Red Hot Chili Peppers fans who may have expected chunky, slapping bass lines, explosive guitar and power-plant loads of energy from By the Way may end up staggering in a semi coma to the stereo to press the stop button half way through the first listen of this album.
It's confirmed, the Peppers have irrevocably changed course, and the white boy power funk of Mother's Milk and Blood, Sugar, Sex, Magic is dead and gone, buried along with the band's storied heroin habits. This isn't necessarily a bad development for the music, though. If judged without weighing the offense caused to Peppers purists, By the Way is a decent rock album by a great band.
The album's title track will be the most recognizable Peppers song, but it's hardly indicative of what's to come. Some of John Frusciante's guitar riffs sound almost lifted from the Doobie Brothers and Flea's trademark bass work is mixed into the background to the point of being almost inaudible. Things get downright strange when strings come in on Midnight and two tracks later we're listening to Mexican guitar on Cabron.
But the oddest thing about By the Way is that despite the complete transformation the Peppers have obviously undergone, the album is almost perversely catchy and listenable.
For the past two years Jay Chou (
Since his eponymous debut, Jay's music stood out mostly because he'd written and produced the music himself, giving it far more personality than the tired pastiche of musical styles on most Mando-pop albums. Jay is an R&B singer and doesn't even pretend to rock or do the electronica thing.
On Ba Du Kong Jian, Jay gives himself a few more chances to rap than on Jay or Fantasy, but his delivery is more convincing when he's trying to be soulful instead of tough. Jay's impressive vocal range is given a thorough workout that at points has him and his backup singers sounding like Boyz II Men, which is clearly what they were shooting for.
Sections of this album are overly produced with fancy samples and the odd traditional Chinese instrument that detract from Jay's voice, but overall it's a solid step forward that will probably keep any pretenders to the Mando-pop throne at bay for a while.
If you've hung out at Underworld or at Zeitgeist, you may have heard Bad Daughter, one of Taipei's quirkiest rock bands. Now, instead of hearing them live on so-so sound systems, you can enjoy them on CD. And it's just in time too, because Hairless Bear is about as good as it gets for a dog days album.
Anyone who hasn't heard Bad Daughter, should probably best imagine them as a cross-breeding of Shonen Knife and Puffy Ayumi. Sometimes they rock in the classic power chord sense, but even when the distortion kicks in there's never a hint of rock angst. That's mostly thanks to the soothing monotone of singer Hsiang-ru (
Bad Daughter won't knock listeners' socks off with their originality. But, the jangly music and sardonic lyrics hit the same funny bone as Belle and Sebastian's early material, which makes this an addictive sing-along album, or just one to put on while lazing around immobilized by the summer heat.
Let's all hope that some of the local DJs pick up Connect by Mark Farina.
Farina is widely hailed as the best house DJ at the moment and on this CD he's put together 17 supremely listenable and funky remixes. Starting with the first track, the music has a catchy Latin feel to it, from the lyrics to the accelerated salsa and samba rhythms and jazzy horns that characterized his Mushroom Jazz style, which he developed at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s.
But Connect isn't another post-Ricky Martin Latin house album. It's got a lot of the dubby, hip-hop elements of Chicago house, which adds a sharper edge to the sound and gives it more thick, rump-shaking bass lines.
A lot of the tracks have a relatively low bpm range, in the 100 to 110 area, that lend themselves more to lounging than dancing. But even the faster dance tracks are mixed to sound like actual songs to be listened to at home, instead of being long repetitive tracks designed solely with DJs looking for a mixing cue.
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