Category Archives: 2010 music reviews

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Belle and Sebastian – Write About Love

I’m not a critic. I’m a fan.

I can be critical of things, even things I expect to love. But I can’t imagine listening to a new album by a favorite artist without a rooting interest in it being great. And I don’t think critics do that.

On the contrary, I believe a good critic has a “show me” attitude and expects the work he’s reviewing to fall just about halfway between good and bad until he’s convinced to tip that scale one way or the other.

I’m bringing this up because my first listen to Belle and Sebastian’s new album, Write About Love, left me mostly indifferent. And were I a critic, that probably would have been that. Six paragraphs, two and a half stars… next!

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Shakira – Sale el Sol

Last year Shakira suffered her first commercial failure in some time, when her dance-heavy English-language She Wolf album failed to light up the charts.

Now, it seems a bit silly in this era to call 350,000 U.S. copies sold (not to mention 1.5 million worldwide) a disappointment but for an artist who’s sold more than 50 million copies of her previous five albums, I suppose the bar is set a little higher.

Despite its tepid sales, She Wolf was an artistic and critical success, its dance-pop sheen highlighting some of the most indelible melodies and infectious beats of Shakira’s career. But according to whoever writes the rules for pop music, the album has gone down as a failure.

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Ben Folds & Nick Hornby – Lonely Avenue

In all my years of listening to music, I don’t believe I’ve ever been presented with as tantalizing a collaboration as Lonely Avenue, the new album featuring lyrics by novelist Nick Hornby set to music by Ben Folds.

Collaborations within a single genre are common, but to have my favorite writer combine forces with one of my favorite musicians… talk about an unexpected delight.

Hornby has long been a fan of Folds’ work (I remember reading his essays about Ben Folds Five back in the Whatever and Ever Amen days) and that appreciation turned into a friendship, which led to an email correspondence that evolved into the partnership we now get to hear fully realized.

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Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers – Mojo

Some artists bounce back and forth between solo albums and albums with “the band,” and sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. You can usually, but not always, tell when Bruce Springsteen is on his own or backed with the E-Street Band. Elvis Costello’s albums sound pretty much the same whether or not he credits The Attractions (or The Impostors) or headlines his albums himself.

Tom Petty with or without The Heartbreakers has always struck me as pretty much the same thing. Quick, Into the Great Wide Open… solo or Heartbreakers? Southern Accents? Full Moon Fever? Highway Companion? Wildflowers? The first two were Heartbreakers albums, the rest solo. But the style on all of them is pretty much interchangeable (not least because Petty tends to use the same musicians even when he goes “solo”).

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Sarah McLachlan – Laws of Illusion

“Here I go again,” Sarah McLachlan sings in the opening lines of ‘Illusions of Bliss,’ the second track on her latest album, Laws of Illusion.

And even that early in the album, those words ring unfortunately true. She’s singing about returning to an ill-fated romance, but she may as well be referring to her increasingly tired brand of ethereal pop rock.

McLachlan seemed unstoppable after the back-to-back mid-90s smashes Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Surfacing. Songs such as ‘Possession,’ ‘Good Enough,’ ‘Sweet Surrender’ and ‘Building a Mystery’ tapped into a seductive mid-tempo vibe that was complemented perfectly by her sweetly yearning vocals. Those albums are classics not just because of their rich sound but the solid songwriting of McLachlan and Pierre Marchand.

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