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Jimmy Eat World
Futures (Interscope Records)

Someone informed me the other night that “emo is sooo over.” Jimmy Eat World’s second full-length album, Futures, begs to differ. Its mood is impulsively transient, so it takes a few listens to really get into. On most of the songs, these notorious kings of emotional gummy-pop stick with their usual heart-on-the-floor tenderness, waxing and waning with heartache, rage and regret. While there aren’t any bopperish, MTV-worthy anthems comparable to the smash hit, “The Middle” from Jimmy’s previous self-titled album, Futures’ title track is a sort-of mantra for the optimistically disgruntled. The song’s borderline political lyrics, “Believe your voice can mean something, say hello to good times, trade up for the fast ride” may just lift you out of a post-election, holiday funk.

Two songs, “Pain” and “Nothing Wrong” stick out like sore thumbs—disturbing metallish headtrips among an otherwise symphonic sea of spacey guitar-keyboard arrangements. Besides these two awkward tracks, though, the album is laden with lullabyish humming and twinkling chords to accompany its lovelorn lamenting and occasional playfulness. Some of the saccharine lyrics are laced with triteness; the phrase “kiss me with your cherry lipstick, never wash you off my face,” for example, is sure to induce much cringing. Still, the majority of the candid melodies are likely to induce something else, like wistful sighing and thanking whoever’s up there that emo is still alive and well.

—Molly Kincaid

Wovenhand
Consider the Birds (Sounds Familyre)

There’s a certain self-righteous smugness that pervades the well-intentioned, self-help cult of Americanized Christianity. This cancerous conceit latches onto “moral values” like homosexuality and abortion, at the expense of slaughtered Iraqi children and underpaid inner-city single moms. It’s a narcissism that, in longing to be above reproach, escapes by pointing the finger at sins its practitioners rarely, if ever, practice.

The laughable irony is that Christ told his circle of hypocrites that tax collectors and prostitutes would enter his kingdom before them. He didn’t say reformed tax collectors and prostitutes.

Far from that dichotomy is Sixteen Horsepower singer/songwriter David Eugene Edwards, a purveyor of intense gothic country who doesn’t reject the darkness of his own spiritual journey. Rather, like Bono and Johnny Cash, he nearly wallows in it. Consider the Birds is Edwards’ second release as his solo side project, Wovenhand. And as the grandson of an itinerant Nazarene preacher, Edwards has plenty of old-timey fire and brimstone intensity.

That’s not to say that Edwards’ is the preachy sort. Hardly. Rather, his songs exude a wheezing, apocalyptic underbelly that practically lauds suffering, misery and pain. His songs are throbbing with fugitives, thieves and murderers. This brooding lyrical blackness twists about a pulsing current of monastic chanting, eastern European folk, punk rawkishness and Appalachian country. As much a follower of Joy Division and Nick Cave as he is a blazer of his own musical trails, Wovenhand lets his dim light shine.

—Lloyd Babbit

Presenting The Great Unknowns
The Great Unknowns (Daemon Records)

If you ran Robinella’s sweetie-pie voice through a smog of cigarette smoke and a pitcher of vodka, you’d end up with the charmingly ragged cords of Becky Warren, the lead vocalist and songwriter in The Great Unknowns.

Although there’s nothing new under the Americana banner, this Boston band’s self-titled debut is a refreshing take on Southern rock. What’s most surprising is how the record didn’t get made in Nashville or Austin, but in the basement of a Beantown dormitory. Warren and her collaborators—Mike Palmer, Andy Eggers and Altay Guvench—made the disc themselves and found some online fame at GarageBand.com. Their break came when one of the disc’s backing vocalists, singer-songwriter Rose Polenzani, played the songs for some industry pals. Enter Indigo Girl Amy Ray who wanted to release the record on her Daemon Records label.

In voice, lyric and delivery, Warren’s songs are honest and simple, with a thrilling soulful rawness reminiscent of Lucinda Williams. This rock has well-measured touches of blues, bluegrassy twang and folky sweetness. In song, these Yanks travel many miles—from the snowy Northern winters to Carolina, Tennessee, Abilene, and Las Vegas—picking up plenty of musical souvenirs. The Great Unknowns may be anonymous on the vast commercial highway, but they’ll be stars on your stereo.

—Paige M. Travis

Jan Garbarek
In Praise of Dreams (ECM)

Saxophonist Jan Garbarek’s output continues to be starkly lyrical. Normally prolific, Garbarek’s last recordings were issued in 1999: Mnemosyne, a “classical” anthology of sacred and folk tunes performed with the Hilliard Ensemble; and Rites, a double-CD “jazz” release of more characteristic fare. Garbarek ends this five-year dry spell with In Praise of Dreams, a mesmerizing selection of tone poems.

For a brief period in the ‘70s, Garbarek occupied a place in the jazz mainstream, collaborating with pianist Keith Jarrett on conventional improvisation over harmonic structures. However, a persistent interest in simple folk melodies—Native American, Nordic, Indian, others—and hypnotic, trance effects has gradually dominated, reaching its full manifestation with the 1990 release aptly entitled I Took Up the Runes. This recording too introduced what has now become the most prominent rhythmic element of Garbarek’s music, the bass and tom-tom (or sampled effects thereof) of rock drummer Manu Katché.

Consisting of just Garbarek, Katché, and Kim Kashkashian (viola), Dreams is Garbarek’s vision at its most spare. Gone are voices, piano, bass; instead synthesizers and drum loops provide the background for Garbarek’s strident horn lines and boundless melodic invention as he and Kashkashian skirl through an increasingly sparse set. The relatively upbeat “As seen from above” and “In praise of dreams” are followed by ominous “One goes there alone,” which continues a spiral toward ever more simple and transparent forms. By the last two cuts, the laughably entitled “Conversations with a stone” and the six-figure ostinato that is “A tale begun,” it’s as if the only tune to follow would comprise one note. Or perhaps silence. Nevertheless, such clutterless introspection works, its sometimes-desolate implications offset by the consistent exuberance of Garbarek’s reverberating tone.

—Jonathan B. Frey

Mos Def
The New Danger (Geffen)

Talib Kweli
The Beautiful Struggle (Rawkus)

Mos Def has spent the better part of a decade raising expectations. He’s fulfilled quite a lot of them—his collaboration with Talib Kweli as Black Star and his first solo record were smart and hard, evidence that the dividing line between Top-40 hip hop and so-called socially conscious rap isn’t nearly as well-defined as it sometimes seems. But, aside from a few guest spots, he largely withdrew from the music scene after Black on Both Sides, in 1999, to return to acting, a departure that disappointed fans and critics who saw him—fairly or not—as the spearhead of an effort to reclaim mainstream hip hop.

Then, a few years ago, word got out that Mos Def was forming a rock band, Black Jack Johnson, comprised entirely of African-American musicians and named after the first black boxing heavyweight champion. That band makes its first recorded appearance on The New Danger, and the wait hasn’t really been worth it.

The band (bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Will Calhoun of Living Colour, guitarist Dr. Know from Bad Brains, and Parliament/Funkedelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell) is ace, but the handful of songs they play on are dull, at best, and mind-numbingly formulaic hard rock at worst. There are good tracks scattered throughout—“The Boogie Man Song” and “Bedstuy Parade and Funeral March,” a pair of dirty funk workouts that hint at Mos Def’s future development as a D‘angelo-style soul pioneer, and the melancholy “Sunshine,” which could be a Black Star outtake. But the Black Jack Johnson tracks impede the murky flow of what could have been a breathtaking album.

Kweli goes in the opposite direction on The Beautiful Struggle, veering toward the mainstream while trying to keep his backpack cred. Kweli is a great rapper, getting accolades from the never-humble Jay-Z on his last record. Kweli’s hampered, though, by the eclectic production on Struggle (Kanye West, The Neptunes, Mos Def, Hi-Tek) which indicates a desperate grab for crossover success more than a broad range. The best song here is the soulful “I Try,” with vocals by Mary J. Blige, produced by West (whose The College Dropout is one of the best recent albums to tiptoe along the line between the Top 40 and underground rap). The rest of the album disappears under the soul samples and jazzy beats.

—Matthew Everett

Blues Explosion
Damage (Sanctuary Records)

The career of John Spencer seems to be—at first examination—one of those tried and true rock ‘n’ roll stories where a visionary artiste soldiers on, pursuing some kind of personal vision against all of the inherent constraints of the insidiously disgusting music industry which has foisted itself upon the pure, true focus of a bon vivant. Spencer was one of those who defied the conventions of rock, threw away the standard structure of drums-bass-guitar, and paved the way for the ensuing big bucks cash-ins of The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and accompanying minions who followed suit.

Spencer and the Blues Explosion were indeed breaking new ground and creating new musical continents in the early ‘90s. I daresay Spencer was actually trying to avoid hipster gentrification when he included R.L. Burnside on his 1994 tour. Burnside was summarily ignored while white hipsters waited for the “real” deal, Spencer, to take the stage. Yep. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Like the ‘Stones before them, the ‘Explosion was mining the blues ghetto whilst maintaining an uneasy, Ivy League, elitist situation of white-boy self-assuredness that could only be accomplished by slumming on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Spencer surely couldn’t have had quite as much street cred had he not logged in a few hours spending Daddy’s money on heroin. If he’d been slicing pastrami at Katz’s Deli instead, things might have been different.

But this slicing and dicing of his motivations and inspirations is, at this point, useless. Bottom line is, the Blues Explosion is back with an album that is initially exciting and—in the long run—turgid. And I’d have preferred it if it was different...

The highlight of Damage is “Hot Gossip,” which features former Public Enemy kingpin Chuck D. I’m not even going to go into why this track is appealing. Either you know or you don’t.

Overall, Damage seems like the sad attempt of a one-time innovator at associating himself with other, bigger-selling could-have-beens. There are flashes of brilliance on this record. But these days Spencer is on the slippery slope, attempting to catch up with his more successful imitators. This leads us to a couple of retrospective questions: did rock ‘n’ roll ever mean anything other than a entre to fashion-plate magazine coverage? And, really, wasn’t a quest for fashion-plate status the real raison d’etre for Spencer’s brief immersion into the world of real rock and blues? Who cares?

—John Sewell

Kaki King
Legs to Make Us Longer (Velour)

Telling a story effectively through song can be a difficult and even mind-boggling task, but Kaki King is taking on the challenge, leaving the job up to instruments to speak rather than lyrics. Her newest release, Legs to Make Us Longer, demonstrates the power possessed by an acoustic guitar along and the proper string and percussion accompaniment. King’s playing ranges from soothing and calming to brisk and vivacious, with a nimble and technical style that displays her desire to bring out variety and originality in each of her songs. King’s agility results in bursts of random rhythmic beats often requiring the use of all 10 fingers.

King showcases her talent as a singer on the last track, “My Insect Life,” the disc’s only song with vocals on the album. Her voice has a Bjorkish quality with a hint of Dolores O’Riordan of The Cranberries. This is King’s second solo album release following her 2003 debut Everyone Love You. Fans of slap guitar will not be disappointed as King stretches her legs and tells stories through music without saying (hardly) a word.

—Melissa Elkins

December 23, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 52 © 2004 Metro Pulse