intentional. This deeply creepy stalker ballad combines the prettiest melody on either of these discs with a truly unnerving lyric of twisted obsession…it’s the kind of love song that says, “I want to skin you alive and wear you like a suit”. Why didn’t they release that as a single, if they wanted a song in this vein? It would have been easily the best single from the album, and even given that album’s apparent goal of shocking and offending its listeners with every single, “Stephen” is still a much more disturbing and attention-getting song than the cheesy piece of radio background filler they released in its place.

“We R Who We R” was supposedly meant as a tribute to all the gay teens who committed suicide as a result of bullying, but to be honest it just comes off as yet another sleazy, inane club banger little different from Kesha’s other singles at the time. Taken as a generic Club song, it’s far from the worst thing Kesha had done around that time, but it’s so laughably unconvincing as the inspirational anthem it was apparently meant to be that it’s hard to take it seriously on any level. It didn’t help that, ironic as it seems today, at the time this song was released Kesha seemed like one of the least qualified then-current pop stars to deliver a serious inspirational message (it would be a long walk to the era of “Praying” and “Hymn”, is all I’m saying).

To be fair, though, there are a few songs (of which “Stephen” is one) that show, at least in retrospect, that Kesha actually had the potential to do good work, though most of us missed it at the time. The title track of Animal sounds much more like a track from the Warrior album than like anything else on the album that bears its name. Then there’s “The Harold Song”, an emotionally devastating song of lost love that offered one of the first hints at the tragic depth behind Kesha’s shallow party-girl facade. Even the final single from the Cannibal EP, “Blow”, is a solid and striking Club track that shows the template used for her early singles could have actually produced good music.

But despite these flashes of genuine potential, this is still easily one of the worst albums of the decade, and while, in retrospect, I don’t entirely blame Kesha herself for that fact, the fact remains that the negative press this album got at the time wasn’t really unjustified. Being a ‘stealth parody’, or ‘subverting’ the trademark sexism of rap by gender-flipping it, isn’t as interesting or creative an idea as this album’s defenders seem to think, and in any case, so much of this album is terrible as pure music that it almost doesn’t matter. Just remember that just because Kesha herself has been vindicated by history doesn’t necessarily mean this album has, and the damage it did to her reputation still hasn’t been fully repaired.

Kelly Clarkson’s albums after her breakthrough masterpiece Breakaway are all underrated in one way or another, and this one is no exception. It has a flaw…a fairly obvious one…and that has made a number of both amateur and professional critics dismiss it entirely. The flaw in question is the heavily electronic production style, which does not fit well with either Clarkson’s distinctive voice nor with her style of songwriting, and which, along with a poor choice of lead single, led many to unfairly consign this album to the dust heap without a second thought.

The album was clearly meant as an attempt to emulate Taylor Swift’s massive hit album 1989 the year before. I wouldn’t call it a rip-off by any means, as it has plenty of distinctive qualities of its own, but it definitely bears Swift’s influence, not only in the Electro-Pop sound but in its conceptual structure. This is another Pop concept album from the era when they became popular again, only instead of a miniature musical like Swift’s album, this record is designed to resemble a late-Nineties/early 2000s-era movie soundtrack (the two specific models Clarkson cited in interviews were the soundtracks to Cruel Intentions and Love Actually).

But in spite of the awkward choice of production style, there is one aspect of this album that redeems it and elevates it to masterpiece status: the songwriting. Clarkson also claimed in interviews that she wanted to create an album where every track could potentially have been a hit, and my God, she pulled it off. This is perhaps the most unrelentingly intense album of Clarkson’s career, but at the same time it is far more polished than her last record, Stronger. These grandiose hooks and searing emotions are sufficient to burn through the haze of the electronic production and land with the impact of an atomic bomb.

The album’s title track, which became its biggest and most recognizable hit, is one of Clarkson’s most personal songs, a scathing indictment of her own father, who abandoned her and her family only to come back and try to leech money off her after she became famous (this seems to be something of a pattern for deadbeat dads of Pop Stars, as Demi Lovato’s father attempted the exact same thing). But while Lovato wrote a whole series of songs dedicated to her painful relationship with her father, Clarkson really only directly addressed it in this one song. In it, she explains how her husband (Reba McEntire’s stepson Brandon Blackstock) finally restored her faith in men and fatherhood after her father’s betrayal almost destroyed it. It’s easily one of the two or three best songs she ever released, and serves as the album’s emotional centerpiece.

The other two high points on the album are “Dance With Me”, perhaps the most sweepingly irresistible dance ballad of the entire current decade, and “I Had a Dream”, an indictment of the current generation’s hypocrisy set to the sound of marching boots. I admit that I was inclined to defend Katy Perry’s “Chained to the Rhythm”, which deals with essentially the same subject, but I readily acknowledge that “I Had a Dream” is twenty times the song “Chained to the Rhythm” will ever be.

Similarly, “Run Run Run” (a duet with R&B giant John Legend) could give “Somebody That I Used To Know” a run for its money in the “two-sided deconstructions of a failed relationship” category. The glowing “Take You High” is one of the most epic declarations of love in modern Pop music, resembling Lady Gaga’s “The Cure” on steroids. And “Someone” was using the turn of phrase “Sorry I’m not sorry” a full year before Beyonce made it famous, and indeed was very possibly a major inspiration for Beyonce’s hit.

But really, as I said, this is one of those rare Pop albums where literally every track had real single potential, which makes it surprising that they chose the lukewarm “Heartbeat Song” as the lead single. This song features the same big choruses as the rest of the album, but without any of the sincerity…its attempts at intensity seem phoned-in and artificial, and it was literally the worst choice they could have made to represent the album.

It also seems decidedly odd that the album’s second single, the ultra-intense anthem of hard-won triumph “Invincible”, never even cracked the Hot 100, let alone the Top Forty. In retrospect, this might have something to do with another, much less interesting song with the same subject matter, Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song”, being a hit around the time of its release. I’ve never really understood the antipathy many Pop listeners seem to hold toward “Fight Song”, but I will admit I soured on it quite a bit when I realized it had effectively kept “Invincible” off the Pop charts.

Overall, I’d be inclined to call this Clarkson’s best album since Breakaway. I’ve always thought Pop music critics pay far too much attention to production…as if the arrangement mattered more than the song itself. Having cut my critical teeth in the world of Musical Theater, where the arrangement is comparatively unimportant, I tend to be much more focused on composition and performance, and on both those fronts, this album is beyond reproach.

Future is one of those artists that the professional critics rave about, while the amateur critics generally dismiss him as an overrated no-talent. I myself have actually learned to respect him: he doesn’t have the kind of talent we generally associate with the Rap genre (that is, lyrical ability), but the repeating melodic fragments that form his hooks are actually quite sophisticated for Pop music, reminiscent of Classical Minimalism like the works of Philip Glass. And his nihilistic emotional content is a strikingly complex and adult tone for a relatively mainstream Pop artist to strike.

This album, his second overall, was his critical breakthrough and the first of his albums to make a significant commercial impact, even if he wouldn’t actually have a chart hit as a lead artist until over a year after its release. The professional critics loved it as much as they love all his work, but even the few amateur critics who like Future seem to despise this particular album. Given this wild difference of opinion, I thought I would investigate and see whether the album was the masterpiece the music press had hailed it as, or one of the worst albums of the decade as the internet reviewers all seemed to maintain.

To be honest, like most of the amateur critic set, I was somewhat biased against the album to begin with because of the quality of its singles. Put simply, the album contains some monumental duds, including three of the worst songs of the decade, and all of them wound up being released as singles. The first single, “Karate Chop”, might actually have been decent if not for an unbelievably offensive guest verse by Lil Wayne (for those who don’t know, this is the one with the notorious “beat that pussy up like Emmett Till” line). The third single, “Shit”, features Future unwisely trying to sing without his trademark auto-tune: let’s just say the result lives up to its name.

The other truly awful single is the unbearably smug and sexist “I Won”, apparently written about legendary Crunk singer Ciara, whom he was dating at the time. This song makes their breakup shortly thereafter not all that surprising, and its one redeeming feature was inspiring one of the all-time great response songs with Ciara’s “I Bet”.

“Move That Dope”, while not nearly as bad as the aforementioned other singles, is a not-entirely-successful attempt to blend Future’s style into a Pop format. The guest rappers (including Pusha T and Pharrell Williams) actually do very good work here, but the repeating hook sounds less like Future’s usual fragmented melody and more like something in the vein of “Imma Be” or “Whip My Hair”. It’s certainly vastly better than most of the Pop-Rap songs Future was featured on in 2013 (“Bitches Love Me”, “Bugatti”, “U.O.E.N.O.”), but it doesn’t really catch him in his element, and he winds up being the least interesting thing about it.

The album as a whole also features a less than fully developed incarnation of Future’s performing persona. His trademark nihilistic tone is somewhat downplayed here, and the standard Glam Rap tropes that form his lyrical content are presented in a somewhat more straightforward manner than on his later songs. Overall, while his music is already as sophisticated as it would be when he started having actual hits off his own albums in 2015, the overall effect is less that of a dark subversion of Glam Rap braggadocio and more of a relatively straightforward singer-rapper in the Drake vein.

With all that said, there is actually a surprisingly large amount of genuinely excellent material on this album. The title song (easily the album’s best single) is actually quite gorgeous, as is “I Be U”, which is probably the most sincere and moving love song Future ever recorded. “Side Effects” and “I’ll Be Yours” are also surprisingly sweet and pretty love songs, showing a side of the artist that most would not normally associate with him. The rapid-fire spray of notes on the faster songs, like “Covered N Money” and “Benz Friends”, are gloriously overwhelming.

“Never Satisfied”, a collaboration with Rap wunderkind Drake, is actually better and more interesting than their much more successful collaborative single “Jumpman”, which would become Future’s first Top Forty hit a year after this album’s release.  And with “Special”, Future offers one of the most penetrating challenges to the true uninspired formula-rappers out there that any interesting rapper has yet come up with. And the closing track of the original edition, “Blood, Sweat, Tears”, makes for a suitably grand and imposing finale.

There was also a ‘promotional single’ originally intended for the album called “Real and True”, with featured vocals from Miley Cyrus, then at the peak of her popularity. It’s not entirely relevant to this discussion, given that it didn’t actually make the final cut of the album, but I mention it because it’s quite possibly the best song Cyrus ever recorded. As a composition, it’s as good as anything on the finished album, and even Cyrus’ notoriously poor vocals can’t manage to ruin it, which is a feat very few other songs have ever achieved.

Overall, there’s a very simple reasons the professional critics liked this album better…they had actually heard the whole thing, whereas the amateur critics mostly only knew it through the singles. In spite of the poor choice of singles, I ultimately have to acknowledge that this is on the whole an exceptionally good album, and it offers some definitive proof that you can’t always judge an album by the quality of its singles.

Say what you will about Linkin Park, they’ve always been a band that arouses passions: they’ve seen their share of detractors and scoffers over the years, but almost no-one has ever been indifferent to them. I’ve always had mixed feelings about their wildly popular early work, which produced some fine songs such as “In the End” and “Numb”, but also some frankly embarrassing material like “Crawling” and “One Step Closer”. Their third album, Minutes to Midnight, was transitional, and while it had its moments (particularly the beautiful ballad “Shadow of the Day”), no-one really seems to be all that enthusiastic about it as an album.

But in the wake of frontman Chester Bennington’s recent suicide, I thought I would shed a little light on an era of their career which, while not as popular or ‘mainstream’, represents their real peak as far as artistic achievement goes. And I thought, what better way to introduce that era into the discussion than to start with the album that inaugurated it, their landmark fourth album, A Thousand Suns.

On this album, they largely renounced their earlier style of Rap- and Electronica-inflected Alternative Metal in favor of a new style based on gorgeous, layered electronic sounds. The closest comparison I can think of is a kind of latter-day Pink Floyd, but this really is a sound all its own.

As for the lyrics, they do not renounce the melodrama that has always been Linkin Park’s stock-in-trade, but this time they deal with subjects larger and more ambitious than the adolescent angst the band are often accused of embodying, or even the real private anguish that Bennington had always intended his songs to be about. This is a Concept Album about tyranny, rebellion, and the possibility of mankind’s ultimate nuclear annihilation, and it ranks with the most far-reaching and visionary Concept Albums of its time, actually tackling far weightier subjects than Arcade Fire’s Grammy-winning opus The Suburbs or Janelle Monae’s Android trilogy.

If this album has any weakness, it comes from Mike Shinoda’s attempts at Rap. Shinoda is a wonderful singer (and, as their next album would make abundantly clear, an excellent producer as well), but while he is actually fairly credible by the standards of Nu-Metal Rappers, he doesn’t quite have the Eminem-esque raw fury that Linkin Park’s emotional content usually demands. Here, he does a respectable job on the tribal-sounding “When They Come For Me” and the ode to rebellion “Wretches and Kings”, but his contribution to the Reggae-flavored “Waiting For the End” is almost embarrassing, providing the album with its one weak moment.

The high points of the album come toward the end: the truly epic climactic song “The Catalyst”, and two exquisitely beautiful ballads, “Iridescent” and the sorrowfully hopeful “The Messenger”. “Iridescent” in particular ranks with the all-time greats in the field of Rock Ballads, even if the lyrics seem disturbingly like a prophecy of Bennington’s ultimate fate when heard now (“Do you feel cold and lost in desperation/you build up hope, but failure’s all you’ve known/remember all the sadness and frustration/and let it go”).

This album inaugurated an artistic renaissance for the band, with 2012’s Living Things building on this album’s innovations to create even more monumental mountains of sound and sheen, and 2014’s The Hunting Party turning back to their Nu-Metal roots with a newfound assurance and sense of focus that saw them creating consistently credible Metal music for the first time in their careers. The more fanatical fans of their early work tend to resent these albums, apparently for no other reason than because this is not the sound they grew up with, but I admire the band for their willingness to grow over time…they kept innovating with their sound and style right up until the end, and every single phase of their career featured a sound unique among all of their peers in the Rock genre.

A moment of silence for an artist who was the heart and soul of one of the most unique, creative and interesting bands of their time, a band that, say what you will about them, managed to get a strong reaction of some kind or another out of nearly everyone. This may not have been a perfect band, but it was a band that mattered, and both it and the tormented visionary who led it will certainly be remembered.

There are two Christian Rappers that stand out from the usual pack of bland diet substitutes, and they have become the most recognizable names in their genre, but for very different reasons. Lecrae actually gets a fair amount of respect in the Rap community, mostly because he really is a fairly legit Underground Rapper who happens to be a Christian and to Rap about his faith a lot. Bizzle, on the other hand, is certainly not remotely respected by anybody, but his sheer audacity makes him impossible to ignore (albeit not in what most people would consider a good way).

Imagine if Pat Robertson had a Rap career, and you pretty much have an accurate portrait of Bizzle. He’s the kind of lunatic fundamentalist you’d normally see burning Rap CDs in mass, but instead he tries to provide a “positive alternative” to the “evil” genre of Rap, and starts fights with pretty much every more famous Rapper in existence. He’s most remembered today for his unforgivably offensive “response” to Macklemore’s groundbreaking plea for gay rights “Same Love” (Bizzle uses the same production, only his lyrics compare being gay to being a pedophile). However, today I’m here to review the notorious mixtape that first launched this idiot into the public spotlight, 2010’s The Messenger.

The song that originally launched Bizzle into notoriety was a bizarre diss track aimed at an infinitely more famous Rapper, Jay-Z. A newcomer making their debut by publicly insulting a giant of the genre is strange enough, but this song was just insane, rambling about Illuminati conspiracy theories involving Barack Obama and coded uses of the number ‘666’ and using all this as evidence that Jay-Z was secretly a Satanist. It’s a lot easier to laugh at than “Same Love (A Response)” would be, but it established Bizzle’s persona as an attention-grabbing religious loony who happened to be a Rapper.

The rest of this mixtape, however, isn’t really hilarious so much as infuriating. For example, ‘Leave-your-boyfriend-for-me’ songs have gotten a bad reputation in recent years, but I think I’ve found the most repulsive example of that template in existence…it’s on this mixtape, and it’s called “Call Me”. The element of pious, puritanical self-satisfaction stemming from the album’s religious angle enhances the smug self-congratulation that kind of song is already known for to the point where the result makes “Treat You Better” by Shawn Mendes sound like an expression of self-loathing by comparison. I also can’t imagine how this song’s scenario could possibly be compatible with Bizzle’s well-known Fundamentalist sexual politics, so I’m forced to conclude that he’s a hypocrite as well.

Equally repellent is “Believer”, where the singer overtly brags about resisting the temptation to cheat on his wife. It’s possible to do this idea well…a few years later, a song called “Honey, I’m Good” would do just that. But that song had a tongue-in-cheek feel to it rather than the weighty pomposity on display here, and was presented as the narrator talking directly to the girl he’s turning down, not boasting of his fidelity directly to the listener. I’ve actually read the Gospels, and it’s made abundantly clear in them that being proud of your virtue is generally worse than whatever sin you’re not committing in the process, so Bizzle doesn’t even have his theology right.

In fact, in general Bizzle comes off as a hateful, arrogant fanatic on most of this album, qualities that are not exactly compatible with Christianity in its intended form (not that that’s stopped anyone else for the past 2,000 years, but still). Despite his proclamations of faith he retains the boastful swagger that’s expected of a Rapper, but in the context of his message it makes him come across as a holier-than-thou Pharisee. Probably the most offensive song of the album is “One”, where Bizzle claims with a straight face that God provides enough for everyone and anyone who is complaining about their lot is just greedy, which shows an especially craven level of hypocrisy given that he’s doing the same thing himself one track later on “You Got Me”.

And while the usual problem with Christian Rap…its pathetically vanilla attempts at thug posturing…is actually somewhat downplayed on this album, there are still times (such as the embarrassing “Prayed Up”) when replicating Gangsta Rap’s sound and delivery with Christian lyrics winds up sounding unintentionally hilarious on its face.

The really frustrating thing about all this is that, apart from his lunatic religious views, Bizzle is actually a really talented Rapper. Even on the “Same Love” response track, the hateful propaganda he was spouting was so eloquently worded that it came off as disturbingly persuasive (which, as I pointed out in my review of that song, is exactly what made it so dangerous). And on the few tracks where he’s not saying something incredibly offensive or unbelievably stupid, his skill does shine through. Actually, his lyrical style, flow, and preferred sound on choruses is oddly reminiscent of Eminem for a Rapper with Bizzle’s religious politics. There’s even one track on this album that dates back to before Bizzle became a ‘Christian Rapper’, a collaboration with T-Pain of all people, and it provides a heartbreaking look at what might have been if this impressive talent hadn’t wound up going completely insane.

Still, in spite of the occasional flashes of sadly wasted talent, this might be the worst Christian album of any kind in the entire current decade…and Lord knows (no pun intended) that’s not a prize that lacks for competition. Even so, bad Christian music is normally too bland and deliberately inoffensive to rise to this level of supreme awfulness, so I think it’s a pretty (un)worthy contender for that dubious honor. In any case, this is one of worst albums (or mixtapes, if you want to be pedantic) of the decade in any genre, and while “Explaining To Do” might actually be worth hearing, just to laugh at the sheer spectacle of insanity it provides, I definitely don’t recommend slogging through all 21 tracks of this garbage unless you’re doing a review of it yourself…in which case, I wish you the best of luck. You’ll be needing it.

Hunter Hayes was the ultimate music-industry Wunderkind…a versatile multi-instrumentalist virtuoso and exceptionally gifted songwriter who was only twenty years old when his first album was released. As of this writing, he seems to have turned out to be something of a one-album wonder, but that comes across as immensely surprising when you listen to this album. There’s a reason it got two Grammy nominations, including netting Hayes a nomination for Best New Artist, which at the time was probably the most prestigious album Grammy short of Album of the Year.

Like Taylor Swift, Hayes was pigeonholed as a Country singer because he got his start on a Nashville record label, but while there are a few mildly Country-inflected songs here (such as the gently smoldering lead single “Storm Warning”), most of the album is pure Teen Pop. The Teenybopper genre was undergoing a huge resurgence around this time, and while some of the participants (such as One Direction or Carly Rae Jepsen) would mature into impressive artists later on, at the time Hayes was the most respectable act in the entire genre, and indeed was held up as an exception to the antipathy many people held for the Teenybopper boom.

There were a few people who accused Hayes of being insincere and even manipulative, but that’s generally because those people were uncomfortable with a teen idol who could write with such sensitivity and sweetness. Songs like “Wanted”, “If You Told Me To” and “Cry With You” constitute some of the most romantic songwriting of the current decade, with perfectly chosen words over gentle, moving melodies that would melt the heart of almost anyone, not just the teenage girls who were Hayes’ supposed target audience. Remember, this was the era of the early One Direction singles like “What Makes You Beautiful”, and Hayes’ material seemed like an impressive demonstration of how to do that kind of song right. Indeed, the last two singles from this album, “Somebody’s Heartbreak” and “I Want Crazy”, do arguably contain some slightly questionable implications, but both are so persuasively written that it’s actually kind of hard to tell, and you have to respect that kind of craftsmanship.

The album also contains its share of breakup songs to counterbalance the sweetness of the romantic pleas, and while a few of them take an angry tone reminiscent of Taylor Swift (“What You Gonna Do” and “More Than I Should” are absolutely scorching), others take a more philosophical approach to the issue. For example, “Everybody’s Got Somebody But Me”, a duet with Folk-Pop great Jason Mraz, is a rueful shrug of a song detailing an experience anyone who’s ever had their heart broken knows: seeing happy couples all around you and thinking “Why not me?” And the gracefully insightful “In a Song”, one of the album’s high points, talks of the universal experience of finding specific songs to help you through your troubles and heartaches. While One Direction and Justin Bieber were writing generic love songs with idiotic lyrics, Hayes was penning insightful observations about universal human experiences, showing himself to be in another class entirely from his Teenybopper peers.

I’ll say one other thing for Hayes, beyond his songwriting prowess: he certainly knows how to play those instruments. Indeed, he reportedly played every single instrument heard on this album, and his prowess with them is often staggering, especially for someone so young. Especially good at showing off his guitar chops are the bluesy breakup ballad “Rainy Season” and the arena-sized anthem “Light Me Up”.

This album also got significant critical plaudits for its consistency, and they are well deserved. There isn’t a single real dud on the entire album, and even the bonus tracks on the “Encore” edition are uniformly up to the level of the original album, which is almost unheard-of in modern Pop outside of Taylor Swift and Eminem’s oeuvres. You normally expect this kind of consistent quality only from experienced professionals, and not even always then: seeing it from a twenty-year-old beginner is almost unbelievable.

As I said, Hayes essentially seems to have disappeared from the Pop scene after this album. His second album, Storyline (which if anything was even more brilliant than this one), did produce one semihit in “Invisible”, but apart from that you rarely hear from him anymore in the mainstream, even though he apparently still performs regularly and even released a third album in 2015. But with this album, he showed himself to be a shining talent with songwriting and instrumental chops far beyond his years. And given how many seemingly superannuated Pop stars have managed to make unexpected comebacks in this decade, it’s certainly possible that we have not heard the last of Hunter Hayes yet. I certainly hope he can make some kind of resurgence, because we can always use raw talent like his on the Pop charts.

Given that this album produced two huge pop hits and won a Grammy for Best Pop Album, it gets surprisingly little attention as an album, even by mainstream pop standards. Of course, when this happens to acts like Rihanna or Katy Perry, it’s obviously because they don’t make albums in the traditional sense of the word, and the ‘albums’ they do make generally consist of a few potential singles and a lot of transparent filler material. But Kelly Clarkson is a genuine album artist, and this album was actually a stunning return to form after the disappointingly uneven All I Ever Wanted, so it seems a terrible injustice that this album should be so blatantly ignored.

In reality, this is actually a very dark and heavy album, much more intense and emotional than the relentlessly pop-heavy All I Ever Wanted. Unfortunately, Pop listeners generally have no idea of this because the album’s hits…the vaguely Country-flavored “Mr. Know It All”, the propulsive “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)”, and the Jason Aldean duet “Don’t You Wanna Stay” (added to this album as a bonus track) are much lighter and more pop-friendly than the rest of the material.

That’s not to say they aren’t fine songs in their own way. “Mr. Know-It-All” features a strong melody and some gloriously raw powerhouse vocals from Clarkson, although the clumsy lyrics do hinder it a bit. The title track song is admittedly something of a walking cliché, but it’s also a terrific, pulse-pounding piece of music that shows off her voice spectacularly, and easily her best single since “My Life Would Suck Without You”. And “Don’t You Wanna Stay” is an impressively sweeping power ballad, with a sound much more characteristic of Clarkson’s usual work than that of Aldean.

The rest of the album, while it doesn’t lack for memorable hooks, is more a series of deeply felt emotional explorations than a string of pop tunes. There are a number of other defiant breakup songs besides the title-track, including “You Love Me”, “Let Me Down”, and “The War Is Over”, but they tend to be less upbeat and more powerfully angry in the vein of her early classics like “Since U Been Gone” and “Never Again”, and their lyrics tend to be far more penetrating than the self-help cliches found on the two hit singles. There are also a number of anguished love ballads, like “Dark Side”, “Honestly” and “Standing in Front of You”, that reveal a desperate vulnerability and need to be loved underneath the defiant self-belief of the breakup songs. One of the most poignant items is the closing track, “Breaking Your Own Heart”, a devastating ballad in which Clarkson pleads with a self-destructive, life-denying love interest to let love back into their life.

This is very much an album about love and relationships, and pretty much the only song that strays from the topic of romance is “You Can’t Win”, a smartly-written complaint about life’s many Catch-22 dilemmas. Apart from the moronic novelty track “Einstein” (‘Dumb plus dumb equals you’), the songs are all excellent in their own right, but the fact that the album never lets up and offers no respite from the intense emotions after the first couple of tracks can make listening to it rather exhausting. Still, its very relentless intensity gives the album an odd kind of power, like a single key banged out over and over on the piano, and I suspect the album as a whole was always intended more as an emotional punch in the gut than a pleasantly conventional Pop album.

This album as a whole would probably be something of an acquired taste to the more casual Clarkson fans who know her mostly from her singles, but it earned that Grammy…the songs’ emotional intensity and honesty and the way Clarkson wholeheartedly hurls herself into the vocals really do make this one of the finest Pop albums of 2012.

When Lady Antebellum first announced this album, they described it as pushing boundaries, and when it was actually released, most critics dismissed that as a false claim. What they didn’t seem to understand was that the ‘boundary-pushing’ in question did not apply to their own boundaries, but the boundaries of the then-dominant subgenre of Country music, best known today by the derogatory nickname ‘Bro-Country’.

Now, Bro-Country has been thoroughly discredited by the time I’m writing this review, but in 2014, when this album came out, it was virtually the only Country music to be heard outside of the Indie scene. And this album is clearly intended to be one long deconstruction of that genre and everything wrong with it. And the truth is, apart from a few individual duds like “Freestyle” and “Slow Rollin’”, which are basically standard Bro-Country only slightly more embarrassing, they mostly succeeded.

For example, “Lie With Me”, with its double-meaning title, is a Bro-Country-esque sex song that sounds deliberately false and hollow, calling attention to the desperation and fear under the party atmosphere in much the same way Sia’s 1,000 Forms of Fear did for mainstream Pop. Or take the album’s lead single, “Bartender”, clearly a feminized Bro-Country party song except for one detail: the singer is only partying to take her mind off a devastating breakup (‘bring it ’til his memory fades away’).

Meanwhile, other songs deconstruct the sexism inherent in so much of the Bro-Country subgenre. “She Is” takes the ‘positive alternative’ route to this, offering a sweet and genuinely respectful love song to a complex and independent woman, and while it’s nothing we haven’t seen before, it’s still quite sweet. But much more attention-getting is “Just a Girl”, an enraged reaction to casual sexism and objectification that makes Maddie and Tae’s “Girl In a Country Song” look positively meek by comparison.

In general, this is definitely Lady Antebellum’s darkest album. Look at the rushing desperation of the title-track, or the ‘love-to-hate-you’ duet “Long Stretch of Love”, which makes the singers sound like they’re about to kill each other. Even the superficially conventional Southern Pride anthem “Down South” has an undertone of deep weariness to it. And “Damn You Seventeen”, while it has basically the same premise as their earlier hit “Dancing Away With My Heart”, is bitter and angry rather than gently wistful. There are a couple of rhapsodic love ballads in the conventional Lady Antebellum mold (like “One Great Mystery” or “Falling For You”), but they are few and far between here.

Given all this, why was the album so poorly received at the time? Well, to be honest, for all the skill with which it skewers the shallow Country trends of the time, its concept required it to use the same rhythm-heavy, vaguely Rap-inflected Country-Rock sound that was Bro-Country’s signature. And while Lady Antebellum certainly did more interesting things with that sound than any of the actual Bro-Country acts ever did, the music still isn’t as good, or as suited to their talents, as the ravishing Country-inflected Soft Rock heard on their earlier albums. This makes the album, for all its fine qualities and achievements, a bit of a disappointment for the group’s usual fanbase.

But if this is Lady Antebellum’s weakest album to date (and let’s be honest, it probably is, if only by default), that hardly reflects badly on them. To create something as compelling and bitingly insightful as this on an off day is pretty much a mark of genius. And while this album has a very different sound that might turn off fans of their other work (and isn’t the best thing they’ve ever done by a long shot anyway), it’s worth checking out if you still remember the days when Bro-Country dominated the airwaves and would like to see it torn apart in an extremely satisfying fashion.

Bruno Mars has become so known in recent years as a brilliant pastiche artist that it’s easy to forget that when he first came on the scene, he had an extremely distinctive style of his own. He didn’t abandon it immediately after his first album, either; his second album featured a mix of pastiche and works in his own style, and even the most overt pastiche tracks (such as “Locked Out of Heaven” or “Treasure”), had hints of his original style about them.

But then came the runaway success of “Uptown Funk”, and now his most recent album, 24k Magic, seems to consist entirely of pure pastiche, with little or no reference to the distinguishing traits of his early work. It is, in fact, essentially an album-length version of “Uptown Funk”. Now, I think one album of this is acceptable, but I hope he doesn’t try to continue in this vein indefinitely.

Pastiche, after all, by its very definition, doesn’t stretch, and while there are artists who can basically release the same song over and over again (and indeed, even some who should), Mars is too talented to be reduced to that kind of thing. So while I appreciate his attempt to expand on the success of “Uptown Funk”, I hope that for his next project he returns to the style he premiered on this record, which has far more potential to accommodate artistic growth.

That style is defined primarily by its hyperemotionalism…the happy songs are not just happy, but euphoric and blissful, while the darker songs have a terrifying, almost operatic intensity to them. Nowhere is that more obvious than on the album’s first track and second single, “Grenade”. A terrifying stalker ballad with crazed lyrics and a sort of pop-operatic vocal style, this actually came out a few months before Adele released “Rolling in the Deep” and was thus one of the first signs of the dramatic intensity that would dominate much of Pop music in 2011.

Other examples of the album’s more dramatic side include the despairing Reggae drinking song “Liquor Store Blues”, the enticing yet threatening seduction song “The Other Side”, the explosive ‘warning song’ “Runaway Baby”, and the gorgeous, melancholy “Talking to the Moon” (which became very popular in Brazil, of all places, after being used as the theme song to a popular Brazilian television program). But lest you think the album is a heavy and dark one, there are an equal number of soaring expressions of sheer bliss.

The first single, “Just the Way You Are”, is one of the most romantic Pop songs of the decade, and it seemed like a revelation in the era of thuggish sex jams into which this album initially debuted. “Our First Time” resembles a smoother, more confident R&B incarnation of John Mayer’s “Your Body is a Wonderland”, or perhaps Mars’ own later track “Versace on the Floor” but with actual feelings. “Marry You”, with its giddy declaration of devil-may-care euphoria, actually managed to become a Top Forty hit in the Glee cover version. And the gentle acoustic ballad “Count on Me” is adorably sweet, sounding almost like a classic-era Sesame Street song. I don’t know what Bruno Mars is actually like in real life, but these songs paint him as the perfect person to be in love with.

There’s only one real dud on this album, and it’s admittedly a pretty severe one…the inane acoustic ‘comedy’ track “The Lazy Song”. It seems that Mars likes to periodically blow off steam by writing these kinds of stupid novelty songs (in addition to this one, there’s “Gorilla” on his second album, as well as that “Bow Chicka Wow Wow” song he wrote for Mike Posner). But given how consistent the entire rest of his output is, I think we can forgive him for amusing himself in this fashion from time to time, even if he is amusing absolutely no-one else in the process.

Overall, this is one of the finest albums of 2010, and one of surprisingly few of those albums to produce any hits on the Pop charts (2010 had a fair number of classic albums in the Indie scene, but it wasn’t what you’d call a ‘good year’ for Pop music). Moreover, it still holds up today, and is a reminder that Bruno Mars is more than just a gifted musical chameleon, and has a style of his own that’s just waiting for him to take it up again.