Arctic Monkeys
Favourite Worst Nightmare
April 24
The cynicism is as barbed as the guitar riffs on Arctic Monkeys' second album, Favourite Worst Nightmare, and the guitar riffs bristle. Their 2006 debut album, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, rode an Internet buzz fueled by the band's giving away its songs before release, but the momentum came from the songs themselves. Arctic Monkeys arrived amid a wave of English bands that were rediscovering the terse melodies and hurtling, hard-nosed narratives of new-wave rock.
In the time between albums Arctic Monkeys have shifted their perspective from the nightlife, gigs, booze and flirtations of their debut album to a more encompassing disillusionment and sense of betrayal. "We're forever unfulfilled, and can't think why," the band declares in This House Is a Circus.
Turner's lyrics are so tightly packed that he sometimes delivers them as fast as a rapper. In the rush of rhymes, nearly everyone and everything is a cheat: lovers, hustlers, tabloid media, even nostalgic memories. Balaclava and The Bad Thing are pickups with a bad conscience from the start; Do Me a Favour focuses on the moment of a breakup. Fluorescent Adolescent mourns the way lust wanes — "Discarded all the naughty nights for niceness/Landed in a very common crisis" — while If You Were There, Beware, denounces the way reporters exploit suffering: "Can't you sense she was never meant to fill column inches."
The new songs are more melodic and even more meticulous than before. Arctic Monkeys have almost ruled out standard punk strumming. Instead they have zeroed in on the counterpoint of the two guitars, neatly separated on left and right channels and clawing fiercely at each other. The songs take pride in that bitter clarity.
Nine Inch Nails
Year Zero
April 17
Trent Reznor enjoys taking his time between records — five years between each of his first three studio records and six years between his third and fourth albums. So fans should note that Year Zero, his fifth full-length CD, arrives less than two years after his last outing, With Teeth.
Fans' learned behavior — that of waiting — was disrupted months ago when Reznor and his friends started a mostly online campaign advancing Year Zero with a complex back story.
While With Teeth was a return to form for Reznor, who first broke with the 1989 classic Pretty Hate Machine, Year Zero is an exploration of minimalistic electronic programming. Instrumental opener Hyperpower! recalls The Downward Spiral's uber-percussion heyday, and the album's lead single, Survivalism, takes that unique approach to drums/programming and adds to it. Reznor experiments with his vocals, adding hiccup-like breaths, meditative spoken word heavy on the downbeat and slides into his upper register.
The result is a classic NIN track, something that will fit naturally into his live sets alongside Terrible Lie and Into the Void. The rest of the album is solid with a few stand-out tracks. Me, I'm Not is quietly lush and surprisingly soulful, composed with sounds that can make you uncomfortable.
The few guitars in The Warming are manipulated and bent brilliantly, and it lends an exciting Indian aesthetic to the song. Capital G starts with The Way You Make Me Feel drums but elevates into a political rager with Reznor, again, exploring new vocal territory.
Avril Lavigne
The Best Damn Thing
April 17
Introspection doesn't suit Avril Lavigne.
After the snotty breakthrough of 2002's Let Go, Lavigne scaled back the sass on 2004's Under the Skin and, as a result, sold half as many copies (8 million worldwide to Let Go's 16 million worldwide). Could the noticeable drop in sales have stemmed from Lavigne's indulgence in maudlin anthems that had a nation of teenage girls sobbing along?
The Best Damn Thing certainly supports that theory: The first ballad on her third album doesn't materialize until halfway through, interrupting a steady stream of fast-moving, punk-studded pop with not one, but two, songs (Girlfriend and the title track) melodically cribbing from Toni Basil's classic Mickey. Any energy or spontaneity is drained from The Best Damn Thing.
It's hard not to admire the calculation on Lavigne's part — the 22-year-old gives the impression she's figured out this whole music business, delivering an album packed with radio-ready singles, designed like high-end automobiles for comfort and mass appeal.
Eventually, Lavigne will outgrow this stage of her life, but the ease with which The Best Damn Thing unfolds suggests that even if adulthood agrees with her, she'll probably shy away from again indulging in the emotional grit of a record like Under the Skin. Soul-searching rarely sells a tonne of records.
In a cunning sleight of hand, two different editions are in stores. The "white cover" version doesn't allude to the songs being edited for profanity; the more expensive, CD/DVD "pink cover" version sports a parental advisory sticker. She might be a savvy businesswoman, but Lavigne's still got a mouth on her.
Timbaland
Timbaland Presents Shock Value
April 3
He looks more like a teddy bear than a revolutionary. But producer Tim "Timbaland" Mosley has smuggled nothing less than trumpeting elephants, Bollywood licks and backwards choruses into the American Top Five in the last decade. Music hasn't sounded the same since.
Mosley began as Missy Elliott's right-hand man, but branched out from hip hop into R&B (Aaliyah was a regular client) and pop. Justin Timberlake divides his love between Tim and the Neptunes, who are Mosley's only real rivals. But with the Neptunes off the boil, Mosley's stock has risen higher still since he did Nelly Furtado's Maneater last year. He earns half a million US dollars per tune, as he taunts one rival on Give it to Me (that's Scott Storch, beef fans). It seems that 'half a mil' a pop is not enough for Mosley, however.
Like his first solo album from 1998, Tim's Bio, Timbaland's second is a long calling card. It brings together Mosley's famous friends (Justin, Nelly, Missy, 50 Cent, Dr Dre, Elton John), his current proteges and some immaculate sound-wizardry. At the end of Bounce, Timbaland fashions a beat out of a dirty chuckle. On Come and Get Me, virginal sopranos rub their arpeggios against the murderous threats of 50 Cent. Mosley's own so-so, rubbery raps reflect on what a wheeze all this is.
But after such a great start, Shock Value descends into a series of commercial samples aimed at markets Mosley hasn't yet dominated. The shock value? A suite of tracks featuring rock acts.
The ubiquitous Fall Out Boy are the least welcome here. More amusing is the surf guitar-hip-hop mash-up of Throw It on Me featuring the Hives. These craven bids for record company business are compounded by guff, over-filling 19 tracks. Mosley's head-to-head with Elton John's piano is more of a skit than a song. His run-in with MIA is a letdown. There are no elephants (or their equivalent).
So Shock Value does nothing more shocking than bid for rock money.
Black Sabbath
The Dio Years
April 3
Black Sabbath is a seminal metal band, yes, but it's also hosted one of the more storied games of musical chairs in rock history.
Second only to Ozzy Osbourne in helming the band was Ronnie James Dio, who fronted three studio records including Heaven & Hell and Mob Rules in the early 1980s and then Dehumanizer in 1992. Dio's early work with the band, spawning the singles Heaven & Hell, Turn Up the Night and Neon Knights, was his strongest, and it brought the band out of a post-Ozzy commercial slump.
This collection of tracks comes out amid the reunited band's current tour. And while a Dio-era Sabbath greatest-hits record is an unquestionable stretch, the three new songs here make the album interesting.
The Devil Cried is the best of the three, and it highlights Tony Iommi's careening riffs as they collide with Dio's over-the-top — yet still finely formed — vocals. It's hardly classic metal, but it's an A-for-effort outing for these rock geezers pushing 60.
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
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Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s