Posts Tagged ‘Asher Roth’

New this week—8/8/10

Saturday, August 7th, 2010

Sugarland—”Stuck Like Glue”
#20
When I heard that Sugarland was claiming steampunk influences on their new album, I expected the worst: something both cutesy and overwrought, pretentious and bland. Instead, we get a charming, though not brilliant, love song, driven by a human beatbox who sounds something like a small industrial sewing machine and a bass line that drives like a piston. It sounds like no country record you’ve ever heard, and yet it’s still recognizably country, a neat balance of the modern (postmodern?), and the traditional. In other words, they seem to have gotten the idea of steampunk just right. If it were a bit shorter (when you depend this much on catchiness you need to be careful not to overstay your welcome), and if Jennifer Nettles didn’t feel the need to do a Christina Aguilera impersonation in the middle, it would be almost perfect.

Asher Roth—”G.R.I.N.D.”
#79
I could do without the preachy spoken bit at the end, and Roth’s feigned off-handedness bugs the hell out of me, but this is surprisingly mature and tougher than I would have expected. “The American Dream is a pyramid scheme” is not the sort of comment you anticipate coming from a guy who has been as lucky in his career as Roth (it doesn’t quite fit with the optimism of the rest of the record, either). He may be smarter than I thought—which doesn’t mean he’s as smart as he thinks he is.

Kenny Chesney—”The Boys of Fall”
#96
Surprisingly elegiac for a song about a game as violent and chaotic as football, but then Chesney isn’t Hank Williams, Jr. It’s so perfectly crafted that he almost gets away with it, and this is pleasant and easy to listen to. But the match of subject matter and approach still jars, and all the craft in the world wouldn’t justify its six and half minute running time. Chesney isn’t Brad Paisley, either.

Shinedown—”The Crow and the Butterfly”
#97
They get the emotional tone of this heavy metal weepy just right, but they do it by the book, so the tone doesn’t carry much emotional weight, and like too many metal bands they think they’re creating meaningful ambiguity by leaving important information out of the lyric. If you’re going to hook a song around the idea of being “a little too late”, you need to let people in on what you’re too late for. I also have my doubts about whether crows actually chase butterflies.

Rihanna featuring Slash—”Rockstar 101″
#99
I like the fact that Slash’s guitar is used for atmosphere rather than flash, and the ominous tone is impressive. But there are better ways for Rihanna to show how tough she is, and the middle eight is all wrong; I’m not sure what type of song it might fit in, but it isn’t this one.

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New this week—7/25/10

Tuesday, July 27th, 2010

Usher featuring Pitbull—”DJ Got Us Falling In Love”
#19
When I saw this I figured that Usher would be overshadowed by Pitbull—and he is, barely—but I didn’t suspect they’d both be left in the dust by producer Max Martin, who owns this record, for better or worse. It’s not great, but it’s a lot more fun than anything else Usher has released lately, and it’s certainly a step up from “OMG”. Pitbull sounds a little lost, though, as if he’d suddenly found himself transported from Miami to a Swedish disco and was trying to bluff his way out.

Darius Rucker—”Come Back Song”
#67
Easygoing country is in fashion now, and Rucker is it’s king. This is so easygoing, in fact, that you don’t believe a word of it—if he really wanted his woman back he’d come up with a better apology than “My bad.” He loses me, though, on the very first line: “I woke up again this morning…” Yeah, I hate when that happens, too.

New Boys featuring Iyaz—”Break My Bank”
#71
They still possess a certain amount of charm, but their jerkin’ days are over. For one thing, no matter how young the artists are, jerkers don’t make little kids stuff, which is apparently all that Iyaz is capable of. What a disappointment.

Auburn featuring Iyaz—”La La La”
#74
More kindergarten hip-hop, this time from producer J.R. Rotem, who essentially invented the genre with Sean Kingston and Iyaz. Catchy and irritating in equal measure; a whirlpool of inanity and overproduction designed to suck you into the void.

Chiddy Bang—”Opposite of Adults”
#90
Despite their dis of Asher Roth, these guys work close to the same territory. Their beats are denser and more “authentic”, their rhymes more clever, but their snotty twenty-something persona is right out of Roth’s playbook. When you compare yourself to a Will Ferrell character, you’re tagging yourself in a way that’s going to be damn hard to shake off. I remember when rappers used to make fun of posh snobs, not play them.

Hannah Montana—”Ordinary Girl”
#91
Terrible record, but I find it interesting that Miley Cyrus’s alter ego says straight out what Cyrus can never manage to say herself without tons of costume and make-up. The only thing they get wrong is the humility. I don’t think Cyrus thinks of herself as an ordinary girl at all.

Monica—”Love All Over Me”
#94
Maybe it’s just my own dirty mind, but the obvious double entendre of the title line and Monica’s intense sincerity in the rendering of it make me laugh every time I hear this song. Good thing for her it’s a ballad, or every rapper in the country would be freestyling all over her as well.

Easton Corbin—”Roll With It”
#98
Corbin has his charms, but this is a very ordinary George Strait rip-off minus Strait’s sense of moderation and taste. Though it does confirm my growing belief that the real test of country authenticity is whether or not you were conceived in the back of a pickup truck.

Rob Thomas—”Mockingbird”
#100
“We can’t move on/We can’t stay here”. Is he talking about the 80s?

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New this week—3/21/10

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

Drake—”Over”
#35
When he first appeared, Drake sounded like a promising triple threat, a guy who could rap in the styles of both Kanye West and Lil Wayne, and a decent crooner of hip-hop hooks to boot. Since then, every record he’s made seems to strip away a little more of that promise. His many guest appearances suffered from a lackadaisical attitude that suggested he wasn’t trying very hard. Here, though, on the first release from his first album, he tries too hard, straining the Wayne and Kanye imitations to the breaking point, with jerk rhythm raps set to overwrought, overproduced, overworked beats (strings and metal guitar, how daring!). He gets an A for effort, but all his hard work reveals nothing but how short he is of ideas, of anything original to say. “Look at me, I’m famous! And I get laid a lot!” isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and it’s been heard too often to be impressive anymore. Somebody should tell Drake there’s a reason Lady Gaga has been deconstructing the standard approach to fame: it’s boring.

Sam Adams—”Driving Me Crazy”
#90
Deeper than Asher Roth (comparisons to whom are impossible to avoid), this white-boy college-rap sounds as if it might have some sense and intelligence behind it, but don’t count on it. What it does have is a hook, a hook so bright and catchy that it overwhelms the rap—Adams could be reading an eye chart for all the difference it makes. If you do want to be taken seriously, Sam, there’s such a thing as being too catchy.

Mario—”Ooh Baby”
#95
Without Ne-Yo around to write his hits for him, Mario falls back on well-crafted cliches about how wonderful sex is, especially if the woman agrees to fulfill some of his milder porn-based fantasies—posing in a chair, wearing high-heels in bed, etc. No mention of what he’ll do for her, except “break it off”, which sounds unappealing to me. The music grinds and grinds and gets nowhere. Not terrible, but medium at best.

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