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Loaded
This Week: Keren Ann breaks the language barrier, John Pizzarelli goes easy, and Ricky Fante looks back
Keren Ann
Not Going Anywhere (EMI)
Keren Ann, a French citizen of baffling multinational extraction, sings in breathy, flattened tones that mark her as part of a lineage of boho cool extending from Chet Baker to Belle & Sebastian: the gnomic sophisticate, urbane and restrained, a melancholy babe with a streak of decadence implied but rarely acknowledged.
She and her collaborator Benjamin Biolay write lovely little songs, vaguely ’60s europop with elliptical, half-formed lyrics that match her vocals for concealing as much as they reveal. This is a quiet album, mostly acoustic guitar plus string sections and occasional percussion, but it’s more restless than restful. Longing trumps contentment at every turn.
Not Going Anywhere is Keren Ann’s first album in English after two in French, but if it’s a crossover bid, it’s on her own terms. From the opening title track, with its fingerpicked guitar and murmuring violin, to the jaunty serial-husband-killing narrative of “Sailor and Widow,” the songs are more alluring than accessible: sideways glances that get your attention whether or not they’re aimed at you.
—Jesse Fox Mayshark
John Pizzarelli
bossa nova (Telarc)
There’s something wonderfully uncomplicated about guitarist and singer John Pizzarelli. His relaxed effect and effortless delivery are appropriate to his jazz entertainer status, but also ideal to delivering what producer Creed Taylor once described as the “genteel persuasion” of the bossa nova.
In this latest recording, ostensibly an homage to the bossa nova innovator João Gilberto, Pizzarelli cruises through half a dozen Antonio Carlos Jobim tunes, including the obligatory “Girl from Ipanema” (with a chorus sung by Jobim’s grandson, Daniel), a handful of other Latin fare, one Gershwin standard (“Fascinatin’ Rhythm”), and a surprising James Taylor cover (“Your Smiling Face”). All reflect Pizzarelli’s clean and breezy touch, less an absence of gravitas than an avoider of same. (For contrast, compare Pizzarelli to Gilberto’s melancholy in a just-released live performance on Verve, In Tokyo.)
“One Note Samba,” the first cut, is highly representative, featuring Pizzarelli’s easy vocal style as well as his uncomplicated guitar, on this solo joined in duet with pianist Ray Kennedy. Less comfortable and a low point is the Taylor cover, which, complete with flute arrangement, sounds too much like Taylor smoothed over (hence near featureless). Worse, it incorporates several annoying key changes. A very welcome contrast is the slow ballad that follows, “Estate,” a Martino/Brighetti cover, sung in Italian and capturing the lower range of Pizzarelli’s tenor.
In closing, bossa nova offers a wonderfully dizzy Pizzarelli original, “Soares Samba,” which Pizzarelli wordlessly vocalizes over to great effect, including a closing vocal/guitar duet—the infectiousness of which explains the staying power of this Brazilian form.
—Jonathan B. Frey
Ricky Fante
Rewind (Virgin Records)
With the release of Rewind by Ricky Fante, soul music, it can be said, is surviving. Although nothing on the order of yesteryear’s socio-musicological anthems by Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Sam Cooke, Rewind is a delicious, emotionally drenched, and audacious copy of the formula that birthed a plethora of hits in soul music’s heyday.
By loading Rewind with passionate vocal deliveries on song after song, simple, yet apt, lyrics characterizing points along the continuum of love, and soul music’s “greasy” ingredients and accoutrements, Fante has produced a perfect concoction of catchy songs. If this release were to be stashed in a time capsule, sans its liner notes, anthropologists might be taken aback by its release date of 2004. Rewind is practically a carbon copy of sweet soul from decades past.
Lyrically, the highlights of this album are “Why” and “My Song.” Pensive and defiant songs respectively, they demonstrate good attempts by Fante to veer from the love-worn songs that listeners are all too comfortable with. Then again, the first three songs on Rewind are flow-blown love songs; they are, however, effectively effusive songs that are punctuated with brass embellishments, greased-up with smears by the tried & true organ, and embodied with companionable lyrics for listener.
Touting a voice that drives home love’s pathos and, simultaneously, love’s joys, Fante’s debut release exudes nostalgia, a familiarity. Deadpan retro soul almost to a fault, Rewind is a solid outing by a gentleman who has done his homework and flattered his forebears with utmost sincerity.
—Ekem Amonoo Lartson
October 21, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 43
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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