It wasn’t just Javier Colon’s high, supple, long-breathed, achingly sincere tenor that made him the winner on the premiere season of The Voice this year. It was also his personality as a family man, earnest striver and all-around nice guy. He doesn’t break character on his new album, Come Through for You, which is filled with advice like, “If you want to make it in love, you’ve got to be ready to give everything.”
But he is breaking with his pre-Voice career: The two albums he released on Capitol Records, in 2003 and 2006, when he was billed simply as Javier. On those albums, in music he sometimes described as acoustic soul, he wound his vocal curlicues around his own acoustic rhythm guitar or he swooped above staccato R ’n’ B electronics and funk samples. He was already playing the nice guy, although at the time his songs were more about flirtation than settling in. Yet a hit that could have placed him alongside Usher or Maxwell never happened.
His winning strategy on The Voice was to lavish his voice on rock-ballad benedictions, among them songs from Sarah McLachlan and Coldplay, and he has stayed with it for new songs on Come Through for You. So long, R ’n’ B and funk; hello, soft-rock for adult-contemporary radio.
Come Through for You is filled with marches and prospective sway-along anthems, like 1,000 Lights, a Coldplay-style collaboration with the songwriters of OneRepublic, and Raise Your Hand, on which Colon urges, “If you’ve ever felt like you’re falling apart, raise your hand.” The acoustic guitar is still there, now lightly strummed and picked in the sensitive-guy style of John Mayer, although it’s usually just a preamble to a big crescendo and more reassuring bromides: “We don’t need nothing, as long as we got love,” he sings in a duet with Natasha Bedingfield.
There are inspirational waltzes, Come Through for You and Echo, with Goo Goo Dolls aspirations, and there’s reggae-lite a la Jack Johnson in songs like Life Is Getting Better and Stand Up, in which Colon’s mentor on The Voice, Adam Levine of Maroon 5, joins him to extol happy-ending suburban love: “find a home, buy a car, buy a dog and there we are.”
The album stays kindly, polished and simpering all the way through, with only one surprise: the unromantic revelation that ends OK, Here’s the Truth. Colon’s skill as singer and songwriter is obvious, but now that he has national name recognition, blandness reigns.
— Jon Pareles, NY Times News Service
Distinctionlessness has become something of a calling card and a weapon for Rihanna, the most consistent pop star of the past five years. Last month she became the fastest solo artist in history to have had 20 Top 10 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, slower only than the Beatles. And she has pumped out these hits with little regard for style or mood — breezy dance tracks rub up against poignant gothically ruptured rock-soul ballads. Her voice is, for the most part, certifiably blank, which is to say it belongs everywhere.
But it hasn’t always had a home. Talk That Talk (Island Def Jam), her sixth album, is maybe the first to suggest the place that’s been hiding in plain sight all along, placing Rihanna squarely at the center of the pop genre best suited for a singer of her fundamental evanescence — dance music, which conveniently is the mode du jour of contemporary R ’n’ B and pop.
Rihanna’s version of this sound dates to the club music of the early 1990s, an era in which she would have shined. The best songs on this lively and often great album sound synth-perfect for that time. We Found Love almost criminally recalls the swinging Crystal Waters singles, with triumphant percussion somewhere between church and seventh-inning stretch. Where Have You Been is even better, with hard, chilly synths, snares from the poppier side of house music, and Rihanna moving in and out of a curled Siouxsie Sioux tone. “I been everywhere, man/looking for someone/someone who can please me,” she sings. “Are you hiding from me yeah/somewhere in the crowd?”
Talk That Talk is the blithest Rihanna album, which is saying a lot. It has none of the dark, wounded subtext of her more recent albums, almost no sign of scarring left by her tumultuous and abusive relationship with Chris Brown that seemed to hover over her more recent work. It also signals the extent to which the work of polyglot post-soul, post-dance artists like Santigold and MIA have been absorbed into the mainstream. It’s here on songs like Red Lipstick (on the deluxe edition) and Cockiness (Love It), on which Rihanna is channeling Neneh Cherry, all pseudo-melodic sass.
Cockiness (Love It) is a particular triumph, its beat by producer Shondrae a booming industrial jumble, and Rihanna easing out come-ons as if she were lapping up milk. That’s followed immediately by Birthday Cake, 80 seconds of squelchy bounce and consumption metaphors.
Like Jay-Z and Kanye West’s recent Watch the Throne, this album has major parts recorded in hotel rooms, a testament to the globalization and rootlessness of pop, to the outlandish prices of conventional studio time, to the desire to create in an environment of luxury, a liminal space with no repercussions. But that can make for an ungrounded overall experience. When Rihanna veers from the fleet stuff, she’s less certain. Watch n’ Learn, which has flickers of Beyonce’s recent Party, has good mouthfeel but no taste.
And on songs like Farewell, the most bombastic one here, it’s tough to tell if the words have feeling, because Rihanna’s voice doesn’t. When she wants to convey emotion, as on Drunk on Love, she essentially shouts the lyrics — “I wear my heart on my sleeve!/Always let love take the lead!/I may be a little naive!” — but staggers around the melody, a victim of trying to feel too hard.
— Jon Caramanica, NY Times News Service
Taylor Ho Bynum opens his thoughtfully tumultuous new album with a solo introduction on cornet, making his mark in jags and loops, like a tag scribbled across a wall. He sounds as if he’s shaking himself free of habits and preconceptions, and clearing the air for the members of his sextet. Two of them, alto saxophonist Jim Hobbs and bass trombonist Bill Lowe, join him in a bleary overture before the rest of the band kicks in.
Bynum, 36, is a provocateur in the guise of a consensus builder, too polite to suggest a firebrand and too generous to resemble an ideologue. But he has a strong vision regardless and has patterned his creative life after some of the least compromising American musicians of the past half-century: pianist Cecil Taylor, with whom he has performed; trumpeter Bill Dixon, whose late-career work he championed; and especially multireedist Anthony Braxton, whom he serves as chief consigliere. The history of jazz’s post-1960s avant-garde has been a tactile experience for him.
Among the more prosaic truths he seems to have extracted is the utmost importance of a sympathetic cohort of musicians — or, better yet, a working stable of them. His sextet has recorded two previous albums, although with a slightly different lineup: the only constants have been guitarist Mary Halvorson and drummer Tomas Fujiwara, collaborators who also accompany him in other settings. On Apparent Distance they work with bassist Ken Filiano to maintain an undercurrent with as many eddying permutations as river rapids.
Parsed into four sections, the album was the result of several composer commissions, and Bynum suggests (in a brief liner-note essay) that its core interest is the upending of expectations. The music bears out this point, but subtly, without coming across like an exercise. There’s a blurring of the lines between what’s composed and improvised, and a frequent splintering of factions within the ensemble: Lowe, on tuba as well as trombone, will square off with Bynum, for instance, or fall into brisk alignment with Hobbs. Part III: Source begins with a watery, reverberant introduction by Halvorson, and then assumes a lurching, elastic groove, folding in on itself. Part IV: Layer, slowly moves from a stark, almost martial cadence to a sort of blazing supplication.
It’s all seductively challenging, full of standout moments that nevertheless dissolve into the whole. Which seems to be precisely what Bynum had in mind, though he couldn’t have made it happen by sheer will alone.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
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