November 2014 reviews

Highly recommended: Amelia Curran, Lynne Hanson

Well worth your while: Jennifer Castle, Sagot, Neil Young

As always, these reviews ran in the Waterloo Record this month.

Jennifer Castle – Pink City (Idée Fixe)

We’ve all had those artists we don’t “get” for years, until one minor epiphany suddenly reveals to us what we’ve been missing all these years. Some of the biggest musical loves of my life have been revealed to me slowly in this fashion, finally overcoming some strange subjective grudge. For years, my friends in Toronto’s music community have sung the praises of Jennifer Castle, known for her solo performances, her guest spots on Fucked Up albums, and her band with the Constantines Dallas Wehrle, Deloro. I’ve seen her play a couple of times; I’ve heard her recordings. I was always left cold, even the first dozen times I heard this album, which features some of Toronto’s finest musicians and string arrangements by Owen Pallett.

This month, she played Toronto with Denmark’s chamber-pop songwriter Agnes Obel, who has taken Castle on tour. In an acoustically pristine soft-seat theatre, Castle’s solo performance was jarring, captivating and curious. Everything about her stage demeanour appeared out of place, yet her voice was in full focus: every quiver, every time she slid between notes, the full body of her lower register.

Castle’s music sounds like it was made in isolation, crafted in a remote Appalachian (or Algonquin) cabin (“I don’t need a home / don’t need a lover / I’ll be out on my own / come hell or high water”). Though rooted in folk forms, she doesn’t always follow familiar refrains, chord patterns or consistent tempos; many of her instrumental voicings and melodies owe more of a debt to jazz. Then there’s her voice itself: part Mary Margaret O’Hara, part Vashti Bunyan, a folkie flower child sounding alternately lost and innocent or wise and weary. In her left-field approach to folk, she also recalls Nick Drake, who used jazz players and stood far apart from his contemporaries. (She does not, however, sound like Nick Drake.) Though it was her solo performance I found so striking, Pink City is very delicately decorated with subtle touches from players careful not to tread on her unique talent.

Of course, at the same concert where I had my conversion, my companion had the complete opposite reaction. To each their own. It takes time to enter this magical Castle’s world. (Nov. 13)

Download: “Truth is the Freshest Fruit,” “Nature,” “Broken Vase”

Amelia Curran – They Promised You Mercy (Six Shooter)

If you’re a folkie singer/songwriter looking to expand your sound, you’d be hard pressed to find a better producer than ex-Rheostatic Michael Phillip Wojewoda, a man who’s worked in almost every genre of music and knows how to capture dynamics. Your song that sounds perfect with just your own stunning voice and minimal guitar accompaniment sounds even better with what Wojewoda decides to add and how he does it.

The East Coast’s Amelia Curran has been stopping listeners dead in their tracks ever since her 2008 album War Brides brought her to national attention. Until now, her approach has been relatively bare bones; this, on the other hand, is a full-blown rock record by comparison, full of ringing electric guitars, powerful drums, strings (by Drew Jurecka, of Jill Barber’s band), horns (by Bryden Baird, of Feist’s band), lap steel, accordion, and some stunning jazz piano and organ work by Aaron Davis (Holly Cole Trio).

A great band and great producer don’t make a great record, of course, and it’s Curran’s voice and songs that are always centre stage. She is a master of empathy, the kind of voice you need to hear in your darkest moments, the kind of voice that has lived through mood disorders and anxiety (the topic of a current public awareness campaign she’s spearheaded) and reaches out in song.

Here, with the help of many friends, a variety of tempos and textures ensure that it’s not a dour affair. It’s much more than that: it’s a powerful record by a major artist. (Nov. 13)

Download: “I Am the Night,” “Coming For You,” “Somebody Somewhere”

Lynne Hanson – River of Sand (independent)

She’s chasing whiskey with what’s left of her tears. She says, “There are days I only feel the pain / Even god don’t wanna know my name.” She’s “living life like a country song.” She writes painfully honest songs about divorce, addiction and sexual predators. She is Ottawa songwriter Lynne Hanson, and she’s made the only roots rock record of 2014 to hold a candle to Rosanne Cash’s The River and the Thread.

This is Hanson’s third album, but her first in four years. Produced by veteran songwriter Lynn Miles and featuring a host of ace Ottawa session players, Hanson’s album boasts 11 songs that project a confidence and boldness that her characters are searching for. Her honey-sweet voice and lovely arrangements offset the subject matter; unless you’re listening closely, you might merely think this was a gorgeous, Sunday autumn afternoon album. There’s a lot more inside, however, and Hanson is the new(ish) Canadian songwriter you should be getting to know better right now. (Nov. 7)

Download: “River of Sand,” “Whiskey and Tears,” “Foolish Things”

The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Pt. 1 OST – Various Artists

Every Hunger Games soundtrack so far—this is the third—has promised more than it delivered. Yet it’s that promise that excites every time, even if the albums have borne diminishing returns since the T Bone Burnett-produced original featured Taylor Swift in a surprisingly subdued, folkie mode, as well as solid contributions from Arcade Fire, Neko Case, Miranda Lambert and others. The Catching Fire soundtrack was handled by a traditional Hollywood music supervisor, whose best move was getting Lorde to cover Tears For Fears’ "Everybody Wants to Rule the World," one of the most memorable covers of recent years.

Lorde returns to assemble this soundtrack. In many ways, she’s an ideal curator: she is, after all, 18, the same age as Katniss Everdeen at this stage of the story. She offers two new songs (and a Kanye West reworking of one of them); sadly, neither stand out. She does, however, appear on a track with Stromae, Pusha T and Haim, surely the strangest collaboration of the year—and also the best. Charlie XCX, 22, gets Duran Duran’s Simon LeBon to guest on her track, another highlight here. Some of the high-profile collabs don’t pan out as well: Ariana Grande tries her best over a weak Major Lazer track, and Miguel is smothered underneath a sonic onslaught from the Chemical Brothers.

Tinashe, 21, stands out with the slow-burning "The Leap." At the other side of the age divide, roping in Grace Jones, 66, is another coup (much like getting Patti Smith for Catching Fire), even if her new song, the largely percussive "Original Beast," is a mere throwaway.

Even if at least half of this soundtrack doesn’t work, it still marks one of the rare occasions today when a Hollywood studio actually prioritizes an original soundtrack, one with modern, high-profile, relevant artists writing new songs in thematic accordance with the actual script. It’s that attention to detail—and carefully catering to its targeted fan base—that has made the franchise so wildly successful. (Nov. 20)

Download: “Meltdown” – Stromae feat. Lorde, Pusha T, Q-Ti and Haim; “Dead Air” – CHVRCHES; “Kingdom” – Charlie XCX feat. Simon LeBon

Jenny Hval and Susanna – Meshes of Voice (SusannaSonata)

This summer, Kate Bush returned to the stage for the first time in 35 years. That prompted plenty of long-dormant fans to book plane tickets to London for 22 shows that sold out in 15 minutes, and others to pen essays about how there has never been another pop performer like her. There has, of course: people like Bjork and Owen Pallett and St. Vincent—and more recently, EMA— all blend avant-garde sensibilities with pop music, making brainy music that also provides visceral release.

These two Norwegian performers, each with moderately successful solo careers, easily tap into Bush’s template of melodramatic, narrative piano ballads subverted by bursts of noise and abstraction and atonality that challenge your expectations around every corner. Hval is also a novelist and performance artist; in much of her work, the sounds she uses—as well as the way her voice slides between notes—are as much a part of the narrative as her lyrics. (Her 2013 album Innocence is Kinky was one of that year’s best.) Susanna’s music is usually much prettier than this; together, they’re fascinating and daring. (Nov. 7)

Download: “I Have Walked This Body,” “Black Lake,” “Running Bones”

Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes – Various Artists (Universal)

If this project sounded too good to be true, that’s because it is. Take some long-lost lyrics by Bob Dylan, written after his 1966 motorcycle crash, and hand them over to producer T Bone Burnett, who in turn invites Elvis Costello, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, Marcus Mumford (Mumford and Sons), Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops) and Taylor Goldsmith (Dawes) to write accompanying music to be performed by all involved—except Dylan, of course.

It doesn’t work, and there are plenty of reasons why. For starters, maybe these lyrics were long-lost for a reason; there’s nothing particularly Dylanesque about them. Maybe there are too many cooks in this kitchen. Maybe it’s because this was written and recorded in two weeks. Maybe everyone was trying too hard to sound like Bob Dylan. Maybe everyone was trying too hard not to sound like Bob Dylan. Who knows? What we have here isn’t even these artists sounding like the best versions of themselves—and that’s the bigger crime than whether or not this serves the legacy of Bob Dylan or not.

It’s not entirely terrible, of course; there’s enough talent here to make it at least listenable. Giddens delivers a beautiful “Lost on the River #20,” and her fiddle is a welcome presence throughout. Mumford offers the biggest surprise, with the sparse, somewhat funky and haunting “When I Get My Hands On You.” Taylor Goldsmith, probably the least known of these performers, acquits himself well.

Lost on the River comes on the heels of a six-disc “complete” version of The Basement Tapes, the original songs and cover versions recorded by Dylan and The Band in 1966; surely Dylan freaks will find much more there to pore over than the detritus heard here. The record company isn’t lying when it says, somewhat carefully, that this is “a music event 47 years in the making.” Whether it was worth waiting for is a whole other issue. (Nov. 20)

Download: “Diamond Ring,” “Lost on the River #20,” “When I Get My Hands On You”

Nickelback – No Fixed Address (Universal)

Nickelback is the biggest rock band in the world. (They’re also the loudest, based on the ear-splitting mastering job here.) Now they’re ready to—get funky? Check out the disco, up-stroke strut of “She Keeps Me Up,” where the constantly constipated Chad Kroeger sings, “Funky little monkey / she’s a twisted trickster / everybody wants to the sister’s mister / Coca-cola rollercoaster!” Even that doesn’t prepare you for the appearance of rapper Flo Rida (he of Low fame) on the somewhat Latin-tinged “Got Me Runnin’ Round,” which also comes with a horn section on top of the grungy chords and dash of wah-wah guitar, while Kroeger sings, “She tastes like the sunshine kissing me.” What fresh hell is this?

It’s actually a welcome change for Nickelback, who already flirted with ska on their last album—anything to break up the monotony of a litany of soundalike singles from this bludgeoning band should be encouraged. No, what’s weirder is that the man who only ever seems to sing about beer, boobs and babes is heard here railing against Wall Street thieves, rhyming mass delusion and mass confusion and chanting: “Hey hey, just obey / your secret’s safe with the NSA / in God we trust or the CIA / standing on the edge of a revolution.” Somewhere in Russia, Ed Snowden is snickering. (Nov. 20)

Download: “Edge of a Revolution,” “She Keeps Me Up,” “Got Me Runnin’ Round”

Pink Floyd – The Endless River (Sony)

As someone who hasn’t liked a Pink Floyd album in 39 years—that would be Wish You Were Here—I find it absolutely shocking that this, their final album, assembled from jam sessions recorded 20 years ago, is as lovely and reaffirming as it is.

All credit is due to the late keyboardist Richard Wright, who died in 2008; he’s the star of this instrumental show, which harkens back to the band’s pre-Dark Side of the Moon, considerably more experimental phase. Guitarist David Gilmour and drummer Nick Mason found 20 hours of improvised material from sessions for The Division Bell and shaped it into what is now The Endless River, with plenty of new overdubs and help from Roxy Music’s Phil Manzanera.

The reviews write themselves: cold leftovers from Pink Floyd’s worst album? No thanks. But listen again: It’s a helpful reminder of what Pink Floyd always did best, before the portentous weight of Roger Waters and Gilmour got the better of the both of them. It’s no surprise, then, that the sole track to feature vocals, the closing “Louder Than Words,” is the weakest one here.

Shine on, Richard Wright. (Nov. 13)

Download: “It’s What We Do,” “Sum,” “Things Left Unsaid”

Sagot – Valse 333 (Simone)

Something evil is afoot here. Julien Sagot sounds like he’s lurking around the shadier sides of Montreal, hanging out with eerie drone-pop savant Dirty Beaches and getting into trouble. At times he’s devilish, at times he’s fragile; at all times he sounds either frightening or frightened half to death at the voices in his head. Sagot borrows from Tom Waits, but only The Black Rider. Sagot borrows from Serge Gainsbourg, but only Histoire de Melody Nelson. Sagot favours twangy guitars, metallic percussion, cabaret piano, squalls of noise, and singing in a voice that we probably shouldn’t trust.

Sagot’s day job used to be in Polaris prize-winning band Karkwa, but neither this nor his 2012 debut, Piano Mal sound anything like that. Sagot doesn’t sound like anyone else in Quebec, anyone else in North America—maybe Italian weirdo Vincent Capossela. But seeing how that guy is one of Europe’s best-kept secrets, it’s up to us to seek out Sagot. We’ll probably find him in the last non-gentrified warehouse in Montreal’s Parc X, his studio set up like a madman’s lair. The lights are dim. The smell is unusual. The sounds, however, are completely intoxicating. (Nov. 7)

Download: “Avion,” “Transsiberien,” “Les Squellettes”

Neil Young – Storytone (Warner)

This is Neil Young’s 37^th album in 46 years. Since his ’70s heyday, he’s managed only about three albums per decade that every fan should own. Each new release is greeted with the same reaction: do we really need this one? When it’s Neil recording cover songs inside a phone booth at Jack White’s studio, as he did earlier this year, maybe not so much. This time, however, the answer is yes.

Storytone finds Young in acoustic and orchestral mode—not unlike much of his 1972 classic Harvest. Unlike when Young employs, say, Daniel Lanois or Crazy Horse to inject life into songs that he may or may not have written hours before going into the studio, he must know that he can’t mess around when he’s hiring a symphony orchestra. Consequently, this batch of songs is his most melodically strong in a long while, even if some of the string arrangements have Disney moments and the attempts at introducing some Chicago blues into the equation (“I Want to Drive My Car,” “Say Hello” to Chicago) are a tad awkward. If strings ain’t your thing, these nine songs also appear in stripped-down solo format, with just piano, guitar, ukulele and harmonica. (Though that still doesn’t save “Say Hello to Chicago.”)

Storytone also comes at a time in Young’s life when he’s more inspired than usual. As befitting the sonic backdrop, Young sounds fragile. He and his wife of 36 years, Pegi Young, filed for divorce in September (“Like I Used To”); lately he’s been dating actress and environmentalist Darryl Hannah (“I’m Glad I Found You”). And that cross-Canada tour to protest the oil sands manifests itself in “Who’s Going to Stand Up?”—one of the most potent protest songs he’s ever written.

Neil Young: a sustainable resource if there ever was one. (Nov. 7)

Download: “Who’s Going to Stand Up?” “Plastic Flowers,” “Tumbleweed”

December '11 reviews

These reviews appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury this month.

Kate Bush - 50 Words for Snow (Fish People/EMI)

Compared to her last album, the disappointingly conventional 2005 album Aerial, 50 Words of Snow sounds much like the Kate Bush that her fans cherish, the iconoclast who has influenced several generations of boundary-pushing performers.

Opening track “Snowflake” is instantly familiar, in part because it sounds like it could have appeared on 1985’s masterpiece Hounds of Love, but also because it consists of little more than a relentless piano riff that—while beautiful—doesn’t change over the course of nine minutes (making it one of the shorter tracks on this seven-song album). As the rest of the album unfolds, it becomes apparent that even though Bush is still in magnificent voice, still writing outside of any pop music convention, still sounding gorgeous, her songs simply don’t match the rest of her talents.

In many cases, they’re unintentionally funny. Granted, intention is difficult to gauge, but 50 Words for Snow is such a sombre, po-faced album that one can only assume it’s deadly serious. There’s a song written in the first person as a snowflake, a song about Yeti, and a song about dreaming a sexual encounter with a snowman (and his “ice-cream lips”) who, of course, ends up melting in her bed.

Then there’s the extremely literal title song: Bush strings together 50 poetic synonyms for snow—i.e., “swans-a-melting,” “vanilla swarm,” “icyskidski” and “whippoccino”—while she intermittently urges on the male narrator (played by actor Stephen Fry) with lines like, “Come on, Joe, just 22 to go … just like the Eskimos … let me hear your 50 words for snow.” Bush has always had a playful side that’s helped her realize her best work; this song, however, is asinine.

That leaves Elton John, of all people, to save the day. He shows up as a duet partner on "Snowed in at Wheeler Street," a story about star-crossed lovers throughout history. It sounds like an odd pairing—although Bush scored a hit in the early ’90s covering “Rocket Man”—but John relishes the role and sings his ass off, giving the song his all and emoting in ways he hasn’t really done in over 30 years. It’s an inspired moment in both of their recent discographies (which might not be saying much), and that track alone is enough to suggest that Bush’s best days might not be so far behind her after all. (Dec. 1)

Download: “Snowed in at Wheeler Street,” “Snowflake,” “Wild Man”

Couer de Pirate – Blonde (Grosse Boite)

Montreal’s Béatrice Martin was kittenish and coy on her fey debut album in 2008, but now this cat has grown claws. The young francophone pop singer has gained considerable swagger on this, her second album, as she struts through swinging-’60s throwbacks that owe as much to British pop of the period (think Petula Clark) as well as Parisian yé-yé and Lee Hazlewood productions. Her voice, while still girlish, is rarely if ever cutesy—Duffy, please take note. Engineer Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Godspeed You Black Emperor) and arranger Michael Rault (a young Edmontonian who records raw retro rock under his own name) help Martin expertly dress up her songs in lovely colours without ever sounding ostentatious. Sam Roberts drops by to sing a duet—in French, of course, as Martin sticks to her native tongue throughout. Anyone who’s ever fallen in love in or with Montreal will find plenty to love here, but the real success of Blonde is that it is much more universal than that. She’s already got a Top 10 album in France, but there’s no reason a language barrier should stop her from conquering the rest of the world. (Dec. 1)

Download: “Adieu,” “Danser et danse,” “Les amours dévouées”

Pink Floyd – Discovery (EMI)

Pink Floyd’s back catalogue has been a cash cow for at least the last 35 years; most famously, 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon holds the record for having the longest run on the Billboard charts (25 years), and has already been remastered and re-released twice before. It appears again, of course, in this deluxe box set—merely a small component of extensive Pink Floyd reissues this autumn—which coincidentally came out around the same time that legendary major label EMI announced that it was being broken up and its parts sold to Universal and Sony. On the heels of endless Beatles repackaging and a new blockbuster from Coldplay, Discovery is EMI’s swan song.

No one really needs to own yet another copy of Dark Side, Wish You Were Here or The Wall, each of which are also being re-released individually in ridiculously expanded packages meant only for the fan who thinks he has everything. And certainly no one needs the three albums that followed The Wall (or, I would argue, even The Wall itself, one of the most wretched albums in the rock canon), though of course they are included here.

The real appeal—other than a lovely 60-page booklet detailing the band’s artwork and imagery through the years—is having all the pre-Dark Side material assembled together; it comprises half of this 14-album, $200 set (less than $15 an album, including doubles, in case you want to break it down). Some of it holds up better than the rest—Atom Heart Mother in particular is revelatory, Meddle is merely muddling, the Barbet Schroeder soundtracks are trifles—but it’s gratifying to hear Floyd in such a playful, exploratory mode, making music that can conceivably be executed by four creative people in a room.

Naturally, it all sounds fantastic; Pink Floyd is nothing if not an audiophile’s band, and this doesn’t disappoint. And albums like Ummagumma still manage to sound remarkably fresh and devoid of cliché; it’s somewhat mindblowing, in today’s culture, to imagine an album this far out there could ever sell platinum (which it eventually did). It’s a welcome contrast to the often-bloated, super-serious, rock-operatic blowhards they became.

Come for the acid, leave for the cocaine. (Dec. 8)

Rihanna – Talk That Talk (Universal)

Rihanna wants to be all things to all people: pop star, dancehall queen, raunchy electro diva, arena-rock power balladeer. She’s a perfect chameleon, and with her cool, collected and compelling voice she soars above the armies of fembots and divas she shares space with in the Top 40. Yet on Talk That Talk, she merely alternates between feel-good, inspirational pop music for the whole family—“we all want love!” goes one track suitable for a Disney movie—and then lurid, hypersexual strip-club soundtrack material that’s about as artful and seductive as a 30-second clip on a free porn site.

Rihanna scores best when she amps up the Eurodisco techno on Lady Gaga-style club bangers like “We Found Love,” or takes a left turn by rewriting the song “Intro” by downbeat British band The XX. Though it’s entirely based around a sample of the original, Rihanna uses it as carte blanche to insert her own melody and soaring vocal. Rather than a ripoff, it sounds like an inspired collaboration—and not a terribly surprising one, as The XX, despite their minimalist moodiness, has always professed their love for modern American R&B.

The tarty tracks are also the weakest here, though they’re obviously the subject of more media scrutiny. Rihanna’s played the bad girl more than once before—last time we heard from her, she was wielding whips and chains—and now she’s into genderbending, urging you to “suck my cockiness, lick my persuasion,” or singing, “Let me grab my dick while you sit on top / do it right there while the whole world’s watching.” Somewhere, Prince is blushing—and more than a few parents of tweens are scrambling for the off button. (Dec. 1)

Download: “Where Have You Been,” “Drunk on Love,” “Roc Me Out”

The Roots – Undun (Universal)

This veteran hip-hop group will try to convince you that Undun is a concept album about one man’s urban struggles and the choice between an honest life and the criminal element. Don’t hold your breath for a Broadway musical, however; there’s precious little to distinguish this from the other 12 albums in the Roots’ discography, thematically or musically. That said, it comes on the tails of their late-career high, 2009’s How I Got Over, where they proved that taking a gig as a house band on a late-night talk show actually reinvigorated them creatively. And yet while that album worked on a variety of levels, Undun finds the Roots returning to well-crafted albums that are easy to respect but hard to actually like. There are more guest vocal hooks this time around, and a short four-song classical suite to close the album, but mostly the appeal remains in ?uestlove’s drumming and production aesthetic—which isn’t enough to carry an entire record on its own. (Dec. 15)

Download: “Stomp,” “The Other Side,” “Make My”

Sigur Ros – Inni (XL)

If there’s a proper heir to Pink Floyd in the last decade, it’s Sigur Ros. Exploratory, fragile, bombastic, obsessed with the science of sound, and—on their best days—mind-blowing, this Icelandic band have released five albums of varying quality; every one has its high points, but mostly they each feel overwhelming and a bit overproduced. It’s odd, then, that this two-disc live album (the soundtrack to an acclaimed concert film directed by Arcade Fire collaborator Vincent Morisset) doesn’t feel bloated in the least.

Recorded in 2008, Inni features just the core four members of the band—no strings, horns or other window dressing (and barely any crowd noise). And yet the music consistently sounds massive, even at its most minimalist. This band has the ability to convey volumes with the sparsest arrangements of notes; when the tension erupts, it’s positively thunderous. What keep it grounded are the small moments of imperfection amidst the otherwise epic constructions: a feedback squall, a whimsical accordion line, singer Jonsi warbling off-mic. Even though they’re a seasoned band, nothing here sounds rote or bled to death; Inni is full of vitality, and a snapshot of a band at the height of their powers. This is the definitive document of Sigur Ros. (Dec. 8)

Rae Spoon – I Can’t Keep All of Our Secrets (Saved by Radio)

When someone close to you dies, nothing makes sense anymore. Black is white, up is down, and somewhere in the middle of it all you can hopefully find some sort of clarity and insight that leads you to a greater truth. Rae Spoon wrote this, his sixth album, in just such a state, and the result is his strongest work to date.

Spoon is often found between states. Once a solo country singer from Calgary, who identifies as a transgender man, Spoon spent time in Berlin before settling in Montreal and transforming into a full-on electro artist with a singer/songwriter’s heart. Here, his strong, boyish voice is put to work over arrangements that old-timers will think are reminiscent of New Order, and youngsters will think sound like Diamond Rings; unfortunately, they don’t have a lot of teeth to them to work as actual club songs, which leaves the material in a tentative state between reflective ruminations of loss and a desire to bust out on the dance floor.

Either way, these are the finest melodies he’s penned to date, and so the disembodied, in-between state of the material works in its favour. On “Are You Jealous of the Dead?” there is enough reverb on his voice to sound like he’s singing from the other side; the song itself starts out as a fractured bossa nova before becoming an electro anthem. “Curse on Us,” which is set to a sort of techno reggae backdrop, is improbably one of the strongest tracks here.

Nothing is predictable about Rae Spoon at this stage of his career. While it’s a shame that a tragedy is what brought this fine work out of him, it’s inevitable that it will open even more creative and commercial doors. (Dec. 15)

Download: “Curse On Us,” “Ocean Blue,” “When I Said There Was an End to Love I Was Lying”

Kreesha Turner - Tropic/Electric (EMI)

While the new Rihanna record gets attention for its potty mouth and little else, Edmonton singer Kreesha Turner hopes to sneak up from behind and capture some of the same musical terrain on pop radio. Turner is still getting mileage out of her 2008 single “Don’t Call Me Baby” (that is, based on the number of times I still hear it in grocery stores and banks), and there’s nothing here remotely as catchy. Apparently she had four albums’ worth of material before settling on these 10 tracks; one has to wonder what it would take to be rejected from this record. That said, Turner is a far better singer than most pop moppets, and half the tracks on this album—split into two short discs labelled Tropic and Electric—draw from Caribbean and South American influences, filtered through Top 40 production values. That means there’s plenty to work with for remixes, even if the songs themselves are slight. (Dec. 15)

Download: “Rock Paper Scissors,” “I Feel My Darling,” “Love Again”

U2 – Achtung Baby (Universal)

Achtung Baby, now 20 years old, carries the most mythology of any U2 album: the earnest stadium rock band reinvents themselves in Berlin, embraces new sounds, stop taking themselves so seriously, and hit the road with a revolutionary stage show that has yet to be topped by anyone. In Jonathan Franzen’s 2010 novel Freedom, the album also becomes the soundtrack to a sexual awakening for two teenagers who later embrace capitalist excess; they lose their virginity on a pile of $20 bills while listening to “Zoo Station,” and later on “Mysterious Ways” somehow alludes to self-mutilation as well as seduction. Fill in your own metaphor.

The new anniversary reissue contains plenty of distractions: there are no less than five versions, from the basic disc itself to a two-disc set with outtakes and remixes to a ridiculous package involving six CDs, four DVDs, four vinyl records and, of course, Bono’s “fly” shades. There’s also a documentary about the album by an Academy Award-winning director, which opened the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

What about the album itself? Devoid of context, it is indeed a classic: 12 nearly flawless tracks that stand the test of time, many of which are still staples of U2’s record-grossing tours. It’s the rare mainstream success that is as intriguing sonically as it is full of accessible pop songs.

It’s hard to contextualize, however, without remembering 1991. U2 was not a band you danced to. U2 was not a band that ever used much more than bass, guitar and drums. And until then, Bono was perhaps the most earnest man in rock’n’roll, one who wouldn’t be caught dead singing “baby” nine times in a row in each chorus of a song (as he does here in “Ultraviolet”).

The first 30 seconds of opening track “Zoo Station” do sound like they would have been a game-changer in 1991—not for music in general, but certainly for a stadium rock band. Otherwise, there’s nothing revolutionary about Achtung Baby. Most of Larry Mullen Jr.’s beats sound like they were lifted from the Stone Roses. The Edge does develop his signature guitar sound further, but it’s not so drastically removed from his earlier work. On the whole, it’s not as if U2 turned their back on rock’n’roll, or at least the version of it they’d already been developing.

The second disc of outtakes contains some gems: b-sides (“Salome”), experiments and embryonic versions of songs that made the album. But it’s certainly not essential: the remixes are either pointless (minor tweaks of the original) or dated (not in a good way), and the covers, excepting The Velvet Underground’s “Satellite of Love,” are otherwise terrible ideas (Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black,” CCR’s “Fortunate Son,” Cole Porter’s “Night and Day”).

Is Achtung Baby a great album? Yes. Is it an important album? Not really. But as the old American saying goes, when a legend becomes fact, print the legend. (Dec. 8)

Amy Winehouse - Lioness (Universal)

The cynic has to wonder how quickly this was assembled after Amy Winehouse’s tragic death this past summer. Indeed, it includes her final recording—a duet with Tony Bennett for his September release, Duets II—but much of this material comes from various points from the last nine years, with a lot of it reminiscent of her pre-Back to Black breakthrough. In other words, there’s little of the spark, the vitality and the sass that made that one album an instant classic.

Any time a major star passes away prematurely, everyone ponders the possibilities and what-ifs. Lioness doesn’t offer any hints, other than suggesting that maybe Back in Black was the result of a time and place—and a producer, Mark Ronson, who has little to do with the tracks here—and not necessarily Winehouse herself, her astounding voice notwithstanding. Her voice and the arrangements are often better than the material here, but even the covers are hit and miss. On Carole King’s “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” she again teams up with the Dap-Kings—Sharon Jones’s backing band who were integral to the sound of Back in Black—and achieve the impossible, breathing new life into a song that’s been covered to death in the last 40 years. However, she stumbles through “The Girl from Ipanema”—complete with awkward scat solo—and is clearly out of her league on the Bennett duet. On a newer original such as “Like Smoke,” she takes a back seat to verses by Nas, who raps circles around her lacklustre vocals.

For a lioness, this is incredibly tame. (Dec. 15)

Download: “A Song for You,” “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow,” “Our Day Will Come”