Category: Album Reviews

I will give Train this much—they’re the most interestingly bad act in Pop music today. Not the worst, by any means, but the most colorful and fascinating in their awfulness. This is rather surprising, given that they started out in the early 2000s as the definition of a competent but dull Soft Rock outfit (comparable to pre-NativeOneRepublic). They did manage to produce one enduring classic, the song “Drops of Jupiter”, but otherwise, they never seemed particularly notable for much of anything.

They followed the standard career path for that kind of band, too…producing a single hit each from their first three albums, and breaking up after their failed fourth album. But in 2009 they reunited, claiming to have stopped worrying about what the world thought of them and rediscovered the joys of just making music. This album was the result, and while it certainly put them back on top commercially, from an artistic perspective, I’d argue that maybe they should have paid a little more attention to the ‘what the world thinks’ angle. Admittedly, the album was a hit, but it also made them the laughingstock of the Pop music world.

This may not be the worst album I’ve ever reviewed, but it unquestionably has the worst lyrics out of all of them. The lyrics on this album are simply insane, filled with stream-of-consciousness non-sequiturs, incredibly poorly-chosen analogies, and random Pop culture references from decades ago. The two big hits, “Hey Soul Sister” and “If It’s Love”, while based on a very simple premise (the proverbial “silly love songs” template), are two of the most bizarre songs of the decade. The former builds a chorus around a reference to a half-forgotten Soft Rock band, contains some frankly disgusting choice of imagery, and for some reason feels the need to insert the phrase “So gangsta/I’m so thug” into an acoustic Soft Rock ballad, a move that has become legendary among enthusiasts of famously bad songs.

“If It’s Love” is less patently ridiculous, but far more confusing, as it’s often genuinely unclear what the Hell the singer thinks he’s talking about. “Breakfast in Bed” is much the same as these two songs, with an increasingly bizarre choice of analogies to refer to the girl in question (“You’re the skin I never want to shed”). The cloying “I Got You” is relatively normal for most of its running time, but has one incredibly misguided moment where the singer compares his love to Sonny and Cher, then seems to backtrack when he suddenly remembers how that relationship ended.

“Marry Me”, the third Top Forty hit from the album, is crazy in a subtler but no less disturbing way. Here, the actual word choices are relatively toned-down…it’s the premise itself that makes the song so insane. For those of you who are familiar with Weird Al Yankovich’s Mandatory Fun album, do you remember the song “Jackson Park Express”? You know, the one where the singer has an elaborate fantasy about a relationship with someone he’s never spoken to, who’s merely sitting across from him on the subway? Well, imagine that exact same premise, but meant completely seriously and without a hint of irony, and you have this song. You actually have to be listening pretty closely to catch it, but once you do, it’s hard not to cringe.

At least the crazier parts of the album are if nothing else entertaining, but much of the material is simply boring. When the lyrics aren’t being utterly surreal, they’re simply arch and trite, dripping with gooey sentimentality and relying on the most hackneyed love song cliches available. And the music doesn’t exactly liven things up, either. Train’s sound may be rooted in Adult Alternative acts like the Counting Crows, but their tone owes more than a little to the dull, sludgy Post-Grunge that dominated the Mainstream Rock scene when they debuted, and if their lyrics have worsened considerably, their actual musical sound hasn’t changed much since then.

Also, something definitely seems to have happened to singer Pat Monahan’s voice during the period where the band was broken up. Monahan was never an especially interesting singer to begin with, but on all of Train’s post-comeback material, he sings in this wrecked, nasal squeak of a voice that just makes the band’s material even more unbearable than it already is.

I suppose I understand how someone who was only familiar with the hits like “Hey Soul Sister” or (from their next album) “Drive By” or “50 Ways To Say Goodbye” might come to the conclusion that Train were a group of absurdist geniuses that were creating this kind of insanity on purpose. But given that about half of this album consists of sentimental tripe that never remotely rises to that level of inspired craziness, it seems unlikely that that effect was deliberate, which leaves the band as merely a bunch of massively incompetent imbeciles who have no idea how insane their material sounds. It’s not the most charitable view of the band’s intentions, but it’s the only one that seems to make sense once you’ve heard their albums as a whole.

Originally, Take That were one of the numerous crop of Nineties boy-bands. They were perhaps slightly more legit than most of their peers in the field, given that they did write nearly all of their own music, but they were still essentially a fairly standard-issue boy-band. They only really became noteworthy after their 1996 breakup, mostly because two of their original members, Gary Barlow and Robbie Williams, went on to become the greatest Soft Rockers of the 2000s in England.

Barlow reformed the band in 2006, but because Barlow had matured into a great talent in the intervening years, their new sound was far more sophisticated than it had been—suddenly, this half-forgotten teenybopper act was the premiere Soft Rock act in Britain. They released two albums with this line-up, reaching Number One on the British charts with some fantastic songs like “Shine” and “Greatest Day”, when an amazing thing happened. The band’s other big solo offshoot, Robbie Williams, who had become even more lauded as a solo act than Barlow, reconciled with his former bandmates and decided to rejoin the group. This album was the result of that partnership.

There’s a good reason this album was the best-selling British album of 2010, and the third best-selling album worldwide that year. If you thought the sound of the first two records by the reformed Take That had been leaps and bounds over their previous stuff, this album kicks it into the stratosphere. Indeed, this is probably the best Soft Rock album of the current decade so far…its only real competition for that title would be OneRepublic’s Native, and of course that was in the Adult Alternative vein of Soft Rock, not the old-school style this album captures.

The sound of the music is heavily influenced by Eighties Synth-Pop, with anthemic melodies over heavy electronic instrumentation, but it features an immense degree of musical sophistication that seems to combine the instrumental intensity of New Order or Depeche Mode, the passion and force of Foreigner or Journey, and the poetic eloquence of Sting’s solo career. If that sounds like a heady and thrilling blend of influences, it isn’t all this album has to offer: there’s also “Pretty Things”, which sounds like it could have stepped right off of David Bowie’s Hunky Dory.

The high points are the unforgettable singles “The Flood” and “Kidz”, but there are plenty of other great songs. Take “Eight Letters”, which, to cite the cliche, actually found a whole new way to say “I Love You”…one so obvious I’m surprised no song had used it before. The songs are mostly tormented love and/or breakup songs, but several of them actually take on a sardonic, even vaguely political tone, with almost violently intense music and apocalyptic imagery in the lyrics.

The album was ultimately followed up with a bonus EP, entitled Progressed. This was common practice in Pop music at the time, of course…Lady Gaga, Kesha and Usher had already done the same thing. The bonus EP’s material, although it featured more songwriting contributions from the other band members without Barlow or Williams, is generally up to the same high level as the original album, and it features two more outstanding hit singles, “When We Were Young” and “Love Love”.

Robbie Williams sings lead vocals on the majority of tracks on this album, and at the time it was popular among critics, due to his impressive solo achievements, to give him primary credit for the album’s quality. But Gary Barlow definitely contributed a lot to the album’s songwriting…those who’ve heard his later score for the Finding Neverland musical will recognize the seeds of that score in some of this album’s songs, particularly “The Flood” and  “When We Were Young”.

I almost can’t believe that this album exists. For such an achievement in what was by then a long-dead musical idiom to come out as lately as 2010 actually gives me hope that old-school Soft Rock might not be as dead as we think it is. In any case, I highly recommend this album to anyone who loves the Soft Rock and Synth-Pop sounds of the Eighties. Don’t be turned off because it seems to be coming from a boy-band…believe me, this is not at all the same band that made their Nineties records, even if it has the same name and line-up. These are seasoned professionals making some of the best British Pop music of the decade, and you owe it to yourself to hear them do it.

Bring Me the Horizon started out as the de facto poster boys for the genre known as Deathcore. Essentially a blend of Death Metal and Metalcore, the genre became a byword for lazy instrumentation and an emphasis on style over substance. And indeed, this band’s debut EP This Is What the Edge of Your Seat Was Made For and their first full album Count Your Blessings contain some of the laziest, least artful Metal in the history of the genre. In addition, their fashion-conscious image made many write them off as simply a glorified boy-band pretending to play Metal. Their third album, Suicide Season, started to show some signs of potential in songs like “It Was Written In Blood” and the title track, but even it contained quite a bit of clumsy, ham-fisted material.

Then this album came along, and like One Direction’s Midnight Memories or Kesha’s Warrior, it made a lot of people do a complete 180 regarding their opinion of the band. This would be sustained in their next two releases, ultimately turning these despised critical pariahs into the most critically acclaimed band in the entire Metalcore genre.

A large part of the reason for this has to do with their use of genre influences. Metalcore is, as a general rule, the least musically sophisticated of the Extreme Metal subgenres, which is why it generally gets less respect than Death Metal, Black Metal and the Doom/Sludge/Post-Metal family. But on this album, by incorporating lyrical passages, choral vocals, electronic elements, and even Classical influences into their sound, Bring Me the Horizon have brought a far greater sophistication to their music than Metalcore generally achieves.

Another thing that sets this album apart, not only from other Metalcore, but pretty much all of Extreme Metal, is the lyrics. The majority of Extreme Metal bands favor fairly heavy-handed shock value in their lyrics, be it based on gruesome visceral imagery (like most Death Metal) or on attempts to offend religious sensibilities through over-the-top attempts at sacrilege (like most Black Metal). Even when an Extreme Metal band attempts to comment on serious issues, the results usually come across as ham-fisted (as in the case of Napalm Death or Gojira).

These lyrics, on the other hand, are surprisingly eloquent, even poetic, and also quite psychologically insightful. The album as a whole serves as a kind of psychological Concept Album, exploring the point-of-view character’s psychological torment and self-loathing, which the band’s frontman Oli Sykes has claimed was autobiographical on his part.  Weirdly, they remind me quite a bit of the lyrics from Les Miserables…they’ve got that same grandly poetic, sweepingly dramatic  feel to them. At any rate, they are certainly the best lyrics I’ve heard on an album from any of the Extreme Metal subgenres to date.

The surprisingly lyrical “Crucify Me”, the grandly orchestral “It Never Ends”, and the richly atmospheric “Blessed With a Curse” are the highlights of this album, but pretty much every track is splendid. Like their fellow experimental Metalcore iconoclasts The Chariot (the lead singer of whom actually provides some guest vocals on this album), they know how to vary their music so it doesn’t come across simply as a monotonous onslaught. To this end, they programmed in lighter moments like the almost gentle ballad “Don’t Go” and the catchy Punk-Metal song “Blacklist”. There are even a couple of songs like “Alligator Blood” that employ what sounds like a more sophisticated variant on their original Deathcore sound, proving that even that reviled genre can be turned to good effect in the right hands.

If you are relatively new to the field of Extreme Metal or just find most of it too simplistically aggressive for your tastes, this band is well worth checking out, given that their diverse genre influences make them both more accessible and more complex than the majority of bands in their field. This album is an impressive artistic achievement, and probably the best Metal album of 2010 (its only real competition would be Folk-Metal outfit Agalloch’s Marrow of the Spirit). In any case, it ranks as one of the best and most important Metal albums of the decade, and is generally far more accessible than most of the contenders for that title (with the exception of a couple of other albums by the same band). Really, whether you’re part of the Metal subculture or not, if you haven’t already heard this album, seek it out. You won’t regret it.

Adam ‘Owl City’ Young’s career trajectory seems pretty straightforward if you limit your survey to his full-length, major-label albums…great album (Ocean Eyes), near-great album (All Things Bright and Beautiful), good-but-not-great album (The Midsummer’s Station), terrible album (Mobile Orchestra). It seems like a pretty standard narrative of a declining talent…until you insert this EP, made only a year before Mobile Orchestra, and the best thing Young had done since Ocean Eyes.

This EP is easily the darkest thing Young has ever released, but apart from that it seems for the most part like a return to his early, Indie Pop style. The opening track, “Beautiful Times”, features the twee-sounding poetry that has become Owl City’s trademark over instrumentation provided by Youtube-launched Dubstep-violinist Lindsey Sterling.

The second track, “Up All Night”, with its Pop-flavored beat, straightforward writing, and angry tone, sounds rather like the album tracks on The Midsummer Station (for those who don’t know, the rest of the album, while more Pop-sounding and ‘normal’ than Young’s previous releases, did not sound like its hit single “Good Time”). “Wolf Bite”, on the other hand, would have fit in perfectly on one of Owl City’s first two major-label albums, with its childlike choice of metaphor and gentle instrumentation, were it not for its darker tone, which is much more desperate and tormented than the ebullient material found on those albums.

The final and most beautiful track, “This Isn’t the End”, tells a very sad but ultimately hopeful story about a little girl whose father commits suicide. It was later transplanted to be the final track on Mobile Orchestra, which is, for those who have heard that album, why the material take such a sudden upswing in quality on the very last track…that unexpectedly good final track was originally written a year earlier for this EP. The song’s narrative bears a certain resemblance to the plot of the webcomic Questionable Content, which may not be a coincidence. After all, that same comic used to have immense importance to the Indie Rock subculture Young comes out of, particularly during the Twee Pop era from which Young draws most of his influences.

To illustrate the degree to which Young outdid himself in quality on this EP, I need only observe that it received generally favorable critical reviews. I’m going to repeat that…the critics, who have despised this artist with a passion ever since he came on the scene with the Number One hit “Fireflies”, were able to set aside their hatred for a moment and say mostly nice things about this EP. Those who are unfamiliar with the sheer degree of undeserved critical vitriol that has been directed at Owl City over the years may not appreciate the full force of this implied endorsement, but the fact that even the critics were unable to bring themselves to hate this record really says all that needs to be said.

After the disaster that was Mobile Orchestra, Owl City is under something of a cloud right now even among his own fans, but I’m not so sure he’s really finished yet. If he could come up with something like this only a year before his latest disappointment, I imagine he can probably still turn things around with his next release. Remember, Ocean Eyes was actually his third album, not his first…he had two self-released albums before it, and they contained the original versions of some of the best tracks that wound up on Ocean Eyes. So that’s six good albums to one bad one, and given that, the law of averages definitely seems to be in his favor. He may or may not have done his last good work on this EP…there’s no way to know the future…but I’m certainly not willing to give up on him yet.

Even with all the popularity and ubiquity he’s achieved on various international music charts, I still feel Calvin Harris’ vital importance to the popular music of this decade has never been fully appreciated by the critics. He pioneered an extremely distinctive style of Progressive House-influenced dance ballads that became the template for nearly all popular dance music for years thereafter and whose influence can still be palpably felt in the output of acts like the Chainsmokers and Zedd. I selected this album because it facilitated his international breakthrough…before this album and its singles, he was largely only famous in England and Europe, to the point where Chris Brown thought he could get away with plagiarizing Harris on “Yeah3X” without any of his target audience noticing (it didn’t work).

The album does start out a little slow…the first full song, “Bounce”, is a bit on the tinny and simplistic side by Harris standards, and it’s followed by “Feels So Close”, one of Harris’ unwise attempt to do his own singing. It’s not that Harris has a terrible voice by any means, but Harris the producer’s trademark style requires massive, expressive belt voices, the Pop-music equivalent of operatic Heldensingers, to soar above his pounding, sweeping production, and Harris the vocalist’s light rasp isn’t up to the task. Indeed, even on the single “Let’s Go”, one can hear featured vocalist Ne-Yo vocally straining a little to be heard over the beat.

After the first few tracks, though, the album’s quality picks up in a big way. Granted, the shorter instrumental interludes, such as “Green Valley”, “Mansion” and “School”, come off as so much filler. However, the largely instrumental “Iron” and “Awooga” (both of which were released as promotional singles) are some of the most intense Synth-Pop we’ve heard since Depeche Mode ran out of steam in the late 2000s. These tracks are presumably what Skrillex was going for on his early albums, but Skrillex lacked Harris’ tight control and sense of restraint, so his attempts at this kind of thing just sounded like random machinery noise. Harris also does collaborations with two of the bigger name Grime rappers, Dizzee Rascal and Tinie Tempah, and while their lyrics are nothing particularly special (for those who don’t know, Grime Rap, a subgenre of Rap rooted in urban Britain, is marked by a distinct emphasis on production over lyrical quality), Harris’ beats on both songs are superb.

But frankly, being able to create great beats was less than half of what made Harris so special. There are plenty of great beatmakers out there—what made Harris different was his determination to create Dance music that could make for an enjoyable listening experience whether you were dancing to it or not. After all, the problem with most bad dance music is the mindset that the cliche ‘It has a good beat and you can dance to it’ is the only positive quality a dance song needs to deliver. And in the years before Harris broke through in the U.S. (especially ’09-’10), we were particularly plagued by a crop of horrible dance songs that were so concerned with getting people ‘on the floor’ that they didn’t bother with things like decent songwriting or listenable singing.

Moreover, Harris was determined to create Dance music with actual emotional content. He knew that with the limited vocal sections, he didn’t have the space to create anything terribly complex, so he instead used each song to focus a single straightforward emotion into an incredible intensity, rather like a Baroque opera aria would. These songs wound up resembling extremely dramatic power ballads set over thunderous dance beats. Harris wasn’t the first to do this style in the U.S….David Guetta had experimented with it a bit, and even had a hit, “When Love Takes Over”, in the style. But it wasn’t until Harris released the anguished love song “We Found Love”, featuring a powerful vocal performance by Rihanna, that this specific template became so popular that practically every Dance-Pop hit for the next six years followed it.

This did result in a certain amount of overexposure that made some people outright sick of the style, but when you remember the kind of Club song that dominated Dance-Pop in the previous years, I think you’ll agree this was at least an improvement. And while not everyone who attempted this style did it as effectively as Harris (and even he contributed one dud when he worked on Rihanna’s lackluster attempted followup, “Where Have You Been”), this album features some of the best works in that style ever produced. In addition to “We Found Love”, there’s the introspective “We’ll Be Coming Back” featuring Example, the glowing “I Need Your Love” featuring Ellie Goulding, the furiously defiant “Sweet Nothing” featuring Florence Welch, and the deeply loving “Thinking About You”, featuring Ayah Marar.

The vocalists all do strong work (Welch and Goulding in particular are magnificent), but the real star of this album is that man who brought substance and depth back to popular dance music, and he really should receive more credit for that singular achievement. After all, without him, Dance-Pop might still consist of shlock like LMFAO and Far East Movement to this day. Think about that the next time you turn on the radio, and remember who you have to thank for sparing you from it. That’s right…none other than Calvin Harris.

The first installment of this two-part release made all kinds of ‘Best Albums of the Year/Decade’ lists, and there’s a reason for that. This disc features some of the smoothest and lushest retro-R&B of the year, and remember that 2013 was the definitive year of the decade in terms of retro-R&B. Imagine if Off the Wall-era Michael Jackson was backed by Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra…that’s seriously what this album sounds like.

From irresistibly dynamic Funk like “Don’t Hold the Wall” and “Let the Groove Get In” to flawlessly seductive love jams like “Suit and Tie” and “Pusher Love Girl” and exquisitely sensual ballads like “Mirrors”, this is some of the best R&B music of the decade. The final track, “Blue Ocean Floor”, is almost Ambient in its atmospheric richness of sound. The third single, “Tunnel Vision”, may not have been the best choice for a single (there were plenty of better songs that didn’t get released), but if it’s the weakest thing on the album, then the album’s doing pretty good, because it’s still a pretty solid song.

Unfortunately, the second disc (billed as The 20/20 Experience—2 of 2) is a far more uneven collection of songs. This is partly because, while both discs are heavily inspired by Michael Jackson, the first installment drew largely on Jackson’s early period, whereas this disc is based more on his post-Thriller work, which is a much less felicitous fit for Timberlake’s style.

There are two gems on the second disc…the silky-smooth ballad “Not a Bad Thing” and “Drink You Away”, which is easily the greatest Country drinking song of 2013 even if it came from a Pop-R&B artist. And a few of the other songs, such as the lead single “Take Back the Night” or “Cabaret” (which features an atypically rapid-fire guest verse from Drake), are at least decent, if nowhere near the level of the songs on the first disc. But items like the obnoxious second single “TKO”, the oversexualized “Give Me What I Don’t Know (I Want)”, or the decisively horrible “Only When I Walk Away” are just flat-out unpleasant.

And even the first disc, for all its glories, suffers from one rather large flaw. Do you know the song “Doctor Jimmy” from the Who’s Quadrophenia album…the one that starts out as a highlight, but then spends over four minutes rambling and repeating itself after it’s essentially finished? Well, imagine a whole album of that. The songs are all wonderful for the first three or four minutes, but the majority of them are seven or eight minutes long, and therein lies the problem.

There’s nothing wrong with writing eight-minute songs if you can actually sustain them, but these songs are essentially over by the three- or four-minute mark, and just stretch themselves out to a long running time by using endless repetition or pointless filler phrases. This problem is even more pronounced on the second disc, where most of the songs aren’t very good to begin with, and become almost unbearable by the time they actually end.

As a result, in spite of the sublime quality of the songs, even making it all the way through the first part of this set requires a considerable amount of patience. I’d argue that the first disc is still worth hearing, but be prepared for flashes of sublime excellence separated by a fair amount of dead air, because that’s what you’re going to get. And I can’t really in good conscience recommend the second disc…the two best songs on it were released as singles anyway, so if you’ve heard them, you’ve heard all you need to hear of that album.

I get why the first part of this collection was so acclaimed at the time, and I’m not trying to dismiss it…it still definitely qualifies as a masterpiece. But it would have been an even greater masterpiece if Timberlake and his longtime producer Timbaland had put a little more effort into being concise and focused instead of artificially stretching out the songs in some attempt to emulate the extended dance jams of classic Funk and Disco. Those songs were lengthy for a reason that no longer applies in the digital era…the desire to keep people dancing for as long as possible without having to interrupt them by changing the record. There’s really no reason for music of this kind to be this long-winded in the modern era, and Timberlake and Timbaland, for all their obvious talent,  clearly aren’t capable of maintaining the audience’s interest for that long anyway, so they would have been wiser not to try.

Now, there are plenty of people who hate Meghan Trainor. The amateur critics tend to hate her because she defied the politically correct politics popular among that demographic in ways that are ultimately trivial but were blown out of proportion by angry internet ranters. The professional critics’ disdain for her is harder to explain. I suspect it’s because, like Taylor Swift, she’s too overtly commercial for the snobs that dominate that field, and too legitimate an artist for them to simply dismiss her condescendingly the way they do acts like Katy Perry and Rihanna. But unlike Taylor Swift, she hasn’t achieved such an obvious level of success that dismissing her outright seems ridiculous on its face, so they presumably see her as an easier target.

That said, Trainor’s second album, Thank You, was greeted as something of a disappointment even by her fans, and this is probably because it didn’t live up to the extremely high standard set by her first. Granted, that can’t entirely explain Thank You‘s negative reception, since many of its detractors didn’t like this album either. But I’m going to come right out and say that anyone who thinks Titleis a bad album is presumably operating under some sort of bias.

The superior quality of this album compared to her sophomore effort is partly because the Fifties Doo-Wop sound she drew on here is simply a richer vein of music than the Nineties Pop pastiche she attempted on Thank You, but it goes beyond that. The songwriting on Thank You, while it featured several excellent moments like “I Love Me” and “Champagne Problems”, was much more uneven and generally less consistent than the superb writing on display here. It makes sense, if you think about it…Trainor had presumably been working on these songs for years, whereas her next album had to be squeezed out in a hurry around the edges of her touring schedule. That’s certainly the usual reason for the Sophomore Slump phenomenon, and I imagine it applies here too.

This album is bookended by two killer singles. The showstopping “All About That Bass” was the first sign Pop music was improving toward the end of 2014, and the deliciously sassy “Lips Are Movin” was one of the crop of songs that confirmed it. But the album has plenty of glories beyond its two smash hits. The high point is unquestionably the sublimely beautiful ballad “Like I’m Gonna Lose You”, but the inspiring “Close Your Eyes” and the tender “What If I” almost equal it in loveliness.

The only real dud on the whole album is the obnoxious “Bang Them Sticks”. Many people will be downright offended by that statement, specifically because of the implication that I don’t consider “Dear Future Husband” to be a ‘dud’. And I’ll admit that this song has an oddly dated view of gender relations that makes for slightly uncomfortable listening if you take it at face value, even if it’s far less sexist than many songs of the actual era it’s pastiching and may have been designed specifically as a tribute to that era. But its problems have been so vastly blown out of proportion by the internet political correctness claque that I’m inclined to defend it at this point. Besides, the fact remains that the music itself is absolutely sensational, and you could make a strong case that’s all that should matter.

The title track (no pun intended) has come under fire by the same groups, but for the life of me I can’t imagine why. I admit I’m not a woman and perhaps am therefore not entirely qualified to judge, but I honestly can’t understand how a girl essentially saying “I don’t want to be ‘friends with benefits’, acknowledge me as your girlfriend or I won’t sleep with you” is somehow degrading to women. Personally, I’d argue the sentiment is rather empowering if anything, and once again the music is so good that it really shouldn’t matter. Also, people in general seem to miss that much of this album is fairly tongue-in-cheek, as the winningly self-deprecating “Walkashame” and the ruefully funny “3AM” demonstrate. The latter sounds rather like if Darius Rucker’s “Drinkin’ and Dialin’” and Lady Antebellum’s “Need You Now” had a baby that was then adopted and raised as a Doo-Wop song.

People were particularly incensed when Trainor won the Best New Artist Grammy for this album, but I’d argue she deserved it as much as any of the nominees, and more than most. For those who don’t know, while they apparently changed the rules later this year, Best New Artist awards used to be directly tied to specific albums. And Title didn’t face a great deal of competition from, say, Sam Hunt’s Montevallo, an ambitious and daring experiment that nonetheless ended in disaster, or Tori Kelly’s painfully generic Unbreakable Smile, or James Bay’s terminally turgid Chaos and the Calm.

It did have one valid competitor in Courtney Barnett’s Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit, and I don’t envy the Grammy committee for having to choose between them. Not only are they both outstanding works in totally different fields (mainstream Pop and Lo-Fi Indie Rock), but they have totally different strengths and emphases. Trainor is above all a wonderful tunesmith, while Barnett is known mostly as a brilliant lyricist, setting her complex lyrical explorations to tunes that are little more than functional.

But ultimately, Barnett’s album is not the type that typically wins Grammys anyway…the Grammys do love them some Indie Rock, but they generally prefer their Indie Rock a bit more accessible than Barnett’s work. So even though Sometimes I Sit and Think was at the opposite extreme from this album in terms of critical praise, I don’t think it was either a surprise or an injustice that Trainor was awarded the prize. This may not be the kind of ‘serious’, ambitious project that its only real competitor was, but it is every bit as excellent an example of its field, and the critics, both amateur and professional, that argued otherwise are simply wrong.

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Bob Dylan has now won a Nobel Prize for his work as a Folk poet, and as I have stated, I see that as a well-deserved acknowledgment of the validity of the medium and the sublime quality of his poetry. But if there is any Folk poet-songwriter who could challenge Dylan as a lyricist, it would be the recently deceased and bitterly missed artistic genius Leonard Cohen. And in memory of this remarkable man, I thought I would pay my respects by reviewing one of his albums.

In the actual Sixties heyday of the folk movement, while most of Cohen’s peers were tilting at political windmills and writing protest songs and social commentaries, he very meticulously focused solely on his own personal story. His songs were introspective and meaningful to the extreme, but they were about his own state of mind and emotional journey, and almost never dealt with the so-called ‘larger’ issues.

It was only in his later career, particularly after his late-Eighties ‘comeback’, than he began to get political in his songwriting. That is why, in reflection of current events, I have decided to review one of Cohen’s later masterpieces rather than any of the justly legendary works from his initial heyday in the Sixties.

In addition to taking on more political themes, Cohen’s voice had changed a great deal since his early years, dropping from a nasal tenor to an extremely deep Basso Profundo, slightly gravelly but still smooth enough to sound pretty. His actual ability to sing in tune was shaky, and for much of this album he doesn’t even try, whispering and intoning his lyrics rather than truly singing. But like Richard Burton in Camelot, his natural speaking voice was so exquisitely musical to begin with that he didn’t really have to sing to create the effect of singing.

This is a concept album dealing with Cohen’s extremely cynical reactions to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the consequent rejoicing. Of course, in reality, all of Cohen’s album are concept albums…people just often don’t notice this because their concepts are generally too abstract to be expressed as linear stories.

There are really only six original Cohen vocal songs on this album, but they represent some of the finest work of his career; indeed, every single one of them tends to be ranked among his all-time classics by fans, making this one of his most consistently outstanding musical efforts.

The title track is the finest look into the motivations of a villainous figure since The Who’s “Behind Blue Eyes”. “Waiting For the Miracle” is one of Cohen’s most poetic creations, quietly threatening yet at the same time exquisitely lyrical.

“Closing Time” is a kind of disturbing hoedown, with some of the most cynical lyrics ever written. “Light As a Breeze” is one of the most erotic songs of all time, even if, like “Chelsea Hotel No. 2”, it’s ultimately about far more than just sex.

“Democracy”, the album’s most overtly political song, would sound like a patriotic anthem from the music alone, but the brutally honest lyric is half bittersweet love letter and half scathing deconstruction.

But the most pertinent track in today’s world may be “Anthem”, a breathtakingly beautiful piece that acknowledges the ills and injustices of the world but ultimately comes away with a truly inspiring message of optimism, declaring “There is a crack in everything/that’s how the light gets in”. Cohen’s songs are very rarely this positive, and indeed, I don’t think he ever wrote anything else as uplifting as this, and it serves to keep the album’s cynicism from sinking into despair the way some of Cohen’s albums do (e.g. Songs of Love and Hate).

The rest of the album consists of two covers (of an obscure R&B tune from the Seventies called “Be For Real” and Irving Berlin’s classic standard “Always”) and a closing instrumental. The covers are both superb, with Cohen’s reading of “Always” being particularly nuanced and fascinating.

As for “Tacoma Trailer”, the first purely instrumental track to appear on any Cohen album, while it loses something by not featuring Cohen’s two most interesting qualities (his lyrics and his voice), it is still a lovely and haunting piece that makes for a satisfying album closer. I don’t know which of this album’s session musicians was playing the keyboard here, but I hope he went on to a long and fruitful solo career, because he definitely deserves it.

Three of the songs from this album made it onto the soundtrack of the movie Natural Born Killers, which helped give the album well-deserved exposure. Still, the songs definitely work best when heard together as a group; as stated, despite not expressing itself as a clear linear narrative, this really is a unified concept album.

Cohen has released a myriad of other masterpiece-level recordings in his career, but I must admit this one was always particularly dear to my heart, particularly “Anthem”, which has gotten me through a number of rough times in my life. And given the state of current events in America today, I think this album, and especially “Anthem”, is more relevant today than it has ever been. And given the loss that the world has experienced with Cohen’s passing, this seems as good a time as any to encourage people to seek out or revisit this glorious masterpiece from a man who was assuredly one of the greatest musical and poetic artists of the last hundred years.

The Chainsmokers are one of Pop music’s most surprising stories of redemption. Back when they first came on the scene with the reprehensible viral novelty “#Selfie”, they seemed like little more than a bad Youtube novelty act encroaching on the realm of Pop music. But the hit single from their previous EP, “Roses”, established them as a legitimate EDM producing act. This EP continued that process, but also did some damage to their reputation for another reason.

Unfortunately, the worst track on this album, “Closer” featuring Halsey (who has made a respectable career for herself since, but was primarily known at the time for the decisively horrible “New Americana”), sat at the top of the Billboard charts for more than three months and refused to budge. This undeserved success has led some people to exaggerate the awfulness of the song itself, which really isn’t quite rock bottom.

The composition itself is actually rather interesting, with an intriguingly offbeat concept: write a song about a couple reuniting after years apart, but with humorously incongruous lyrics that demonstrate exactly why they broke up in the first place. This is certainly a much better comedic concept than “#Selfie” ever had, but the joke doesn’t really land. Unlike “New Americana”, it actually succeeds in capturing that brand of irony particular to the Millenial generation…the problem is that the result isn’t really all that funny.

More damningly, the beat is the weakest on the EP, underpowered and tinny-sounding. On top of that, one of the production duo sings half of the vocals on this duet, and he is spectacularly unqualified as a singer. Seriously, this guy makes Calvin Harris sound like Barry White. At any rate, the song is not remotely strong enough to withstand its massive overexposure, and the whole world seems to have gotten sick of it by now.

This has unfortunately led some critics to dismiss the entire EP as trash, which seems a massive overreaction and a damned shame, because there’s some very good material here. Like Taylor Swift’s Red or Future’s Honest, this album wound up putting its worst material in the most prominent place, but the rest of the disc is actually some of the best EDM we had seen on the Pop charts in a while at that time.

The first track on the EP, and the only one not released as a separate single prior to its release, is “Setting Fires”. On an album consisting mostly of Calvin Harris-influenced dance ballads, this is the only song to go for a funkier, more uptempo feel, and it does so in a quite satisfying fashion, providing a burst of variety and energy than helps keep the EP interesting and get things off to a lively start. I’ve heard some people complain that this song has offensive ‘woman-as-helpless-appendage-of-man’ implications, but that just strikes me as bizarre, given that the entire subject of the song is her declaring that she won’t make senseless sacrifices for this man anymore.

“All We Know” has almost the same melody as “Closer”, but with a vastly superior beat and lyrics. It also could be argued to have vaguely similar subject matter (both are about hanging onto dysfunctional relationships), but this song plays the concept as sad and quietly bittersweet rather than bitterly comic as “Closer” does. Featured vocalist Phoebe Ryan gives this touching ballad a distinctive and haunting sound that is miles ahead of anything its more famous cousin achieves.

The high point of this album is “Don’t Let Me Down”. This song was a double subversion of listeners’ expectations, because it combined the Chainsmokers with teen Pop star Daya, best known for such execrable items as “Hide Away” and “Sit Still, Look Pretty”. And yet, in spite of this seemingly dubious combination, it wound up being probably the best EDM hit of the entire year. An emotional dance ballad in the Calvin Harris vein with some DJ Snake-esque Trap influences worked into the beat, it ranks with the finest EDM hits of the decade. It also features a glorious vocal performance from Daya…on her own songs, she generally tries to sound like Rihanna, which is not at all a good fit for her, but here we can finally see why people were initially calling her a vocal prodigy.

The album’s least successful single, “Inside Out”, is a capable song, with an attractive chiming sound to the beat and suitably impassioned love-song lyrics reminiscent of songs like “Beneath Your Beautiful”. But without the haunting sadness of an “All We Know” or the explosive impact of a “Don’t Let Me Down” (or, I suppose, the obscene career luck of a “Closer”), it never made much of an impact on the charts. Still, it’s a more than respectable song that certainly deserved success more than “Closer” ever did.

These guys still have a tendency to make asses of themselves in interviews, which might also hurt their perceived credibility, but as producers and songwriters, they’ve proven themselves quite capable and earned a fair measure of respect, at least as far as their art itself goes. The critics who excoriated this album because they were annoyed at the undeserved success of its worst single seem to be missing the fact that, as far as EDM goes, these guys were pretty much the best thing we had on the Pop scene in 2016. No, this EP doesn’t necessarily reach the level of the best EDM from the genre’s glory years like 2012 or 2013, but it’s a Hell of a lot better than, say, Justin Bieber’s EDM stuff or anything Calvin Harris released that year, and “Don’t Let Me Down” would be a treasure in any year. The “Closer” issue notwithstanding, this is a highly respectable record consisting of precisely 80% good content, and it’s worth exploring to find out what these guys are capable of outside of their terminally overexposed Number One hit.

This is the most recent studio album by singer-songwriter-musician and former Pop sensation Stefani Germanotta, better known by her increasingly unfortunate stage name Lady Gaga. In all seriousness, I have to imagine she regrets choosing that name at this point…it worked for what she was trying to do for the first few years of her career, but now that she’s trying to establish herself as a serious artist, it’s becoming more and more of a liability.

In any case, for those who need a refresher course, Lady Gaga started out as a Pop starlet with pretensions of avant-garde artistry that she didn’t really try all that hard to back up. Unlike her closest peer, Katy Perry, she actually had genuine talent, but almost seemed to downplay it in order to not draw attention from her over-the-top persona. At first, this didn’t matter…most of the public was eating out of her hand, and she became the same kind of Pop culture icon that Madonna was at her peak. But after Adele broke into the mainstream and showed people what a real genius-level Pop star looked like, people gradually realized that their supposed visionary genius was a fraud.

After an extended hiatus and an attempted ‘comeback’ album that did little more than embarrass her, she spent the next few years working in fields of music unrelated to the Pop charts. She made a duets album of classic standards with legendary singer Tony Bennett, and crafted a harrowing, Oscar-nominated theme song for an ultra-serious documentary about sexual assault cases, and she would follow up this album by starring in a surprisingly respectable remake of the classic movie musical A Star is Born. This time associating with more legit musicians and genres seems to have done her a lot of good, as the quality of her work has actually improved immensely since her last ‘Pop’ album was released.

This album was nominally intended, at least in the eyes of the public, as her ‘comeback’ to the Pop world, and yet unlike her last ‘comeback’ album, Artpop, which reeked of desperation, this album seems almost indifferent toward its own level of success on the Pop charts. Strange as it may sound, Lady Gaga is not really a mainstream Pop artist anymore, and while this album only really produced one ‘hit’ to speak of, it wound up emulating Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, another album by a seemingly superannuated former Pop sensation, by becoming a major underground success outside the mainstream Pop scene.

Some fans of her early work complained about Gaga discontinuing the bizarre antics that she used to get attention back in her ‘Pop’ days (I remember reading a particularly idiotic argument along those lines from The Washington Post‘s resident Pop music critic when this album first came out). These arguments are stupid and hypocritical for a number of reasons, but the most obvious one is that Gaga’s ‘freak’ persona almost never spilled over into her actual music. Yes, she made surreal music videos, gave outlandish live performance, and made an ass of herself at public events in all kinds of bizarre ways. But apart from “Bad Romance” and to a lesser extent “Poker Face”, her songs were nearly all relatively normal (if often above-average) Pop music of the period. “Just Dance” and “Telephone” were fairly conventional club songs, “Alejandro” sounds uncannily like an Ace of Base song, “Born This Way” is a pretty standard ‘love yourself’ anthem, “You and I” is a pastiche of Pop-Country, and “Edge of Glory” is fairly straightforward retro-Classic Rock. This album has a more normal marketing image than most of her earlier work, but its actual content isn’t particularly different.

The primary difference between this and Gaga’s earlier work lies in its consistency. This album, which draws mostly on influences from Classic Rock and Classic Country, doesn’t have a single real dud on it. Even the third single, “A-YO”, while probably the least successful item on the album and thus not the best choice for a single, is a fairly solid and enjoyable song. The highlights are the Springsteen-meets-Jim-Steinman lead single, “Perfect Illusion”; the Country-flavored “Million Reasons”; the scorching album opener, “Diamond Heart”; the title track, an optimistic song about grief; the erotically off-kilter “Dancing in Circles”, penned by none other than the legendary Beck himself; and the heartbreaking “Angel Down”, about the Treyvon Martin shooting. But pretty much everything on the album is strong, even the bonus tracks, which is a rarity in Pop music…even good artists tend to rely on blatant filler material to fill out their deluxe editions. Several of the songs feature production by Mark “Uptown Funk” Ronson, and Florence Welch shows up for a duet, “Hey Girl”…and impressively, Gaga manages to hold her own against one of modern music’s most monumental voices.

Remember, the only Lady Gaga album to even approach this level of consistency before was the eight-song EP The Fame Monster, and even it had one blatant filler track in “Teeth”. Gaga’s done songs as good as anything on this album before (“Just Dance”, “Poker Face”, “Bad Romance”, “The Edge of Glory”, etc.); what makes this a breakthrough is that she managed to do so many of them in one place. If albums really do matter, then this is the opus that elevated Gaga to the prestigious rank of genuine ‘Album Artist’, and that has to count for something.

This isn’t a world-changing, genius-level masterpiece album like Adele’s 21 or Taylor Swift’s 1989 or Beyonce’s Lemonade, but it is a consistently excellent collection of sophisticated Pop songs—indeed, as a whole it is a more satisfying collection than Adele’s follow-up 25. But then, Lady Gaga is not, nor was she ever, a visionary genius…just a solid, dependable talent who unfortunately spent her early career trying to pass herself off as something she wasn’t. And while her flamboyant past and increasingly awkward choice of stage name are still somewhat hindering her attempts to reinvent herself as a serious artist, this set proved that she certainly has the raw talent necessary for it.