Datarock - Red: What a horrible disappointment. I somehow became a Datarock defender in 2005, seemingly by accident, and this album has everything that irked me about them then and has erased any possible trace of what made them kinda special. To use a typical example, compare "Computer Love" to "True Stories." In the former, Datarock uses the form of "Summer Love" from Grease to tell a story about meeting a girl at computer camp -- the reference points are merely texture to a silly romance song. That is, they're a silly backdrop to the real action, which is the story being told. In "True Stories," they literally just list Talking Heads references, occasionally incorporated into actual sentences and occasionally just stated. That's it. There's a vaguely TH-by-way-of-"Fa Fa Fa" spiky guitar sound to it, but drawing direct attention to the musical antecedent really undermines the (obvious) reference. It's total overkill.
And so goes the whole album. They have a song called "The Blog," featuring interviews about the popular social networking site and a fake live crowd noise throughout. They have a song about the 70's that...lists a bunch of stuff that happened in the 70's. Even "Molly," their ode to Molly Ringwald, seems to have the thesis: this is a song about Molly Ringwald. Remember Molly Ringwald?
God Help the Girl - s/t: From what I can tell this is a Belle and Sebastian side project, kind of the closest Stuart Murdoch is going to get to Electrik Red. Problem is he can't keep himself out of the proceedings, and what begins as an interesting character study of an Ashlee-like mess with a B&S orchestral lilt turns into a weird middle ground between that and a half-thought-through B&S album. Individually I might have interest in either of them, but together the whole thing feels weirdly strained and tedious.
EDIT: Ah, this helps the project make a lot more sense. Doesn't make it work as an album (and I can't imagine these songs working very well in a film musical) but hey, context.
Rick Ross - Deeper Than Rap: Was looking forward to this quite a bit after "Mafia Music," and probably like "Maybach Music 2" even more, Kanye doing a semi-inspired verse, relatively earnest triumphal T-Pain hook. There are scattered highlights in an album that pretty much drops off after the singles -- "Face" w/ Trina is like an oasis in the middle of yachts and fucking and cocaine, none of which are all that interesting when Rick Ross does 'em (for cocaine these days I'll take Gucci Mane, for fucking I'll take any given nebbishy Dream-like superfreak, for yachts maybe Robin Thicke? Yacht music can't just mention yachts, it's gotta make you feel the wind on your nautical-themed pashmina afghan).
Jamie Foxx - Intuititon: A few more winners than Ross but tanks harder in the second half than Ross does. Jamie works hard as hell to lift his nothing music personality up with every production gimmick available to him, but he starts to falter when he goes up against Ne-Yo at Ne-Yo's own game and loses big time, turns to mush from there. First handful of tracks are pretty great, best (aside from "Blame It") being the first, "Just Like Me" w/ T.I., which Lex has already talked about:
'just like me' by jamie foxx and t.i. is based on such a brilliant conceit - dude discovers his girl's been cheating on him, but he can't be mad at her cuz he's been doing the same - and he concludes that this is just evidence that they have the same alpha personality type, egocentric and entitled and with all the girls/boys falling at their feet, and are thus MADE FOR EACH OTHER.
I'm realizing that the T.I. verse undermines the conceit a bit, though he's refreshingly frank about his sexist double-standard (I can cheat and you can't because I = man and you = woman); thing is, Jamie isn't actually using that sort of double standard at all. He actually sounds excited that he's had this breakthrough -- he's not only not mad, he's found his true soul mate!
The-Dream - Love/Hate: An oldie but, I realize now, a goodie that I definitely underrated severely when I first heard it a year or so ago. Now I own the album, have decided that "I Luv Your Girl" is one of the greatest singles of this decade (and the best latter-half-of-the-00s club song in existence), and can stand the tracks that I formerly didn't like as much. Though it still doesn't feel cohesive, it offers different sorts of dizzying pleasures than Love vs. Money does. Being a bit of an albumist, I'll still take the second one.
Gucci Mane - random assorted stuff: I still feel like a huge poser getting into Gucci Mane off recent innernet hype, but whatever. The guy is really, really funny, but doesn't sacrifice trap boasts or (occasionally disturbing) dealer realism. But the humor -- and the fact that the guy sounds genuinely goofy, even a little sweet -- humanizes a genre I usually can't really get down with for basic privileged white voyeur weirdness. Which is weird, because usually this isn't an issue -- I guess the sense of character is clearer here, or maybe genuine laughing-with gives me a point of identification that the narratives themselves don't; when I can't totally get down with the performance as performance, I instinctively go into bullshit feigned neutral/cultural anthropologist observational mode. Someone needs to sift through all of his mixtapes, guest spots, etc. and do a service to mankind in the form of one of the great odds 'n' ends mixes Matthew Perpetua has been offering. (My fave so far is a surprisingly coherent distillation of Fugazi's discography into one disc, which works as an album itself.)
Tinted Windows - s/t: Power-pop project w/ a Smashing Pumpkin and a Hanson and a Fountain of Wayne (Adam Schlesinger, a pretty reliable throwback/soundtrack mastermind) is disappointing. Girlboymusic sums it up: "Tinted Windows has all the right ingredients to be A Band I Love, and yet when you put it all together, you get A Band I Do Not Dig At All." 'Course I'm not as inclined to love it in the first place, but even giving it the benefit of the doubt it lurches through the motions in a particularly brittle way. Osteoporatic, maybe?
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