Untamed, Cam, Arista Nashville/RCA
The crickets, the lonesome harmonica, the faraway train whistles and the plinking banjo that open Untamed, the title song on Cam’s debut album, declare allegiance to country’s rural roots. So do the lyrics, about “making Memory Lane out of old back roads.” But the thumping tom-tom beat and handclaps also make Cam — a Californian transplanted to Nashville, whose fuller name is Camaron Ochs — a 21st-century radio-ready performer. It’s a combination she executes skillfully throughout the album, which includes a song nominated for the Grammy award for best country solo performance: Burning House, the only 500,000-selling country single released by a woman in this year.
Burning House, an acoustic (but elaborately produced) ballad with crackling-fire sound effects in the background, is a lost-love song, an apology to an ex and a dream of life-or-death devotion that couldn’t work out; it’s the gentlest moment on the album. “Wish that we could go back in time/ And I’d be the one you thought you’d find,” Cam sings.
Cam wrote all the songs on Untamed with various collaborators; the wordplay is taut, and the sentiments are rarely sugary. Cam presents herself as a lover who’s scrappy when she needs to be; she’s clearly an admirer of the Dixie Chicks and Miranda Lambert. She flashes unbridled anger — as furious as Adele in Rolling in the Deep — in Runaway Train, a turbocharged banjo tune directed at someone who betrayed her. Hungover on Heartache suggests one aftermath, a reconciliation tarnished by bitter memories: “I get sick when you mention her name.” Elsewhere, the honky-tonk-tinged Half Broke Heart mocks someone who’s trying to let her down easy — “I need my space is still goodbye”— while My Mistake asserts her right to a barroom pickup and one-night stand.
In Country Ain’t Never Been Pretty, Cam flaunts farm-gal bona fides, deftly contrasting high heels on a red carpet with manure-seasoned boots. But for all the banjo picking on the album, Cam isn’t pledged to traditionalism. The tracks are punched up, with spacious mixes and hefty drumbeats, by Cam’s two fellow executive producers and co-writers: Tyler Johnson, who’s responsible for much of the electronic programming in the background, and Jeff Bhasker, a producer known for pop hits by Fun., Bruno Mars and Alicia Keys. All the better; Cam’s voice is strong enough to seize the foreground, and her songs deserve the push.
— Jon Pareles, NY Times News Service
Spring Rain, Samuel Blaser Quartet, Whirlwind
The free-thinking American composer, clarinetist and tenor saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre was already a bit of a ghost when he died in 2008, at 86. His career had stalled out decades earlier, reaching its commercial peak in the late 1950s, when he was leading a sparse but stylish trio with valve trombonist Bob Brookmeyer and guitarist Jim Hall.
The spontaneous flair and chamber-like cool of Giuffre’s music have brought him back into favor in recent years. One of the contemporary artists tapping into his legacy is Samuel Blaser, an intrepid, Swiss-born trombonist living in Berlin, whose new album, Spring Rain, is a thoughtful and energetic tribute.
Because Blaser plays trombone, it’s only natural to assume his interest in Giuffre starts with Brookmeyer. But Spring Rain bears more affinity with a later edition of the Jimmy Giuffre 3, the spikier trio Giuffre led in the early ‘60s, with Paul Bley on piano and Steve Swallow on bass. This album includes compositions from that group’s repertory, like the lonesome fanfare Cry, Want, and two durable tunes by Carla Bley.
Blaser explores this music, and the terse angularities of his own originals, with a smartly elastic rhythm section: Russ Lossing on piano and keyboards, Drew Gress on bass and Gerald Cleaver on drums. (He’ll have a different lineup on Friday and Saturday at Ibeam in Brooklyn: Lossing, bassist Masa Kamaguchi and drummer Billy Mintz.) The band’s interactions give the impression of an alert and contingent poise.
Blaser has a precise, expressive style on trombone and he’s an ace with multiphonic techniques, which enable him to growl chords on the instrument; one track, Trippin’, finds him in solo reverie, calmly deploying garbled effects. (That title suggests a nod to the Giuffre tune Trudgin’, also found here.)
Blaser’s focused interiority and dauntless self-possession point toward Giuffre even when the connection is otherwise unclear. The same can be said for his sidemen. One original, The First Snow, has a solo by Lossing that evokes the limber scrawl of a graffiti artist, played on both acoustic piano and Minimoog synthesizer. It’s a moment that ducks any direct emulation, but its bristling composure recalls Giuffre’s ideals, especially a focus on originality.
— Nate Chinen, NY Times News Service
The Buffet, R. Kelly, RCA
You don’t need to know that R Kelly wrote, by his own count, 462 songs in preparation for The Buffet, his 13th album, to understand that he is a protean character. (It’s nice to know it, though: 462 is a comical number.) The spirit of not getting stuck is an integral part of Kelly’s work, even more than his specialization in super-sexed subject matter.
As singer, songwriter and producer, he runs efficiently through short-order metaphors and conceits, and, more cautiously, through styles. He applies finesse in measured amounts, like a road-line painter, and doesn’t linger. You can imagine his ticking an item off the list before he’s finished, thinking about the next one. The thing about people like this: They eventually become boring.
The concept for The Buffet, he has explained in several interviews, is, unsurprisingly, breadth. As of his last record, Black Panties in 2013, he has gone back to the lewd stuff, after two relatively sweet throwback soul records that followed his acquittal on child-pornography charges in 2008. So now he’s mixing it up — sleaze and sentimentality.
His subjects include uncomplicated leisure time (Backyard Party, in which a barbecue is only a barbecue) and the love of a father for a daughter (in Wanna Be There, sung with his actual 17-year-old daughter, who goes by Ariiraye).
And sex — sex as poetry, sex as a public disturbance, sex as a marching-band performance. In the song Marching Band, there’s the album’s most memorable simile: tuba-playing as fellatio. If you suspect that there will be a sex-as-buffet metaphor at some point, you will be right. It occurs in Poetic Sex, with the phrase “all I can eat.”
To describe the record is to make a list. There is grand and stirring R&B from the ’70s, and minimal, atmospheric R&B of the present; the continuation of his relaxed, midtempo Chicago-stepping style, one of his strong suits; some near hip-hop, with the barked, staccato flow of the new Atlanta rappers (in Switch Up, with Jeremih and Lil Wayne as guests); and, interestingly, functional country and blues (Barely Breathin’ and Sufferin’, tracks on the disc’s deluxe edition.)
The point is that all of these songs are capable, and one is not much better than another. The track that most shows what Kelly is able to do with his voice, in light trembles and agile phrasing, is Get Out of Here With Me, evoking Marvin Gaye ballads. But it does so mechanically, even coldly, with entreaties that aren’t very sexy.
— Ben Ratliff, NY Times News Service
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