Category: Album Reviews

While most amateur critics seemed to detest the shallow, willfully stupid party rappers that cropped up around 2015 like Rae Sremmurd and Migos, many casual listeners and a surprising number of professional published critics tried to defend them with the argument that their lyrics (which is the most common complaint brought against them) aren’t the point and that their music is merely meant to be mindless fun. And while I would certainly buy the ‘lyrics-don’t-matter’ argument in regards to the more sophisticated melodic Hook-rap genre that would evolve out of this movement a year or two later, as far as the 2015 “Crunk Revival” itself goes, this is one of those times I have to side with the amateur critics.

It’s not that the ‘mindless fun’ argument couldn’t conceivably have merit…it’s just that it didn’t really apply in most of the cases where it was used. Rae Sremmurd’s first album was produced primarily by Mike Will Made It, who has somewhat redeemed himself since but who at the time was known for making some of the dreariest beats of the current decade, so arguing that the beats rather than the lyrical content is supposed to be the source of that record’s appeal doesn’t really help them much. And Migos’ early fondness for endlessly repetitive hooks of the “Imma Be”/”Whip My Hair” variety made their music from this time period about as much ‘fun’ as having a sharp stick jammed in your ear. And at least those two acts have improved since then…when it comes to the genre’s B-listers like Silento and T-Wayne, their beats weren’t any more interesting than anything else about them.

Contrast those acts against this album, the debut effort by a relatively minor Rap name who only has one Top Forty hit to his name, and you’ll see an immediate difference. It came out a couple of years before the Party-Rap trend really caught on, and could be considered a direct ancestor of the Crunk revival, but in contrast to most of its successors in the field, it’s actually fun to listen to. The beats are consistently superb and really manage to create a genuine party atmosphere. The one hit, “No Hands”, is particularly good, combining its strong beat with a genuinely beguiling chorus.

The album has only one flaw: the actual Rapper at the center of it. Granted, this kind of Party Rap is not known for intelligent lyrics at the best of times, but Waka Flocka Flame is right down there with Soulja Boy and Insane Clown Posse as one of the worst lyricists in all of Rap. Perhaps the best way to describe him is to ask you to imagine if Shaquille O’Neal had actually had a legitimate Rap career. Frankly, even that is a bit kind…Waka’s lyrics are every bit as juvenile and simplistic as Shaq’s, but Shaq was at least trying to be clever. These are the kind of Rap lyrics that result from putting absolutely no effort whatsoever into your work, and they make the lyrics by acts in the Rae Sremmurd vein seem capable by comparison.

The reason for this is apparently that Waka Flocka Flame actually hates Rap, is only sticking with his Rap career because he can’t bring himself to turn down the money, and thus goes out of his way to put as little effort into his lyrics as possible. This accounts for this album’s closing track, “Fuck This Industry”…and no, contrary to what you might think, writing a song with actual content does not cause his lyrics to improve. This is a man who can still be completely simple-minded and cliched even when talking about his defining hatred for the Rap industry and paying tribute to his dead family members.

There are a fair number of featured credits on the album, but they don’t really contribute much to the lyrical quality. Most of the contributors are obscure nobodies, largely drawn from the rest of Gucci Mane’s ‘Brick Squad’ posse, and while, like most Rappers, they’re more capable than Waka Flocka Flame, they aren’t especially interesting in their own right. Of the few people you’re likely to have heard of, most are other famously terrible artists like French Montana and Gudda Gudda (best known as the “grocery bag” guy from “Bedrock”). Even Wale’s verse on “No Hands” (the only appearance by a genuinely talented rapper on this album) does not catch him in particularly good form.

One could argue that Waka Flocka Flame is a kind of modern-day version of the Crunk era’s biggest party “rapper”, Lil Jon…an act with no discernible skills as a Rapper who still managed to make genuinely enjoyable music. The only problem with this parallel is that Lil Jon was actually good at something…granted, that something was not Rap, but there’s no denying he had an utterly unique and outsized personality. Waka Flocka Flame seems more like a random no-talent who lucked into a good production team, and I understand the frustration some people feel about his largely undeserved success and the fact that he is not the one primarily responsible for what good qualities his work does possess.

All that said, the truth is that this album is still pretty enjoyable, even with the large flaw of the idiotic lyrics. The lyrics are enough to detract somewhat from the experience, but they’re not enough to ruin it, and the album still makes for a fun listen. If you really must listen to mindless Party Rap, I’d certainly recommend this over Sremmlife or any of the other albums in that vein…in spite of the near-rock bottom lyrical content, there are still no shortage of far worse Rap albums than this one.

Of all the young, photogenic teenybopper R&B singers to step in during the time when Chris Brown seemed to have permanently vacated his niche, Iyaz was by far and away the most talented. Granted, given that his competition was Trey Songz (“See? I’m the perfect replacement for Chris Brown! I TOO can sing songs about being a loathsome scumbag!”), Jason Derulo (“Proving people with no discernible talent can still have major careers since 2009!”), Jeremih (“Wait, you mean “Dick in a Box” was intended as a JOKE?!”), Taio Cruz (“It’s a flying pig, it’s a Purple People Eater…it’s CAPTAIN RIDICULOUS!”), and Jay Sean (“The humanoid incarnation of the law of diminishing returns…and proud of it, man!”), that may not seem like saying much. But even so, Iyaz was something truly special for the extremely dark period for mainstream R&B out of which he emerged. In addition to the above-mentioned artists, I’ve seen him compared to Sean Kingston (“To be honest, I have no idea how I got this job either…maybe one of the record executives felt sorry for me?”) and Akon (“Making REAL thinly-veiled rape anthems YEARS before the “Blurred Lines” controversy!”), but he is much more capable than the former and vastly more palatable than the latter.

This album’s good qualities may seem easy to take for granted today, but two things make this album very special compared to its peers at the time. The first is sheer melody. For those of you who have heard the album’s title track, the runaway hit song “Replay”, yes, just about the entire album sounds like that. These songs don’t just have catchy hooks surrounded by functional staccato noise…every note from the intro verses to the pre-choruses to the hooks themselves is good enough to carry a song on its own. Even now we only occasionally get mainstream R&B this melodious, and it was practically unheard of at the time.

The other thing that made this album stand out at the time of its release is its tone. Do you remember all the complaints about the not-very-convincing pose Shawn Mendes tried to strike on his second album Illuminate…that of the sweet, sincere hopeless romantic who only wants to make his girl happy? Well, six years earlier, Iyaz had captured that same persona so effortlessly and convincingly that it’s pretty hard to believe it was a pose at all. Remember, Iyaz came on the scene about a year before Bruno Mars showed up to put the romance back in R&B, so he was definitely an anomaly at the time. In a world where R&B had become overtly sexualized and very (for lack of a better word) thuggish, Iyaz was totally unashamed to write what were basically boy-band ballads, and he wrote them with a sincerity no boy-band ever approached. In that sense, you might call him the Buddy Holly of late-2000s R&B (don’t laugh—the comparison is more apt than you might think).

I will be the first to admit that this album is corny, dopey and sappy in the extreme…the tremulous love song “Heartbeat” even uses a refrain of “Rum-pa-pum-pum”. But that’s just part of its charm…like the early Owl City albums, you don’t have to be able to take it seriously to find its ingenuous innocence irresistible. The album isn’t perfect…there is one blatant false note, the murder ballad “Stacy”, which is severely out-of-place next to the rest of the album and isn’t a good fit for Iyaz’s style to begin with. But songs like “Solo”, “There You Are”, “Friend”, and “Goodbye” comprise some of the sweetest and most melodious R&B we had heard on a mainstream Pop album in years at that point, and as dated and cheesy as they sound compared to the sophisticated Retro-R&B and Indie R&B sounds heard on the radio today, they still are almost impossible not to like.

Eminem’s Recovery album was acclaimed as a triumphant comeback and one of the best albums of the year when it was released in 2010, but lately it has settled into a reputation as a disappointment. This decline can probably be chalked up to the fact that this is an album you can imagine any truly great rapper making. Not any old run-of-the-mill rapper…the quality of the lyricism is far too high for that…but still, you can easily imagine Nas or peak-period Jay-Z coming out with an album like this, while Eminem’s most acclaimed albums, like his three early-career masterpieces or 2013’s The Marshall Mathers LP2, could never have been produced by anyone except Eminem himself.

This album has every bit of the lyrical quality that makes Eminem the greatest rapper in the history of the genre…in fact, these might be the most complex, rapid-fire lyrics to be found on any Eminem album, and the wordplay, in its own blunt-spoken way, is as witty as a Cole Porter song. What the album admittedly lacks is the distinctive Eminem flavor…the lyrics don’t lack for shock value most of the time, but the colorful and gruesome sense of humor that has become Eminem’s calling card is replaced by an earnest seriousness on most of these songs. The song templates here are tried-and-true Rap staples…the phoenix-rises-from-the-ashes anthem of triumph, the loving tribute to a fallen friend, the honest confrontation of the artist’s own psychological issues. There’s even one song, “Seduction”, that follows the I-Can-Steal-Your-Girlfriend formula that was so much of a cliche in Rap at the time.

But keep in mind that all of the elements of Eminem’s distinctive persona would never have mattered if he hadn’t been the greatest lyricist in all of Rap. For proof of this, look at one of the most excoriated Rap acts of all time, Insane Clown Posse. Their persona is, if you think about it, almost indistinguishable from Eminem’s…the darkly comic shock-rappers who pretend to be serial killers. The difference is that Eminem, at least apart from the Encore album, has the skill to back his theatrics up; because ICP are morons who write ridiculously stupid lyrics, their over-the-top personas just make them look like buffoons. What made Eminem a legend is his talent, far more than his gruesome subject matter, and that talent is in as full display on this album as anything in his discography.

There are a few things on this album that manage to capture a bit of the trademark Eminem spirit. “Cold Winds Blows” is the only appearance of his Slim Shady alter-ego on the album, and while it is quite sober and serious compared to previous Slim Shady songs, it still captures a flash of the character’s twisted humor. The twisted love song “Space Bound” actually managed to create some good old Eminem controversy, due to its music video climaxing with a graphically portrayed suicide. “25 to Life” seems to be another rant about Eminem’s ex-wife Kim, until a very surprising last line. In general, the second half of the album has more of a typical Eminem flavor than the first, but even it still contains some very earnest and conventional (if brilliant) songs.

As for the production on the album, it is good enough to be consistently worthy of the lyrics, with beats monumental enough to challenge those on Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy the same year. It also features one of Eminem’s most consistent strengths outside of his lyricism…making interesting and creative use of samples. When Pitbull or Jason Derulo or Flo Rida uses a sample of a well-known song, they’re just trying to piggy-back off that song’s success; when Eminem does it, he actually creates a whole new effect. It’s been true since the Dido sample on “Stan”, and he proves it true again on such songs as “No Love” (which samples “What Is Love?” by Haddaway) or the ‘hidden track’ “Untitled” (which uses a sample of Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me”).

The album also contains a monumental Pop crossover single…namely, “Love the Way You Lie”, the best hit song of 2010. It tells the story of Eminem’s mutually destructive relationship with his ex-wife Kim in some of the most searing lyrics he has ever produced. It may seem odd that, during the year that Chris Brown was temporarily banished from the Pop world over a domestic abuse scandal, Eminem could release massive hit a song openly admitting to abusing his ex-wife and actually receive sympathy for it. But then, that’s what separates a serious artist like Eminem from a talentless bozo like Brown…Eminem managed to convey genuine guilt over what he had done, and actually gave the impression that he had learned something from it. Speaking of Brown, the song also features a richly nuanced chorus by Rihanna, who seems to pour all the anguish and ambivalence of her own experiences with domestic abuse into her delivery.

Apart from Rihanna, there are very few featuring credits on the album proper, and only one actual guest rapper, Lil Wayne on “No Love”. Now, Wayne could generously be called an uneven talent, but being on the same track as a revitalized Eminem seems to have inspired him, and he rises to the occasion with probably the single best verse in his entire discography. The most unlikely choice for a collaborator is probably Pink, whose ‘Grrl Power’ persona wouldn’t seem to be a very comfortable match for Eminem’s attitude, but the album finds a way to make their worlds meet effectively on the defiant “Won’t Back Down”. But Eminem also proves that he is one of the few artists working today who can be counting on to do top-level work even on his Deluxe Edition bonus tracks, particularly on a collaboration with Underground Rap legends Slaughterhouse, “Session One”. This surprisingly excellent track serves as a foreshadowing of Eminem’s next project, Hell: The Sequel, which would be a collaboration with Slaughterhouse’s most famous member, Royce da 5’9”.

Overall, this album is admittedly not as unique, or perhaps quite as much fun, as the other top-level Eminem albums. But it is nonetheless a masterpiece of a very high order, and it did constitute just as much of a return to form as the critics who initially greeted it suggested. Eminem’s album the year before, Relapse, wasn’t as bad as Eminem himself seems to have decided, being actually pretty solid apart from a few prominent duds, but those who now suggest it is superior to Recovery are kidding themselves.

You know, 5 Seconds of Summer didn’t have to be a terrible band. They play their instruments fairly well…okay, the School of Rock cast have them beat by a mile at half their age, but they’d still make a perfectly respectable semi-unknown bar band, and they might even have been a halfway decent Pop act if they had made better creative decisions. Granted, their choir-boy vocal sound makes their attempts to pretend they’re a legitimate Pop-Punk band pretty futile (the sound of their singing unmistakably marks them as a Boy-Band), but even that didn’t have to be fatal.

Their real problem is that they insist on writing most of their own songs, and they’re spectacularly unqualified to do so, even by the standards of sterile teenybopper music. Look at their most immediate predecessors and influences, One Direction: their first two albums consisted of reprehensible pandering, but at least it was capable pandering. It may have been totally without artistic merit, but it knew what it wanted to do (manipulate teenage girls into giving the band and its management money), and let’s face it, it was enormously successful in that dubious goal.

These guys, by contrast, are complete and utter amateurs, without even the polish that most subpar Teenybopper acts acquire from the soulless professional songwriters from whom they generally get their material. At best, this band’s original material consists of simple-minded cliches, such as the paint-by-numbers love song “Beside You” or the ultra-derivative Carpe Diem anthem “Never Be”. At worst, they consist of some of the stupidest lyrics in all of modern pop music, such as ‘She looks so perfect standing there/in my American Apparel underwear’ (from the lead single “She Looks So Perfect”), or ‘She’s got a naughty tattoo, in a place that I want to get to, but my mom still drives me to school’ (from the pseudo-jailbait freakout “18”).

These guys also seem to have some thoroughly messed up ideas about women. It tells you something when the uncomfortably stalkerish “Don’t Stop” and the whiny “Heartbreak Girl” (which actually uses the term ‘friend zone’) are the tame examples of this. The most extreme example is the album’s low point, “Good Girls”, the chorus of which runs, “Good girls are bad girls who haven’t been caught’, essentially maintaining that all girls are promiscuous and the ones who seem not to be are frauds. Granted, these guys aren’t the only blatant misogynists in Pop music today, but when, say, Chris Brown writes a disgustingly sexist song, he at least seems to understand what he’s done. I honestly think if you told these idiots to their face that “Good Girls” is sexist and offensive, they would be confused, because they really are too stupid to understand the implications of the things they write.

Only on four of the album’s songs are these guys smart enough to call in established songwriting talent to write their material. “Kiss Me, Kiss Me”, “End Up Here” and “Long Way Home” were written primarily by Alex Gaskarth, the frontman of All Time Low, a respected Emo-Pop Band that somehow never took off in the mainstream, and they pretty much sound like All Time Low songs. These songs rock far harder and have vastly sharper lyrics than the rest of the material here, and they are pretty much the only good songs on this album. Indeed, if there’s anything good about this album’s existence, it’s getting the first All Time Low song (even one farmed out to another band) into the Top Forty with “Kiss Me, Kiss Me”.

The fourth song to call in an experienced songwriter from another band, “Amnesia”, was written by brothers Benjamin and Joel Madden, the masterminds behind Emo-Pop band Good Charlotte. It’s worth noting that Good Charlotte were basically the 5 Seconds of Summer of their own era…the shallow boy-band pretending to be a legit Rock act…so it’s at least interesting to see them contributing to their successor’s career. Their contribution here, “Amnesia”, which was the album’s second-biggest hit, sucks about as bad as the rest of the album, but it sucks in the way Good Charlotte sucks rather than in the way 5SoS sucks…that is, instead of being insultingly stupid, it’s whiny and melodramatic and kind of mean-spirited.

Now, for the record, I may not like One Direction’s early albums, but I at least understand why they were successful among their target market. I’m genuinely baffled by the fact that these inept amateurs gained the success they did with this album…not only is it patently bad, but they don’t seem to be the kind of bad that generally succeeds in this field. Even shallow, hormone-addled teenage girls generally require more effective manipulation techniques than this to get them to fawn over a bunch of no-talent prettyboys. Granted, like One Direction, 5SOS got significantly better over time (their second album was a definite improvement, and I don’t really have a problem with their latest album, Youngblood). Still, I honestly don’t get what the initial appeal of this band was even on a wholly cynical level, although one thing I can guarantee is that whatever it was, it had nothing to do with the actual quality of their songwriting. Think of this album as the 50 Shades of Grey to early One Direction’s Twilight…not a well-calculated, if artistically worthless, attempt at pandering, but a hopelessly inept amateur effort that inexplicably got lucky.

Maroon 5 are to the 2010s what Chicago were to the Eighties and Nickelback were to the 2000s…the patently and consistently terrible band who inexplicably receive massive amounts of undeserved success, to the point of being the most commercially successful act in the entire Rock genre. Granted, Maroon 5 were once a legitimately good band…their first two albums in particular were excellent…but then, the same can be said about Chicago. In any case, anything good about the band was lost over the course of the early 2010s, and by the time their fourth album was released in 2012, they were the definition of mindless, soulless sellout Pop-Rock polished to a slick sheen to pander to the masses.

Maroon 5’s previous album, Overexposed, was mostly made up of bland, soulless garbage, but this album is on a whole new plane of terrible. In fact, it might beat out Kesha’s first two records as the worst album I’ve reviewed for this site so far. This is also another example of how lead singles can be misleading, as “Maps” was Maroon 5’s best single since “Misery”. The song had a co-writing assist by the new and improved Ryan Tedder, and possibly thanks to his influence, this represents at least a partial return to the pop-rock sounds of Maroon 5’s classic era. Notably, you can actually hear the rest of the band for the first time in ages, and even if the song is kind of on the bland side and the auto-tune still not doing anything good for Adam Levine’s voice, it’s still a clear improvement on anything they’ve done since “Moves Like Jagger”.

Admittedly, there are two or three other decent items, like the New-Wave-flavored “It Was Always You”, or the slow, sensual “Unkiss Me”, but none of these are really all that interesting, and they certainly can’t make up for the rest of the album. And even these songs suffer from Levine’s poor vocal performance…the sad thing is, Levine actually had a really interesting voice before he started slathering it with auto-tune. Now, I will readily grant that auto-tune has its place, but it doesn’t work for everyone, and there’s no question that its effect on Levine’s unique voice is spectacularly unflattering.

I’ll say this much for the album, though…if nothing else, it displays great variety in its awfulness, demonstrating a wide range of different ways that music can be terrible. For example, “Leaving California” is just unbearably oily and bland, while “Sugar”, which lifts its disco-like melody almost note-for-note from Katy Perry’s idiotic “Birthday”, features agonizing falsetto squeals from Levine that sound like a cat being tortured, which is odd given that Adam Levine has been singing in a falsetto range throughout his career and has generally sounded fine as long as he wasn’t slathered with auto-tune.

“New Love” and “Feelings” combine two of the most annoying beats I’ve ever heard with spectacularly unlikable and insincere “love” song lyrics. “Feelings” in particular combines all the worst features of the manipulative vagueness of One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful”, all those bad Rap sex jams about taking someone else’ girlfriend, the very worst excesses of the Disco era, and Maroon 5’s earlier hit, “Sugar”. It’s an incredibly annoying dance song with vocals just as bad as those on “Sugar”, where the singer tries to seduce someone who’s already in a relationship with ambiguous declarations that make him sound like he’s manipulating her (the chorus is “I’ve got feelings for you”, wailed out in a terrible falsetto, but he never offers any clarification of what those feelings are).

Meanwhile, the obnoxiously overblown power ballads “Coming For You” and “My Heart Is Open” manage to make their supposedly loving messages sound belligerent, almost threatening. Going from a soporific melody on the verses to an obnoxious chorus with its overbearing piano chords and wailing hook of “Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah”, “My Heart is Open” is simultaneously one of the most insipid and one of the most overblown Easy Listening ballads I’ve ever heard.

“Animals” got a lot of undeserved flack for being overly creepy and inappropriate when it came out, with some even invoking the political correctness movement’s favorite word when it comes to Pop music…’rapey’. For the record, though, it is a terrible song…just not for the reason the political correctness crowd seemed to think. It’s not creepy at all…it’s silly, with goofy, over-the-top lyrics that sound like a parody of stalker songs (‘baby, I’m preyin’ on you tonight/hunt you down, eat you alive’). Still, the furor it provoked was a definite overreaction; frankly, it’s not interesting enough to be offensive. If you want something that really is creepy, try “In Your Pocket”, which really does seem to paint a portrait of a paranoid, borderline-abusive relationship.

But where the album really sets its record for sheer awfulness is in the bonus tracks. Given that even truly great Pop albums often have embarrassingly terrible stuff festering in their deluxe editions (look at Take Care and “The Motto”, or Beyonce’s self-titled and “7/11″), this probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The three tracks addended onto the first deluxe reissue were as bad as the rest of the album…”Shoot Love”, which applied a gruesome murder metaphor to a supposedly romantic subject (it’s possible to make this kind of thing work, but it takes skill these idiots don’t have); a neutered cover of Marcy Playground’s “Sex and Candy” (a song that, ironically, the band could probably have pulled off in their Songs About Jane days); and “Lost Stars”, the boring, pretentious Oscar Bait ballad Adam Levine recorded for the film Begin Again.

But the real horror came with the second reissue, which features a new single entitled “This Summer’s Gonna Hurt Like a Motherfucker”. Maroon 5’s late-career, post-sellout output has maintained a pretty consistently low quality for the most part, but this is in all seriousness one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard. I think it has one of their typical asinine lyrics about women, but I can barely tell because the agonizing headache this song invariably gives me makes it very hard to concentrate on the lyrics. Not only is this concentrated musical migraine easily the worst hit song of 2015, it is a very serious contender for the worst song to crack the Top Forty in the entire current decade. The rest of the album is exceptionally terrible by any ordinary standards, but it is dwarfed by this horrific monstrosity, which irrevocably seals this album’s fate as one of the worst efforts of the decade, and Maroon 5’s status as the worst band currently around.

Real Rock music, in the classic sense of the word, has almost disappeared from the mainstream charts. Yes, crossover ‘Indie Rock’ bands make the Top Ten several times a year these days, but with a very few exceptions like Kongos, these hits tend to come from the softer ‘Indie Pop’ branch of the genre. But in 2015, two albums came out that exemplified the intensity (or ‘heaviness’, as they call it in the business) that Rock music used to entail, and each managed to produce multiple hits on the Pop charts. The first was American Beauty/American Psycho by former Emo-Pop band Fall Out Boy; the second, surprisingly, came not from a Rock act at all, but from a mainstream Pop star, former Disney starlet Demi Lovato.

Lovato had always been slightly more Rock-oriented than most of her peers in the world of pure Pop, but this album’s sound was a revelation. The songs that got the most attention, obviously, were the first two singles, the achingly erotic “Cool For the Summer” and the blazing title-track, but the hate-to-love-you lament “For You” and the affirmative love declaration “Yes” rock just as hard, and I could see both of them easily being hits themselves.

When the album slows down this Rock idiom to a ballad format, it tends to sound distinctly like the work of legendary Pop-Soul singer Adele. This is most evident on the third single, “Stone Cold”, with its raw sound and rangy, anguished vocal wails, and the defiant power ballad “Lionheart”. Some people have complained about this, but Lovato does this style almost as well as Adele herself, especially on “Stone Cold”, a devastating song that could compete with Adele’s finest work any day.

Some of the album’s songs do make certain concessions to the sounds prevalent in Pop music at the time: “Kingdom Come” and “Waitin’ For You” even have “Dark Horse”-style Trap beats and Rap verses. But neither of these songs sound distantly like your typical “Dark Horse” clone; even if the Rap verses add absolutely nothing beyond informing us of how bad Iggy Azalea’s taste in television is, even these songs have an intensity and ‘heaviness’ that clearly places them far above the standard-issue Trap-Pop that was making the charts at that point. About the only track on the album that might be considered a disappointment is “Old Ways”, which starts out as intense as everything else on the album, but then fizzles out at what was supposed to be its climax.

While the most striking changes in Demi Lovato’s template for this album were in her musical sound, one still can’t discuss the album without addressing the changes it made to her image. Here, Lovato finally abandoned the wholesomeness of pure Teenybopper Pop for more risque material, but she did so without degrading herself the way most former Teen Pop stars do. Much like Beyonce and Christina Aguilera, she has managed to embrace her sexuality while maintaining her dignity, and as a result has created material more genuinely erotic than any Pop star in recent memory except perhaps Ariana Grande. The album’s raw intensity certainly has an element of powerful sexuality to it, which is most clearly seen in the lead single “Cool For the Summer” and the erotic ballad “Wildfire”, which actually sounds like an explosive orgasm.

The album’s climatic song, “Father”, is the most serious and ambitious track here, a piece of genuine singer-songwriter material where Lovato examines her complex and often painful relationship with her recently deceased father.  In a slow, almost bluesy ballad that breaks into an epic outcry of emotion on the last chorus, Lovato expresses a mix of deep-seated anger, confusion, honest love and hard-earned forgiveness. Some of Lovato’s best songs, such as “Skyscraper” and “For the Love of a Daughter” had been inspired by the anger and pain her father had caused her, and, at least from the listener’s perspective, this feels like a satisfying climax to that emotional arc.

You don’t get many albums in the mainstream with this much raw power…even the more conventional Pop songs on this record rock harder than any of their peers, and the pure Rock songs are an almost unheard-of thrill in the context of today’s Pop music. This was definitely Lovato’s best album until she topped it with the even more magnificent Tell Me You Love Me, and while it didn’t prove to be as much of a game-changer in the short term as one might have hoped, one can hardly blame the album itself for the fact that no-one in the mainstream was brave enough to attempt to match its achievements. In any case, this album is a one-of-a-kind treat in today’s Pop music world, and well worth checking out beyond its three dazzling singles.

Of the two Weird Al albums released in the current decade, 2014’s Mandatory Fun seems to generally receive the lion’s share of attention, due to its topping the Billboard 200 for a week and producing Yankovich’s third Top Forty single, the Schoolhouse Rock tribute “Word Crimes”. But of the two albums, this one is actually the better one by a significant margin.

Some have held it against him that he basically repackaged the songs from his Internet Leaks EP, which had made a big deal about its gimmick of being distributed free over the internet, as part of this commercial album, which some saw as hypocritical. But when this album was released in 2011, there was undoubtedly still a significant portion of Yankovich’s fanbase that hadn’t been sufficiently internet-savvy as to have downloaded the EP (I was one of them at the time, so I know), so I can understand why he felt the need to make sure that all of his fans got to hear this material. In any case, apart from perhaps “Skipper Dan”, the most interesting material on this album was all completely new at this time, so there was ample reason to pick it (and ample value in paying for it) up even if you already owned the EP.

The material from the EP is capable enough…a recession-themed parody of a Glam Rap song, and topical technology satires mimicking the styles of Queen (“Ringtone”) and the Doors (“Craiglist”), but it’s very much Yankovich business-as-usual. Even the genuinely amusing “CNR”, which parodies the ‘Chuck Norris facts’ meme by substituting Charles Nelson Reilly for Chuck Norris, doesn’t really break any new ground.

But much of this album is actually quite dark and deep by Yankovich’s usual standards. “Skipper Dan”, the funny-sad lament of a failed actor reduced to working at Disneyland, is actually quite depressing for a Weird Al song, especially on repeat listens. And “TMZ” and “Party In the CIA” are two of most ambitious and serious satires Yankovich has ever released. The former, based on Taylor Swift’s “You Belong With Me”, is a genuinely biting commentary on our culture’s treatment of celebrities, while the latter, a parody of Miley Cyrus’ “Party In the USA”, is a surprisingly dark political satire that actually mentions waterboarding and political assassinations.

The single this time around was “Perform This Way”, and while it may not have charted as high as “Word Crimes”, it is an even more impressive achievement. If you had asked almost anyone before this album came out, they would have said Lady Gaga’s sheer excesses made her utterly impossible to parody, but Weird Al is considered the King of Parody for a reason, and he proved it by creating a hilarious parody of “Born This Way” that perfectly captured the utter absurdity of the whole Lady Gaga phenomenon.

The ubiquitous polka medley of contemporary hits is, like all such medleys on Weird Al albums, something of an acquired taste, but this one is as well-executed as any of them, and will no doubt appeal to that handful of fanatics who buy the albums primarily for those medleys.

Pretty much the only real dud on the album is “If That Isn’t Love”, an uninspired retread of jokes that weren’t even Weird Al’s best work the first time around. But the album more than makes up for that misstep with its magnificent closing track, “Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me”. On the surface, it seems similar to the two aforementioned decent-but-unspectacular songs from the EP; then-current technology jokes set to a pastiche of a Classic Rock act’s overall style. But combining the sheer exaggerated dramatic force of the Jim Steinman-Meat Loaf collaborations with a hyperbolic lyric about unwanted e-mail somehow resulted in a song so gloriously over-the-top that it ranks with the funniest large-scale set pieces of Yankovich’s career.

As I said, this album tends to get overlooked in favor of its successor Mandatory Fun, but it contains some of the most impressive material in the entire Weird Al canon, and it demonstrates how he has outlasted most of the acts he started out parodying and is still as relevant now as he was in the Eighties and Nineties. This album should be required listening for anyone with an interest in Weird Al’s work (yes, even if you already own Internet Leaks), and is also of value to anyone interested in the Pop music of the period, as Yankovich casts a fascinating lens on that pop-culture era and its assorted phenomena.

This album has gradually become one of the most admired among Paul Simon’s hardcore fans, but it was a commercial disaster at the time and is still underrated (or at least relatively unknown) among the general public, so I thought I would try and call some attention to it.

Personally, I’d argue that in the pantheon of Paul Simon’s albums, this is second only to the legendary Graceland in terms of quality. So why was it such a flop when it came out? I can’t say for sure, but I imagine it had something to do with the fact that this album doesn’t contain a single potential radio hit (and indeed, none of its songs managed to crack the Top Forty). It’s not that the album is inaccessible, by any means…just too special and delicate to really be meant for Pop success. But this record stands as one of the all-time artistic showpieces of Simon’s career as a singer-songwriter, and contains some of his most exquisite compositions.

This was originally conceived as a reunion album for the team of Simon and Garfunkel before a fight between the two derailed the idea, but while there are places you can kind of pick up on this through the album’s sound, which does often echo Simon’s early work with his former partner, it works more than well enough without Garfunkel’s contribution, and frankly, having someone else singing along might have sabotaged the intensely personal and confessional feel of the album.

Some people have suggested that is Simon’s ‘breakup album’ after his failed marriage to actress Carrie Fischer, equivalent to items like Blood on the Tracks by Bob Dylan or Here, My Dear by Marvin Gaye. But to be perfectly honest, only a very few tracks here touch directly on Simon’s divorce…the intensely rueful album opener “Allergies”, the beautifully honest title track, and perhaps the wistfully hopeful “Train In the Distance”, which is about an archetypical marriage and divorce and what it says about the human condition.

Granted, there is one out-and-out clinker on the album…the tinny, irritating “Cars Are Cars” might actually be the single worst song on any Paul Simon album. And there are a few other relatively earthbound pieces, like “When Numbers Get Serious”, an interestingly quirky exploration of neurosis that features fairly clever lyrics, but doesn’t really measure up to the rest of the album.

But this album also contains a large number of absolutely gorgeous moments. The hard-to-describe blend of Doo-Wop and Art Song “Rene and Georgette Magritte With Their Dog After the War” is breathtakingly beautiful. “Song About the Moon” is a poetic lesson is songwriting, written to sound almost improvised, and is one Simon’s most explosively rhapsodic expressions of joy. “Think Too Much” comes in two versions, one a fairly straightforward contemplation on Simon’s various neuroses and one a dreamlike, hauntingly gorgeous lyrical passage. And the album closes with a fascinating and deeply haunting three-part song called “The Late Great Johnny Ace”, which draws a parallel between the deaths of Johnny Ace, John F. Kennedy, and John Lennon.

This album may not feature many of the take-home Pop tunes heard on Simon’s more famous albums, but time has revealed it to be one of his most artistically important works, and while most of Simon’s more passionate fans who might be reading this have already heard it, it remains essential listening for any newcomer who is trying to learn more about Paul Simon’s body of work.

In light of founding member Glenn Frey’s tragic passing and the band’s supposedly permanent final breakup as a result, I thought I would contribute something to the conversation on the Eagles, a band as widely known, loved, and hated as any you could name.

Now, the Eagles have a reputation as a primarily single-oriented band indulged heavily in album filler, and sometimes that reputation was not entirely unwarranted (the last album of their heyday, The Long Run, being the most obvious example), but it certainly doesn’t apply to all their albums, and this is a case in point. While it doesn’t contain as many famous highlights as their self-titled debut or One of These Nights, this is probably the Eagles’ most acclaimed album next to Hotel California, proving that its whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.

It is often called a ‘concept album’, and while many critics dispute this notion, their complaints largely arise from confusion about what the term ‘concept album’ really means. To a modern audience, it usually calls to mind an album with a plotted narrative like Tommy or The Wall, but in reality, concept albums date back to Frank Sinatra’s themed albums of standards in the Fifties and Sixties, and are properly defined as any album with a strong unifying idea tying all the songs together. Desperado has only a very loose narrative structure that drops out entirely for much of the album, but it has a very strong thematic concept…using imagery out of the Old West as a metaphor for people (mostly men) who fetishize their own loneliness and try to pretend that they’re fiercely independent outlaws rather than pathetic lost souls.

In bringing this buried despair into the emotional forefront, the band created some of the most moving songs of their career, including the heartbreaking “Tequila Sunrise”, the softly wistful “Saturday Night”, and above all else, the legendary title-song, which perfectly sums up the emotional truth at the heart of the album. Other highlights include the laconic, threatening “Bitter Creek”, with its slow, simmering suggestion of menace, and the scornful swagger of the posturing “Outlaw Man”. And for a band so often written off as Soft Rock wimps by their detractors, “Out of Control” is without a doubt the hardest, most uninhibited rocker the Eagles would create until at least the Hotel California album, and arguably not even then. And while there may not be all that much explicitly plotted narrative on this album, the grandly tragic closing track, a continuation of the opening “Doolin-Dalton” followed by a reprise of the title track, certainly feels like an epic finale to a genuine drama. There’s even a vague hint that the album might have been to some extent written about the band members themselves, in “Certain Kind of Fool”, a string of double-meaning metaphors that simultaneously described a Western outlaw learning to shoot and a professional musician teaching himself to play the guitar, all in pursuit of the specter of fame and notoriety.

Ironically enough, as Seinfeld famously parodied, the album has become for some men an emblem of the very loneliness-worshiping mindset it was trying to deconstruct, but then again, it’s far from the first great work of art to be completely misinterpreted by some people. That said, this is still one of the great concept albums of the Rock genre, and if you’re looking to explore the Eagles beyond their ubiquitous Greatest Hits collection, this is as good a place to start as any.

This is one of those ‘controversial’ albums whose quality has been debated vigorously ever since it first came out, and the debate shows no signs of stopping anytime soon. To be specific, the professional critics loved this album, as they do most of Kanye West’s output (it was the most common choice for best album of 2013 according to Metacritic’s aggregation of published lists), but the casual fans and amateur critics were much more divided on it, and it certainly didn’t do as well on the Pop charts as Kanye’s earlier albums.

Certainly the music itself…the production work…is up to the same brilliant standard as it was on all of Kanye’s albums up to that point. Some of his fans were turned off by the heavy Industrial influences on much of the album, but while the sound was definitely a new one for Kanye, and significantly less accessible than his previous style, he still pulls it off superbly. The only real potential Pop hit on the album is the closing track, a collage of classic R&B samples called “Bound 2” (and indeed, it was the only song off this album to crack the Top Forty), but the entire album sounds absolutely fantastic as music.

The problem, and the real reason this album was received so much less well by the fans than by the critics, is the lyrics. Frankly, Kanye is a second-tier lyricist at the best of times (he really owes his legendary status to his production prowess, not his skills as an actual rapper), but on this album he completely ceases to filter his own insanity to any degree whatsoever, resulting in what may be the most gloriously insane album since Michael Jackson’s HIStory: Past, Present and Future.

Granted, the practice of recording your own nervous breakdown is a fine tradition stretching back at least as far as John Lennon, but usually there’s some visible impetus in the songwriter’s life to write something like that: Lennon wrote Plastic Ono Band after the breakup of the Beatles, Michael Jackson wrote HIStory after his first accusations of child abuse, and so on. Kanye, on the other hand, as far as anyone can tell, is like this all the time, and it’s not entirely clear why it came through so much more clearly on this album than on his previous ones, but it did. The result is incredibly misguided and often downright offensive, but there is a certain entertainment value at just how over-the-top and utterly insane it is.

The album is full of unbalanced rants about racial prejudice with titles like “Black Skinhead” and “New Slaves”, but these ultimately seem to have less to do with Black rights in general, and more to do with Kanye’s perception of himself as a victim. Just to drive this point home, in “Blood on the Leaves”, he appropriates the chorus of the historic song about lynchings “Strange Fruit” for a song about gold-digging women trying to get pregnant so they can extort rappers for child support, a subject that would probably seem at least mildly offensive even without the wildly inappropriate sample.

In fact, Kanye in general shows very little sensitivity to any disadvantaged group that he does not actually belong to…witness for example the highly insensitive line about Parkinson’s Disease from “On Sight”. He isn’t even above cracking disrespectful jokes about the political causes he claims to be fighting for here, as witness the Civil Rights historical references laced into the absolutely filthy sex jam “I’m In It” (e.g. ‘Your titties, free at last/Great God Almighty, they free at last’). In fact, Kanye does so little self-editing and has so little regard for anyone else’s sensibilities on this album that he literally has a song called “I Am a God” where he proclaims just that. Even when the lyrics aren’t angry, they’re still usually bizarre, as witness the exceptionally goofy word choices on “Bound 2” (‘Damn, what would Jeromey-romey-romey-rome think?’).

I understand why the critics admired this album so much…it has a certain perverse integrity to it, and between the phenomenal production and the sheer spectacle of Kanye’s insanity, it’s never hard to listen to…but I also see why the fans were underwhelmed by it: it’s definitely the weakest of Kanye’s albums up to that point (though his next two, The Life of Pablo and Ye, would devolve much further in terms of quality). Still, whatever your primary reasons for it might turn out to be, it’s pretty hard not to enjoy this album, and whatever reservations I may have about it, on those grounds I feel obligated to at least recommend it to my readers. It’s not perfect, but it’s most definitely worth hearing.