  
| 
| ||||||||||||
  EW review: Fagen's smooth 'Morph'Also: Gilmour's empty 'Island,' awful Etta JamesBy Tom Sinclair  YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- What makes great music great? The late Clash singer Joe Strummer once offered a theory about what doesn't: ''It ain't about playing the right f---ing chord, for a start,'' quoth Saint Joe, making the point that passion trumps technical perfection. He was right, of course, but that doesn't mean that every artist obsessed with correct chords is a soulless automaton. Case in point: Donald Fagen, the singing, keyboard-playing half of the two-man autocracy known as Steely Dan. Fagen has just released "Morph the Cat," his third solo album in 24 years. With its precisely calibrated funk grooves, exquisitely tasteful playing, and general air of blissed-out languor, "Morph" is firmly in the smoothed-out tradition of latter-day Dan discs like "Gaucho." In short, anyone hoping that Fagen might throw some session work to Elliott Randall (the undersung guitarist who played that rousing solo on the early Steely Dan hit ''Reeling in the Years'') will be disappointed. As usual, the ax work here is more indebted to George Benson than Jimi Hendrix. Even a harmonica solo on the Ray Charles homage ''What I Do'' sounds like it could have been generated via synthesizer. Yet Fagen fans -- even those who prefer the grittier, more rockin' early Dan material -- have long inured themselves to his unrepentant jazzbo tendencies. We put up with them largely because the marriage of his mordantly acute lyrics and wry, rubbery vocals is so insidiously compelling. Fagen's songs, populated with doomed idealists, counterculture casualties, desperate lovers, and hapless neurotics, have been likened to mini-novels, and this latest batch introduces a handful of new oddballs to his gallery of beautiful losers. Meet Denise, the ex-jailbird who goes on to front a semi-legendary rock band; Mona, the isolated depressive who ventures from her Manhattan high-rise ''only for bare necessities''; and the nameless traveling man who finds love at an airport security checkpoint. Our man has said the album's subtext is death (''the fella in the Brite Nitegown,'' as ''Brite Nitegown'' puts it), which gives Fagen ample opportunity to work his old trick of coating downbeat messages in shimmering, expansive music. If "Morph" offers no sonic surprises, it remains a solid effort likely to be welcomed by devotees. Still, all those beautifully executed sax solos make me wonder: If Kenny G's albums featured clever, literate lyrics, would hipsters hold him in higher regard? EW Grade: B+ 'On an Island,' David GilmourReviewed by Tom Sinclair "On an Island," the third solo effort from Pink Floyd singer-guitarist David Gilmour, is a meticulously crafted affair -- and a textbook example of the limits of craft devoid of inspiration. Enhanced with pretentious orchestration and filled with aimlessly pleasant acoustic ruminations, it attempts, and roundly fails, to replicate the magic of the Floyd in ''Comfortably Numb'' mode. In fact, that title captures "Island's" essence perfectly: The sketchy lyrics are, if anything, less memorable than the music; and while Gilmour does fire off some intermittently affecting guitar solos, notably on the latter half of ''The Blue,'' even those aren't enough to lift the album out of the slough of competent complacency in which it's mired. A few wrong chords might have helped, but probably not by much. EW Grade: C 'All the Way,' Etta JamesReviewed by Raymond Fiore Paging Joe Henry! The producer who guided soul-senior-citizen Betty Lavette's achingly triumphant 2005 opus of covers to critical acclaim would have been a fine choice to help this R&B great regain her 21st century footing on "All the Way." Instead, Etta James has sunken her rich yet increasingly shaky alto into toothless versions of ''I Believe I Can Fly'' and ''Imagine'' only an orthodontist's office could forgive. EW Grade: D 'Youth,' MatisyahuReviewed by David Browne Matisyahu's "Live at Stubb's" could have easily been last year's No. 1 novelty disc. But this converted Orthodox Hasid actually did sound as if he'd grown up on the streets of Jamaica, not in the New York suburbs, and the album's dub-rooted grooves, while sometimes monotonous, did approximate the lean, hungry feel of vintage reggae. On "Youth," this one-man mash-up understandably wants to prove he's more than just a one-Talmud pony, yet the strain is as noticeable as his black hat. In the studio, the stark directness of "Stubb's" is too often replaced with cluttered electro-reggae. It's one thing to pen ''What I'm Fighting For,'' a bargain-basement rewrite of Bob Marley's ''Redemption Song.'' It's another to slip the chorus of Matthew Wilder's cloying 1983 hit ''Break My Stride'' into the otherwise severe ''Jerusalem'' -- the two songs mesh together a little too well. "Youth" also tries to demonstrate the range of Matisyahu's delivery, with similarly mannered results. He's unquestionably skilled at aping a variety of styles: spewing hammy patois on ''Dispatch the Troops,'' transforming into a dancehall motormouth on ''Fire of Heaven/Altar of Earth,'' and crooning like a mellow Phish-loving fellow on the gooey love song ''Unique Is My Dove'' and ''Late Night in Zion'' (his assertion, or warning, that ''We're not alone in the madness/ If we're here then so are you''). But in spanning the vocal spectrum, Matisyahu could easily pass for a will-try-anything contestant on "Jewish-American Idol." What elevates Matisyahu above gimmick status is, of course, his lyrics, which resolutely reflect his religious conversion. In fact, outsiders may feel they need to have a copy of the Torah handy in order to grasp the many Zion references. His singsongy melodies, like that of ''Time of Your Song,'' help offset his sermons. And the wailing wall of guitars on ''Youth'' mightily compensates for Matisyahu's stern admonition of those darn self-indulgent kids today. (Is he referring to the same Hacky Sackers who've become his fan base?) But that song's unrelenting humorlessness is part of Matisyahu's larger dilemma: trying to reconcile his strict beliefs with the joy and bliss that are intrinsic to reggae and jam-band rock -- and which his own creations regularly lack. EW Grade: C+ Click Here 
|
| ||||||||||||
| © 2007 Cable News Network. A Time Warner Company. All Rights Reserved. Terms under which this service is provided to you. Read our privacy guidelines. Contact us. Site Map. |
 |
|
to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly
External sites open in new window; not endorsed by CNN.com
Pay service with live and archived video. 
