Album Reviews

Favorable Reviews:

 The Civil Wars “Barton Hollow” Contact Music- Folk
After being released last year in their native United States, duo Civil Wars' debut album, Barton Hollow, has now been released in the UK for their fans to get their hands on. The album has already won two Grammy awards and a support slot with Adele who has lavished praise on them, calling them the best live act she has ever seen. Not bad for a band whose popularity has snowballed since one of their songs featured on medical dram, Grey's Anatomy.
Barton Hollow kicks off with '20 years' which has some luscious acoustic guitar playing which is followed by the lovely singing voice of Joy Williams. One particular element of this album is how simplistic the instrumentation is. The album is never over layered with guitars, drums and what not. This allows Williams and John Paul White's singing to flourish without sounding impeded. The singing of the duo becomes the centrepiece for this album.
And this is reflected perfectly in 'To Whom It May Concern' as the duo's voices sing in harmony showing a particular warmth and delicacy complimented by the accompanying string arrangements and acoustic guitar.
One of the highlights on this album comes in the shape of the album's title track, Barton Hollow which is a total foot stomper of a song and reminiscent of Elbow's 'Grounds For Divorce.' Civil Wars' combined vocals constantly go from soaring right back down to a gravel like darkness. After hearing such stripped back acoustic arrangement in the prior tracks it is the most vigorous song on the album.
'Poison and Wine,' one of the album's single's, sees Williams and White's at their best, lyrically it tells the story of emotionally drained lovers. A standout song on the album for the singing's felling of fragility. White's almost quivering like vocal on this helps draw the emotion out in the song as if bringing a character to life.
Upon listening to Civil Wars, you are reminded of the work by Robert Plant and Allison Straus. But Williams and John Paul White manage to create a sound that is easily recognised due to the style of their own voices and the way they intertwine with one another. They help tell the stories in the songs and the sparse music is the perfect background to bring them to life. One of the best albums in the past few years that can delve into human emotion and create a reaction in the listener.

Darren Criss “Human” (EP) Sputnik Music- Alternative
Human touches on the basic emotions that we all experience throughout our lives, like love, heartbreak, and jealousy. Criss’ voice exhibits sincerity and passion in each of the songs on his EP.

One of the songs, “Not Alone,” which Criss performed live at the Trevor Project benefit earlier this year, showcases his vocal range from his larger drawn out notes to his falsetto. The chorus also happens to be quite catchy. I promise that you will be singing-a-long by the end of the song. Also, there’s a feeling of truthfulness in the lyrics, which serves almost as a reminder that we’re all capable of these emotions that make us inevitably human.

Production-wise, one can only imagine what Criss could accomplish if he had the time to record a full-length studio album with a full band. For recording the EP at home, the overall sound is pretty good. It’s nice to hear Criss’ raw vocals that are not glossed over by studio magic.
Two Bad Reviews:

Lana Del Ray “Born To Die” Meta Critic- Alternative
Fundamentally wary of any artist who whiffs of pop contrivance, indie-rock circles greeted singer Lana Del Rey with equal parts fascination and skepticism. After all, her aesthetic—a boutique blend of ’60s pin-up glam and indie listlessness, with a light dusting of trip-hop—was so refined that it had to have been manufactured. When details about Del Rey’s past as the much plainer singer-songwriter Lizzy Grant confirmed those suspicions, the Internet’s cynicism gave way to blunt hostility. The ensuing debates about Del Rey’s authenticity were overheated and dispiriting, riddled with gender prejudices and unfair jabs about the artist’s cosmetic overhaul. Unfortunately, Born To Die almost seems to go out of its way to vindicate even Del Rey’s smuggest detractors. Shallow and overwrought, with periodic echoes of Ke$ha’s Valley Girl aloofness, the album lives down to the harshest preconceptions against pop music.
Although Del Rey’s early marketing teased her as a “gangster Nancy Sinatra,” the creation on Born To Die is never so strong-willed. Instead, she’s a severely outmoded imagining of the ultimate male fantasy: a flighty Talking Malibu Stacy doll who pledges her complete devotion in a pouty baby voice. Her lyrics linger lustfully on her body: her pursed lips, painted nails, short dresses, and black bikini tops. She exists only to titillate.
Some of this was possible to excuse on Del Rey’s torchy breakout single, “Video Games,” wherein she fruitlessly throws herself at a distracted boyfriend. She carried that song with winking assurance. A curdle in her voice seemed meant to drolly mock her boyfriend’s obliviousness, if not the sheer melodrama of her own song. But the stifling desperation of Born To Die suggests that any cheekiness in “Video Games” must have been an illusion. If there is a joke in the song, it isn’t on the boyfriend, but on Del Rey, a one-note vixen who’s so solely self-defined by her feminine allure that sexual rejection undermines her reason for being.

Sly Stone "I'm Back! Family & Friends" Mikael Wood- R&B
As frustrated fans of the erratic funk legend know, this isn’t the first time Sly Stone has promised he’s back: In 1976 he and the Family Stone released “Heard Ya Missed Me, Well I’m Back”; three years later they followed it up with “Back on the Right Track.” Unlike those coolly received efforts, “I’m Back! Family & Friends” doesn’t contain much original material, which of course undercuts to some extent the very idea of Stone’s return. If he’s not writing and recording new music, what is it that he’s back to, exactly? Failing to show up on time for his live engagements?
Here he teams with a handful of fellow Woodstock-era vets — Jeff Beck, Johnny Winter, Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge — for covers of old hits like “Everyday People” and “I Want to Take You Higher.” There is no great damage done to the still-powerful material, though you might cringe slightly when Ray Manzarek drops a bit of the Doors’ “Light My Fire” into “Dance to the Music.” But these affectionate redos don’t tell you anything you didn’t already know about Stone’s music; they’re far less informative than work by his many acolytes.
Three new tracks (including a dreamy take on the gospel standard “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”) provide a glimmer of what Stone might accomplish if he ever rouses himself more fully. But only a glimmer — and only after a good deal of static.

Mixed Reviews:
Lady Gaga "Artpop" Gemma Champ - Pop

What happens when pop’s most original star releases an album that’s depressingly derivative? We’re about to find out, as Lady Gaga’s ARTPOP just about scrapes in at No 1 on the album charts.

This is an artist who has built her reputation on weirdness, shock, surprise and mystique, but the biggest shock on this record is how pedestrian the whole thing sounds. Track by track, the influences and references are not just hinted at: they are inflated in Jeff Koons-style bright ­plastic.

A charitable listener or an avid fan would point out that, with a visual collaborator like Koons, and a title that plays with Pop Art – a genre that turned the most obvious pop-culture references on their heads – Lady Gaga is making a point here. Possibly. But she’s also trying to sell records and keep ahead of her chart rivals, and this album adds little to the pop canon.

ARTPOP does have its moments: the opening bars of the first song, Aura, bode well, with a sort of psychedelic, surf-rock menace and a feline tone to Gaga’s voice, but it takes only a couple of phrases before a Bad Romance-style call of “Aura-ah-ah” signals a decline into repetition. The Infected Mushroom-produced song maintains an edge until the forgettable chorus: little surprise that the electronica duo had asked for their names to be taken off the credits.

Venus, purportedly inspired by the psychedelic jazz genius Sun-Ra, with a bit of Starman thrown in, is more like a tame version of Katy Perry’s ET, interspersed with a declamation that combines Blondie, Madonna and Electric Six, though without the authenticity of any of them.

The title track is a real high point, however, its propulsive, ostinato bass given a sense of menace in vowelly synths. Who’s singing? Well, it sounds like Sophie Ellis-Bextor, which makes a change from Madonna, Ke$ha, Cher, Britney and the many other artists that the chameleonic Gaga channels during the album.

Also excellent is Fashion: Bowie’s Let’s Dance appears to be a direct influence on the vocals (“Let’s Dance” and “Fa-shion” are sung on the same intervals and metre, the spare production and strong drum echoing the Bowie song). Add a Daft Punk robotic hook and electric guitar trill, and a fun, optimistic lyric – “Looking good and feeling fine” – and you have a song that, if utterly unoriginal, is deeply catchy and ­enjoyable.

So, back to the art: what is Gagaism? At this stage, little but a blank canvas. Album number four needs to paint a new picture.

 Stellastarr "Harmonies For The Haunted" Rob Theaksen- Indie Rock

Almost two years to the day have passed since stellastarr*'s eponymous debut won over the hearts of hipsters and nostalgia addicts with their audio smoothie of everything '80s and '90s. During this time Interpol released Antics, and there was no doubt that stellastarr* was quietly lurking in the background, scribbling notes about song arrangements and dynamics. The homework and study paid off, and the bandmembers took what they learned and applied it to their own sound for Harmonies for the Haunted. And while they've done a good job, the same problem that plagued their first album has swollen immensely. Harmonies for the Haunted is an interesting paradox: they have presented something new without it really being new. A game of "name that influence" runs rampant from the album's start to its closing seconds. The album shows promise thematically with its opener, "Lost in Time," which sounds a bit like Coldplay covering the Cure's "Pictures of You," but only after Chris Martin sucked on lemons for an hour. From the first song onward, the group wanes and retreats into one predictable musical exercise after another. Shawn Christensen flexes his vocal muscles to reveal a hybrid between the booming vocal delivery of Interpol's Paul Banks, the Cure's Robert Smith, and the Chameleons UK's Mark Burgess, with a little bit of a whiny Danzig thrown in the stew for good measure, and the band sounds good from a technical standpoint. The production is heavy and dense, but very well polished -- crafted with the finest post-punk dynamics in mind for maximum hipster enjoyment. But strip away the gloss and the group is really, in the words of James Brown, "talkin' loud and sayin' nothin'."