Posts Tagged ‘Rob Thomas’

Pouting Will Get You Nowhere
Hot 100 Roundup—6/30/12

Thursday, June 28th, 2012

Justin Bieber featuring Big Sean—“As Long As You Love Me”
#21
Bieber isn’t stupid, and he tries harder than he probably even needs to, but he’s still young, and he still feels the need, in order to connect with his fans, to couch even his most serious messages in the form of love songs. Hence this astute but confusing foray into dubstep. Bieber demonstrates true concern for the poor and disadvantaged while at the same time belittling their problems by saying that he could endure it all as long as he has “you” by his side. His vocals have never been better—just listen to his phrasing and dynamics on the line that ends “we could be broke”—and the arrangement has real darkness and urgency to it, but in the end it’s just another love song; he still hasn’t learned to merge rote romance with his more “serious” ideas. He’s right, though, I think, not to throw the romance out—if he could merge the two ideas he’d be on to something deeper than he may yet realize. The fact that he’s trying, though, is already a point in his favor.

Cher Lloyd—“Want U Back”
#75
This is a step up from other British trash pop singers like Jessie J and Rita Ora, but not by much. Details that seem distinctive at first—the frustrated grunting in the background, the pouting phrasing, Lloyd’s feeble attempts to mimic Nicki Minaj’s vocal pyrotechnics—quickly become irritating, and presenting herself as a woman who only want’s her ex back because somebody else grabbed him doesn’t exactly strike a blow for feminism, even she’s only playing a part. Judging, though, by her previous single, “Swagger Jagger” (no, I didn’t make that up), Lloyd is a one-shot and then some. Thank God.

Blake Shelton—“Over”
#89
Shelton has one great commercial advantage: it isn’t necessary to actually listen to his songs in order to appreciate them. You still have to hear them, of course, on the radio, in a bar, or a department store. But all the emotional effect they’re going to have on you can be had at a distance. The words and the details of the arrangements don’t matter. The texture of the music, the dynamics, the tempo, the familiar, reassuring chord changes, that’s all you need to hear to get everything there is out of his records. Listening closely, or even thinking about it, only diminishes the effect. It’s music to do other things to: washing the dishes, fixing the car, shopping. Once you hear the opening acoustic guitar, you anticipate the crash of drums and electric guitar in the chorus, and instead of delivering an emotional jolt, it’s comfortable and calming, just the thing to help you decide if you want to stock up on laundry detergent while it’s on sale. I doubt if this was Shelton’s intent—he may well see his overwrought melodramatic clichés as true emotion and pathos—but it’s still an achievement of a kind. And it’s certainly made him successful.

matchbox twenty—“She’s So Mean”
#91
matchbox twenty write and perform with such smugness you’d think they’d invented dumb. The song is stupid enough, but Rob Thomas’s phrasing, which I’m sure he put a lot of thought and effort into, results in some of the worst singing I’ve ever heard. Thomas is the kind of guy who thinks it’s funny when he pouts and whines like a five-year-old. There’s a reason that woman treats him like shit: he deserves it.

Lee Brice—“Hard To Love”
#96
Hard? Try impossible.

Driicky Graham—“Snap Backs and Tattoos”
#97
The beat gets inventive after a while, and Graham isn’t a bad rapper, but most of this is standard issue stuff, if more fashion conscious than the norm (he also has a rap about high-top sneakers). Hard to get past that name, though. Is that supposed to be a pun on Tricky? Dicky? A mix of the two? Who knows. I doubt we’ll ever hear enough from him to make it worth finding out.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Hot 100, Hot 100 Roundup, new this week, singles | Comments Off

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?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Hot 100, new this week, singles | Comments Off

New this week–11/15/09

Sunday, November 15th, 2009

Justin Bieber—”Favorite Girl”
#26
The new tactic of releasing a song a week in the leadup to an album makes sense if 1) you’re trying to build anticipation for the new work of a major star (as in Carrie Underwood); or 2) the songs become progressively more interesting or of higher quality. I find it hard to believe that you can build curiosity and anticipation in an audience when each record is even more bland than the one before it. Bieber has his appeal, and the publicity push behind him is massive, but he was thin gruel to begin with and gets thinner every time out. You can only dilute this stuff for so long before it becomes nothing at all.

Jay Sean Featuring Sean Paul & Lil Jon—”Do You Remember”
#27
Bouncy, catchy, and totally forgettable, this three-for-one deal’s only purpose is as a commercial for the participants’ careers: it capitalizes on Jay Sean’s recent number one by repeating its sound almost exactly; it provides Sean Paul with actual hit potential, something his own records can’t seem to manage anymore (his last single tanked so quickly most people didn’t even notice it was there); and, finally, it reminds everybody that Lil Jon still exists. This last is achieved by Lil Jon yelling in the background every time there’s a gap in the main vocal, like the runt of a litter trying to get the attention of the big dogs—apparently the producer’s weren’t prepared to give him room for a verse of his own.

Jason Aldean—”The Truth”
#91
Country singers are always trying to act sincere, but it’s rare to hear one come across this vulnerable. The guy really does sound lost, and somehow Aldean pulls this off without easy sentimentality or overplaying his hand. It helps that he maintains a certain ambiguity—we never do discover the whole truth. Instead of drawing us in with cheap emotional tricks, he creates a mystery. The music is a little on the bland side, but this is a very smart, moving record.

Rob Thomas—”Someday”
#93
“Hell, maybe someday, we’ll figure all this out,” Rob opines. Not with bland cliches and woozy philosophizing, you won’t. Besides, don’t all those hired angels in the background make it hard to concentrate?

Jake Owen—”Eight Second Ride”
#95
This is a decent song ruined by the sort of homey, down to earth detail that’s supposed to make country music special. The chorus opens wth a good double entendre (“I ain’t never seen a country boy with tires on his truck this high”), and then follows with an image so disgusting that the last thing you want to hear is a description of how the rest of the evening goes. Owen seems to think the alliteration of “Climb on up but watch the cup that I spit my dip inside” is erotic as well as clever. No doubt there are women who feel the same way. They deserve each other.

Glee Cast—”Defying Gravity”
#99
I’m beginning to think the real joke of Glee is that these high school kids take the awful songs they sing so badly so seriously. Bringing Broadway showtunes to prime-time television is a worthwhile endeavor, but not if you’re going to pick songs as bland as this and sing them as if amateurishness was a sign of personal honesty and emotional sincerity. With a song as dumb as this, sincerity is the last thing you want to convey—it makes you sound like an idiot.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Hot 100, new this week, singles | Comments Off

New This Week

Saturday, May 30th, 2009

As everybody knows, this is American Idol week on the Hot 100. Before last year, this would have meant that whatever lamentable ballad had been foisted on the winner would debut at number one, and that yet another version of the same ballad sung by the runner-up would debut somewhere further down the chart. Last year, however, Idol cut a deal with iTunes that resulted in numerous performances, by the winner and the losers, being made available for a limited time immediately after the finale. Last year, this gave David Cook 11 Hot 100 debuts in one week. This year, with the competition a little closer, winner Kris Allen and runner-up Adam Lambert split the prize, with five debuts for Allen and four for Lambert, and not a single one landing in the top ten.

Rather than bore you and/or drive myself crazy writing separate reviews for each entry, I thought it best to handle them in a bunch, and then get on with the rest of this week’s debuts, of which there are eight, including two from another television/iTunes goldmine, Glee. I should also mention that I didn’t watch American Idol this season, and have heard nothing from these guys until now, so my perspective is fresh, or at least as fresh as someone with my jaundiced viewpoint of Idol to begin with can be.

Kris Allen:
No Boundaries #11
Heartless #16
Ain’t No Sunshine #37
Apologize #66
Falling Slowly #94

Adam Lambert:
Mad World #19
A Change Is Gonna Come #56
No Boundaries #72
One #82

First things first: Adam Lambert was robbed. Kris Allen is a decent singer, but he evinces precious little personality, and, like too many Idol singers, he often seems to be unsure what the songs he performs are about. Hence his version of “Ain’t No Sunshine”, which is OK until he gets to the repeated “I knows”. He treats them as something to be gotten over with, instead of what they are: the emotional center of the song. His one advantage (which also happens to be one of Lambert’s weaknesses), is that he doesn’t oversing. This makes his performances of “Falling Slowly” and “Heartless” more than bearable, even with their weak arrangements. It’s also worth pointing out that though Allen’s version of Heartless is nowhere near as good as the original, it’s miles better than The Fray’s, and proves conclusively that it’s a great song. The idea of it becoming a standard seems far fetched to me, though—the lyrics are too idiosyncratic, tuned to West’s oversized ego and personality. Allen sounds a little silly singing them.

As for Lambert, he has the better voice, the sharper sensibility, and more of that rock and roll attitude. Which means he oversings, overplays his hand at times, picks more pretentious material, and depends too much on his personality to get his songs over. But he can sing, and does a far better job with the awful “No Boundaries” than Allen does. His biggest weakness is a tendency to mistake slurring his words together for being soulful, as if every line were just another opportunity to lay on some melisma. This doesn’t ruin his version of “A Change Is Gonna Come”, but it makes the song mean less than it might, even with the amazing falsetto he puts on at the end.

In defense of both, the Idol producers, as usual, have come up with some of the most deathless arrangements in history (though the Sade-like backing on “Heartless” is nice). Simon Cowell is always accusing singers of sounding Karaoke. Has he listened to the band lately?

Glee Cast—Don’t Stop Believin’
#4
The first forty seconds or so, where Journey meets Steve Reich in a high school choir room, are brilliant. Once the band enters, though, it becomes just another damn cover of that same damn Journey song. Here’s hoping that once the series—I haven’t seen it, but it sounds like High School Musical for fans of Election—goes into regular rotation, the producers will pay more attention to the first forty seconds here than the remaining three minutes. Bad songs brilliantly arranged; that would be a first for television, wouldn’t it?

Linkin Park—New Divide
#6
Oddly enough, Linkin Park’s apocalyptic metaphors and musical bombast make more sense when they’re singing about broken relationships than they do when they’re singing about actual apocalypse. They’re a perfect match for a certain brand of teenage emotional self-seriousness, and I suppose they deserve respect for so effectively pushing those buttons. But facts are facts: these guys haven’t been teenagers for over a decade, their music is boring, and, as in most apocalyptic scenarios, there are some buttons that should never be pushed.

David Cook—Permanent
#24
I have no idea what this song is supposed to be about, and neither does Cook. At least there’s nothing about his singing that suggests he does. Don’t blame him for that, though. Considering the quality of the song, I’ll bet he doesn’t want to know.

Rob Thomas—Her Diamonds
#42
This record revolves around an interesting concept: a guy watching his girl cry and having no idea what to do to help her. Except the focus is all on how that makes Thomas feel, the music bears no relation to the lyrics, and when Thomas sings that everything will be fine if she finds some delight you can’t help but assume he thinks he’s the one to provide it. Then the female background vocals come in, and you realize why the girl is crying: she’s just discovered that the guy she’s living with is actually Carly Simon.

Charice—Note To God
#44
This fifteen year-old definitely has a voice—for sheer volume her final note has to be heard to be believed. But if I wrote a note to God, it would consist of a single, simple message: Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.

Black Eyed Peas—Imma Be
#50
Maura over at Idolator has predicted that this will be the jam of the summer, but I have my doubts. More likely it will be the point where all the fans who have been enjoying the ride since Elephunk jump off the bus. “Boom Boom Pow” could be thought of as a novelty record, with club shout-outs that anyone could yell along to, but this represents a deeper step into the digital minimalism wilderness, and as amazing as some of it sounds, I have a feeling a lot of people won’t care to follow along (I barely care to follow along myself). This didn’t get the radio build up “Boom Boom Pow” did, so its relatively low debut may not mean much, but if the whole album sounds like this, the Peas may discover they’ve invested a little too much faith in the willingness of their fans to follow them anywhere.

Eminem—Insane
#85
I’m assuming this made it onto the charts on sales, because I can guarantee you no radio station in the country would dare play it. It’s as if Eminem had found a way to set Naked Lunch to music, only without the relative comfort of knowing it’s an opium-induced fantasy. The only reassuring thing about this record is the emotional distance the music maintains. It’s the only song from Relapse I’ve heard where the lightness of the beats makes sense—set these lyrics to music that matched and it would be almost impossible to listen to. I just wish I could be assured that it’s selling for its quality, and not just as a novelty.

Glee Cast—Rehab
#98
If the opening of their cover of “Don’t Stop Believin’” demonstrates what can be done right by a vocal group, even with a bad song, this demonstrates everything that can be done wrong with a great one. The musical style may be different, but in approach this is barely a half step away from the lamest folk groups of the early sixties or Sing Along With Mitch. I know this is partly intended as satire, but I’m not sure that’s how most of the audience is taking it, and I fear endless follow-ups. And if, as some believe, Amy Winehouse is already minstrelsy, what the hell is this?

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in new this week, singles | Comments Off