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Yeah Yeah Yeahs SHOW YOUR BONES (Interscope) (Las Vegas CityLife)
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There's no understandable reason why the Yeah Yeah Yeahs would have made Tegan and Sara's sophomore album as the follow-up to the popular and critical success of 2003's Fever to Tell. The first half, especially tracks "Gold Lion" and "Way Out," reveal Karen O doing her best impression of Canada's siblings Quin. What happened to the YYY? Where are Nick Zinner's shrieky guitars and Brian Chase's thunder bombs? Where's the fury? Where's the urgency? What's going on here? Am I losing my mind?
Fear not. The musical ship rights itself in the album's second half, but the YYY are definitely evolving, even if the direction is uncertain. Gone are the short, spastic numbers of concentrated ferocity. These fits of post-punk rage have been channeled into more melodic moments -- perhaps more disciplined in this regard -- because the trio is learning to create songs differently. Nearly every track falls between three and four minutes in length, perfectly digestible in its radio-friendliness. But for all of this accessibility, something is definitely missing. A clue comes on "Cheated Hearts" where Karen O emotes, "Sometimes I think that I'm bigger than the sound." Too much ego may be the culprit, but the iconoclasts seem more comfortable here as commodities.
It cannot have been an easy decision to scrap the momentum of their previous successes. The artistic choice to refrain from simple repetition earmarks their album as gutsy, even if it isn't nearly as successful. Show Your Bones will distress the band's previous fans, if for nothing other than its imbalance.
CAREY MURPHY
Eef Barzelay BITTER HONEY (spinart)
The vogue for singer-songwriters, and especially those working in Clem Snide frontman Eef Barzelay's idiosyncratic mode, is to create or at least permit a mystique to grow up around them. But nothing about Barzelay is numinous. Bitter Honey is so much the work of a very honest, ordinary human, it is unlikely he will achieve notoriety beyond his band.
Conceived as a pair of five song cycles, the album ranges across a vast plantation of turn-of-this-century brokenheartedness. "The Ballad of Bitter Honey," the autobiographical meditation of a young black woman who dances in hip-hop videos sung in a white dude's dented voice, is the difficult and gorgeous first song on Barzelay's folkie smorgasbord of awkward risks and guileless missteps. "Well" is pure, finely articulated bitterness set in a country tune. "Let Us Be Naked" is a gentle 1920's pop air. And by the final holler-along of "I Wasn't Really Drunk," the song has transcended both the pathos and the comedy of its hapless narrator.
Smog and the Mountain Goats share Barzelay's talent for crushing emotional intensity nailed to a lonely guitar melody, but Barzelay, with the congeniality of a boy who doesn't drink that much, can get away with things they can't -- such as disarming with painful honesty. The emotional revelations in some of his songs are shocking in their unself-consciousness and while he, or the narrative character he inhabits in the song, doesn't come out looking good, you forgive him as you would a brother. Listening to Bitter Honey, you feel you know him with an intimacy beyond liking or disliking, but it's tricky; you can't always be sure it's him.
Then he covers "Joy to the World" and, with each halting phrase, wins you over to the idea that it wasn't really a mistake.
BEVERLY BRYAN
Lila Downs LA CANTINA: ENTRE COPA Y COPA... (Narada)
Lila Downs is a fascinating soul. Her father a white college professor and her mother a Mixteca Indian, Downs followed the Grateful Dead before settling down at a Minnesota university to study anthropology and music. After earning her degrees, she went to Oaxaca, Mexico, immersing herself in the music of the region. She teamed up with -- and eventually married -- jazz saxophonist Paul Cohen, and since 1994 has produced a half-dozen albums, culminating in 2004's Grammy-winning Una Sangre (One Blood). This was a rare tour de force in world music, taking on every singe Latin American music genre and blending it with Delta blues, reggae, Japanese drumming and whatever else flitted through her vast imagination.
La Cantina is more focused but no less compelling. Here, Downs tackles canciones rancheras, or traditional Mexican ballads. But hers isn't a traditionalist approach. Downs subtly infuses these classic songs with electronic drums and effects-enhanced arrangements. One can easily envision "La Tequilera" bumping out of some barrio-grade Caddy, until you hear plucked violin notes cascading through the second verse, adding beauty to what was once sonically intimidating terrain. "Pa' Todo el Ano" is tweaked to make it sound as if Downs is pouring her heart out in a crowded goat-dish joint on the border; you can hear people hushing each other to hear her over the sad mariachi guitars. And there's the celebratory gunfire that introduces "El Centenario," a conjunto collaboration with Flaco Jimenez, the Tex-Mex accordion player whose own albums are definitely worth enjoying. This song will show you why.
Throughout La Cantina, Downs' voice is engrossing, hypnotic. She is sensual, husky, tender and tough -- sometimes all within the same song. Simply put, her range and control are unparalleled in world music.
JARRET KEENE
Cory Branan 12 SONGS (Madjack)
A couple years ago Lucero frontman Ben Nichols name-checked then-unknown Memphis singer/songwriter Cory Branan in one of his songs, saying that the guy has "got a way with words that will bring you to your knees." He wasn't lying. Branan's 2002 debut, The Hell You Say, was cleverer than a New Yorker cartoon -- at least the ones you can understand -- without shortchanging all the alt-country essentials: heartfelt commentary on relationships, odes to beautiful girls and true insight into the beauty of hard liquor. He threw out lines like he was trying to one up Oscar Wilde. Of course, it didn't hurt he could also write hooks so potent they stick with you like herpes.
Four years later, Branan hasn't lost any of his wit or mind-control capabilities -- though both are subtler now. With 12 Songs, he's not showing off; he's trying to write timeless songs. And while that means some of the literary moments, like the perfect opening of The Hell You Say's "Miss Ferguson," have disappeared, Branan makes up for it in revealing detail (the raw and funny "Hell-Bent and Heart-First") and flat-out beautiful melodies (the cooing "Love Song #11"). He takes a Ryan Adams weeper ballad like "Sweet Janine," strips it of its disheveled-hair superiority and then reloads the track with massive amounts of reverb and longing. He gets all loud and jittery on "A Girl Named Go." And on the bouncing "Tall Green Grass," a song that just references the Beatles but begs for long walks and kids running through fields, Branan remembers he's a writer, describing his girlfriend perfectly in 20 words or less: "With your lemon yellow ribbon and your bleach blonde hair/ blending in with the sun until you're barely there." Somewhere, Nichols is genuflecting.
