Spiritualized,SWEET HEART, SWEET LIGHT, Fat Possum
There’s so much uncertainty in rock right now. It’s turned into lightweight, flexible material; it’s almost apologizing for itself. It’s mostly become a question, or a proposal. It’s renting space. It can seem as if it might go away one day, when its basic imperatives are forgotten, and it’s no longer a music about fear, innocence, power, naive hope and ineptness.
Jason Pierce will be all right if that happens. Pierce, who goes by J Spaceman, the central and only continuous member of Spiritualized, seems to know exactly what he’s doing with rock, or exactly what rock is doing with him. He specializes in two things: big, clear melodies, like those in rounds or old nursery rhymes, rendered prettily and tenderly; and the-artist-is-only-a-vessel music: drones, repetition, chants, rendered through dense layering of sound and guitar spasms in a single chord.
Sometimes, in Sweet Heart, Sweet Light, Spiritualized’s seventh album in 20 years, he puts both tendencies together. Headin’ for the Top Now, a long song with a Velvet Underground eighth-note stomp and improvised guitar-strafing throughout, ends with women’s voices, light and sweet, singing a corrupted nursery rhyme: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your future go?/ Backstreet dealin’, midnight stealin’, oh does your mother know?”
This record, most of it made at Pierce’s home in London with special trips to Reykjavik and Los Angeles to record strings and a choir, is a reshuffling of the basic materials he’s worked with at least as far back as the 1997 album Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. (Rock wasn’t quite so endangered then.) It’s well recorded: you can hear everything clearly, even in the most crazily muddled songs — in I Am What I Am, the gospel choruses, the rumbling bass lines, the tambourines, the free-jazz saxophones by the guest musicians Evan Parker and Tony Bevan.
The album as a whole sounds as if it comes from a willful or natural ignoring. It transmits no anxiety about much outside of Pierce’s enshrined pain and his record collection. It’s grandiose — slouchy, broody, mock-churchy, self-pitying. (“Sometimes I wish that I was dead,” Pierce sings in Little Girl, “‘Cos only the living can feel the pain.”)
It sounds based in the contention that work like this can still qualify as popular music, and that is its strength. It comes straight from an Anglo-American tradition of elegant dissipation and beautiful loserdom. The coordinates are fixed in that tradition, if not frozen, but Pierce finds them inspiring, and his conviction gets the album over, even when it’s ridiculous, which it often is.
— BEN RATLIFF
Lionel Richie, TUSKEGEE, Mercury Nashville
There are many reasons for the air of inevitability around Tuskegee, the sleek, surefooted new country duets album by Lionel Richie. Start with the mainstreaming of country music, with Nashville’s embrace of soft rock and soaring pop. Then take the demographics: Richie is 62, with a multigenerational fan base and a durable catalog of hits. Consider too that the all-star duets album is a proven route to career rehabilitation — and that country listeners make up a big chunk of the public that still buys albums.
You could take all of the above into account and begin to see how natural it is that Richie opened at No. 2 on the pop charts in the US, behind another confoundingly well-preserved agent of reinvention, Madonna. But then you’d be leaving out the influence of reality singing competitions, with their endless reframing of songs across genre lines. If you’ve been watching The Voice this season, you’ve seen Richie pull a shift as a mentor; you’ve also seen Blake Shelton, one of the show’s judges, dispense big-brotherly advice.
Shelton’s is the first voice you hear on Tuskegee, singing the opening verse of You Are with a credible yearning. And what’s striking right away is the common-sense comfort of the pairing: not Shelton with Richie, necessarily, but Shelton with the song.
Like many of this album’s other guests — Little Big Town on Deep River Woman, Kenny Chesney on My Love, and especially Jennifer Nettles on a cathartic Hello — he sounds like he’s thinking of his perennial injunction to “make it your own.” (Rascal Flatts, taking the same tack with Dancing on the Ceiling, manages to make the original seem tasteful, almost subtle. A few others, like Jason Aldean and Tim McGraw, can’t quite transcend the material.)
For his part, Richie sounds terrific: easeful and soulful, if no longer exactly youthful. The characteristic smoothness of his delivery makes him both an approachable partner and a malleable backup singer. He strikes a fine blend with Darius Rucker in Stuck On You, but his most inspired supporting work comes on Endless Love, featuring Shania Twain, coaxed out of retirement to deliver the album’s most stirring vocal performance.
Richie, who was born and raised in Tuskegee, Alabama, has said that making this album felt like coming home. That’s a nod to his Southern roots, but it might just as well refer to the crossover fluidity of a song like Lady, the smash he wrote for Kenny Rogers more than 30 years ago. That song arrives near the album’s close, before an amiable Easy with Willie Nelson and an obvious All Night Long with Jimmy Buffett and the Coral Reefer Band. It’s the old-timer’s corner, and Richie seems happy there, though he clearly has other designs.
— NATE CHINEN
MGK, HALF NAKED AND ALMOST FAMOUS, Bad Boy/Interscope
Spend some time with MGK — previously Machine Gun Kelly — and thoughts turn to rock. A white rapper, heavily tattooed and as lean as jerky, he’s a frisky performer, less about cool swagger than rowdy antics. And MGK teases the connection himself, using “Cobain’s back!” as a recurring tagline, and boasting on one song, “I’m a real rock star, Nikki Sixx.”
But being too rock-minded has long been a death knell for white rappers; it contributed to the undoing of Yelawolf before MGK, and to a lesser degree Kid Rock before them both, though Kid Rock turned mediocre rocking into a worthy aesthetic of its own.
But Kid Rock chose that at least in part because he was never a worthy rapper, which MGK very much is on Half Naked and Almost Famous. This EP, his first major label release after a string of mixtapes, is a collection of experiments — MGK over dance-pop, MGK over R ’n’ B, MGK over faux rock — as if his minders aren’t quite sure what to make of him.
If that’s the case, they should pay close attention to Wild Boy, already one of the year’s most uproarious hip-hop songs, and an MGK mission statement: “You a white-flag-throw-that-towel boy/ I’m a jump-right-in-that-crowd boy.” Ominous and pummeling, it’s a terrific showcase for MGK’s rat-tat-tat rhymes. (There’s also a great remix of that song featuring Meek Mill, Mystikal, 2 Chainz and others, though it’s not on this EP.) The same goes for EST 4 Life, the only other straightforward hip-hop song on this EP.
Sometimes MGK sounds too eager, as if he’s vibrating at too high a frequency, delivering lyrics that were conceived syllables-first, ideas-later (“Trees in my pockets like my denim’s a greenhouse”) or tossing off awkward mentions of MapQuest and Craigslist.
The closest he comes to getting smoothed out is on See My Tears, which samples the sweet trance anthem Rain by Armin van Buuren. Here, he’s taking small breaths between lines, letting his electricity speak for itself. It doesn’t rock; it rolls.
— JON CARAMANICA
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