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CD REVIEWS

THE NEW BOSSA NOVA

DAVE MATTHEWS & TIM REYNOLDS
Live at Radio City Music Hall
RCA
Aug. 14

Matthews and guitarist Reynolds played gigs together in the days before fame struck, and last paired up for a record about 10 years ago. Here, their obvious musical chemistry is revisited in intimate versions of Matthews Band staples Crush, Grace Is Gone, Don't Drink the Water and Gravedigger, along with warm readings of Neil Young's Down by the River and Daniel Lanois' The Maker. The previously unrecorded Sister stands out here as the sort of sensitive-guy anthem Matthews excels at, while the more familiar Dancing Nancies rocks as hard as the meandering, eight-minute Lie in Our Graves does not.

Prince
Planet Earth
NPG/Columbia
July 24

Prince gets a pass because, well, he's Prince, a fact he likes to remind us of every so often with either a gangbusters tour or a throwdown performance at halftime of the Super Bowl.

But when it comes to his recorded output of late, his means of getting music to the people - either by including CDs with the purchase of concert tickets or by giving them away as freebies in a Sunday newspaper, a stunt he recently pulled in Britain - has shown far more creativity than the music itself.

TIME ON EARTH

Even if his comeback albums Musicology and 3121 helped lift him from his mid-to-late-1990s artistic dead-spin, they've failed to capture the public's imagination the way Prince did so freely at his 1980s creative peak.

DAVE MATTHEWS & TIM REYNOLDS

So while Planet Earth is the best of Prince's recent efforts, it only shows glimpses of the genius that was once his Purpleness' hallmark.

It's not for a lack of variety. The album flirts with a number of Prince's most recognizable styles, from glittery pop to rock to R&B. But it doesn't push boundaries the way his albums once did.

It's a decent Prince album, which at this point might be the best you're going to get out of the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

Prince

The best track is Mr. Goodnight which sounds like Prince remaking the Notorious B.I.G.'s Big Poppa. He's in classic ladies man form as he raps his come ons, enticing a woman by telling her, I've got a mind full of good intentions/and a mouth full of Raisinets, and later promising to screen Chocolat with her before hitting the pool. Now that's romance.

Mr. Goodnight exudes effortless, sexy charm, which is in short supply elsewhere on the record.

The album-opening title track is a clunky, if well-meaning, plea for the environment that begins with a simple piano and builds to a guitar implosion, but never finds its center.

It's not that Prince isn't having fun - Chelsea Rodgers is a full-on funk party that likely would be a blast live, and The One U Wanna C sounds straight off of Sign 'O' the Times - but you get the feeling he's simply spinning his wheels.

Prince is still Prince, of course, but Planet Earth will not be the catalyst for another purple reign.

THE NEW BOSSA NOVA
Luciana Souza
Verve
Aug. 21

A few months ago Gilberto Gil performed at Carnegie Hall and played a memorable bossa nova version of the Beatles' When I'm 64. He remarked that a lot of Beatles songs were just right for bossa nova. It raised a question: How much can bossa nova accommodate? What are its fixed qualities? An acoustic guitar with some particular harmonic voicings and a leavened samba rhythm; an overall weightless feeling. Then what?

The spare arrangements of The New Bossa Nova get a lot right. You can measure all the tiny tonal changes in the medium-range voice of Luciana Souza, a Brazilian-born jazz singer. Her pianist, Edward Simon, may never have played more airily. The saxophonist Chris Potter improvises in short, jabbing figures; he's artful, and can make you think of Stan Getz on his own jazz-bossa nova crossover records (maybe a Stan Getz who's been listening to a lot of Wayne Shorter).

But the repertory here is, with a few exceptions, West Coast pop singer-songwriter music, including songs by Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Michael McDonald. An interesting exception is Elliott Smith; a less interesting exception is Sting. At any rate it's here that the problems arise.

The producer is Larry Klein, a gray eminence of adult pop and also Souza's husband; their judicious choice of songs mostly avoids the super-famous or overplayed. But a fair amount of the romantic lyrics are profound or analytical in a way that seems a little too leaden for bossa nova.

Coupled with an occasional hyperprecision in Souza's singing, this all begins to make the project lose its stability. (The arrangement of You and the Girl, written by Souza and Klein, builds a perfect atmosphere of restful unease. Then the word vainglory appears.) The album is properly introspective; perhaps it just isn't sweet enough.

TIME ON EARTH
Crowded House
ATO Records
July 10

Ten years after disbanding, Crowded House was reunited last year by its songwriter, Neil Finn. Partway through recording a solo album, Finn reconvened the bassist Nick Seymour, a founder of the band in 1985, and the keyboardist and guitarist Mark Hart. One member was absent: the drummer Paul Hester, who suffered from depression and committed suicide in 2005. That's one reason the reunion album, Time on Earth, is suffused with thoughts of mortality and mourning.

Yet Crowded House has always been a pensive band, balancing melancholy and consolation in songs like its 1986 hit, Don't Dream It's Over. In the new Don't Stop Now, Finn sings, Give me something I can write about/Give me something I can cry about. With Matt Sherrod on drums, Crowded House sounds like its old self (and like Finn's solo efforts). The music harks back to the folk rock and Merseybeat of the 1960s, backing straightforward melodies with guitars and piano.

The reunited band doesn't pretend a decade hasn't passed. The 14 songs here are the thoughts of a grown-up songwriter. Silent House, written with the Dixie Chicks, speaks to an aging relative whose memory is deteriorating; English Trees contemplates the aftermath of a long-ago breakup. A few songs are upbeat, like the ironically jaunty She Called Up and the guardedly optimistic Even a Child. But Time on Earth is filled with ballads and thoughts of how transient life is, nowhere more so than in the aching, shimmering A Sigh, which acknowledges, No changing the story now.

The reunited Crowded House is to perform Wednesday and Thursday at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan.

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