February 2016 reviews

Highly recommended this month: Jim Bryson, Basia Bulat, Sons of Kemet

Highly recommended, reviewed earlier: Jason Collett

Well worth your while: Cris Derksen, Jordan Klassen, Mavis Staples, Rokia Traoré

As always, the following reviews originally appeared in the Waterloo Record.

Jim Bryson – Somewhere We Will Find Our Place (Fixed Hinge Records/Fontana North)

By his own admission, this Ottawa songwriter “carries the weight of the world around.” He tells his lover, “You never seem to worry about loneliness and doubt / but it seems to be all I ever think about.” To be sure, Bryson excels at the Canadiana take on “sad bastard music”—perhaps never better than he did on 2003’s “Something Else,” later covered by his frequent employer, Kathleen Edwards—but the mild-mannered, self-deprecating frontman is also fond of big sing-a-long melodies and huge guitars. He started out in the punk band Punchbuggy, and his last record—a whole five years ago now—was recorded with the Weakerthans as his bold backing band.

Here, Bryson teams up with producer Charles Spearin (Broken Social Scene), who gives his music a different kind of swagger and groove—most evident on lead single “The Depression Dance.” Bryson, who produces other artists in his home studio (Oh Susanna, Kalle Mattson), surrenders to Spearin and Grammy-nominated mixer Shawn Everett (who helmed Alabama Shakes’ stellar Sound and Color) and emerges with the most colourful album of his career, sonically speaking. I’d like to say that his songwriting has improved as well—but it hasn’t, if only because he’s always been this good; Bryson is nothing if not consistent. With the muscle of Spearin and Everett behind him, however, the songs sound better than ever. (Feb. 25)

Stream: “The Depression Dance,” “Changing Scenery,” “Breathe”

Basia Bulat – Good Advice (Secret City)

Basia Bulat’s voice can reduce a grown man to tears. That’s what happened to My Morning Jacket’s Jim James during the recording of the fourth album by this Montreal-based songwriter, which he produced. That emotional response is no small compliment, considering James’s own powerful pipes. But that’s what Bulat does nightly when on tour; to see for yourself, check out the short documentary capturing her sold-out, headlining show at Massey Hall in 2014.

Weeks before that show, she drove solo to Kentucky to start recording with James and a bunch of musicians she’d never met before. Unlike previous producers she’d worked with, James has a distinct sound: trippy modern psychedelia filtered through classic Southern rock and reggae. Thankfully, James didn’t make a record that sounds like Basia Bulat fronting My Morning Jacket—but he did grant her free reign with all his synthesizers, which makes Good Advice a sonic makeover for the woman best known for wielding an autoharp. That said, it never overwhelms That Voice or the songs she’s singing; this is not a case of a producer’s stamp overshadowing the artist’s core strengths. Perhaps the album’s title refers to him.

Instead, we’re told, it refers to female friendship, shoulders on whom Bulat relied during a recent breakup. For what is ostensibly a heartbreak record, Good Advice is remarkably upbeat: even the spacy ballads (“The Garden,” “Someday Soon”) are in major keys. 2013’s Tall Tall Shadow found Bulat bringing in more gospel and soul music to her palette, and that buoyancy remains here.

Some artists come roaring out of the gate with what turns out to be the best work of their career, to which they spend the rest of their lives measuring up. Bulat, on the other hand, keeps getting better and better, 10 years on and four albums deep. (Feb .11)

Stream: “La La Lie,” “Infamous,” “Fool”

Cris Derksen – Orchestral Powwow (Tribal Spirit)

Tanya Tagaq played with the K-W Symphony Orchestra recently, and apparently it was a smashing success. As much as I love Tagaq, I don’t really understand how an entire orchestra fits into the improvisation she and her band tap into every single night. As it turns out, she’s not the only Aboriginal musician attempting a unique collaboration with the symphonic world. Albertan Cris Derksen is a cellist who’s played with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Tagaq—separately—but on her solo recordings plays around with loop pedals and, on this record, samples of powwow music; live, she’s accompanied by a nine-piece symphonic ensemble and an 11-piece powwow group.

Riffing off the melodies, Derksen’s compositions and arrangements work surprisingly well, despite the somber nature of her work and the raw power of the powwow music. In the same way that A Tribe Called Red takes that same source material (recordings by Northern Voice and Black Bear, among others) and makes modern EDM with it, Dersken pulls it toward a more meditative place. There are times where the two worlds sound like their colliding rather than collaborating; instead of failing, however, that tension is just as interesting as when they emulsify.

This came out last summer, but it’s up for Best Instrumental Recording at the Junos on April 3, in a unusually strong category with Afiara Quartet and Skratch Bastid, Colin Stetson and Sarah Neufeld, Esmerine, and Jens Lindemann and Tommy Banks. (Feb. 18)

Stream: “Powwow Rhapsody,” “Intertribal Happy Feet,” “East Winging It”

Jordan Klassen – Javelin (Nevado)

This Vancouver singer-songwriter says his new album was inspired by depression and cancer. Well, helllooooo February! What perfect timing, Mr. Klassen. Everything about Javelin sounds wonderfully wintry: his soft, occasionally falsetto voice, the delicate piano and guitar, the plaintive cello, staccato rhythms fluttering like snowflakes underneath. Klassen fled his B.C. home and headed to Texas to make this record, largely by himself, and the wide-screen arrangements seem to reflect his adopted surroundings. Not that he ever sounded claustrophobic on previous records, but everything about Javelin sounds unrestrained, yet with plenty of space allowing the arrangements to breathe. There are obvious parallels to be drawn here to Sufjan Stevens, Magnetic Fields and A.C. Newman, but Klassen is quickly carving out his own niche. (Feb. 18)

Stream: “Gargoyles,” “No Salesman,” “We Got Married”

Lizzo – Big Grrrl Small World (BGSW)

Minneapolis rapper Lizzo has guested with Prince and toured with Sleater-Kinney and recorded at Bon Iver’s studio—three names that definitely stand out on a resumé. None of those people sound like the other, and Lizzo too stands apart from most hip-hop/R&B. Perhaps not since Neneh Cherry has a female MC sounded so simultaneously fierce and smooth and willing to bend her songs inside out just because she can. While her first album featured plenty of what she calls “Lizzobangers,” Big Grrrl Small World sees her coming out as a both a powerful singer and a R&B visionary with an avant-grade streak. “I think I’m in looooooooove…” she sings, drawing out a syllable before concluding: “…with myself.” As she should. (Feb .11)

Stream: “Ain’t I,” “Ride,” “En Love”

Rihanna – Anti (Universal)

Anti-climactic, more like it. After a year of teasing hints, including three singles, and collaborators ranging from Paul McCartney and Kanye West to Grimes and Kiesza talking about collaborations, none of those elements appear here, on the pop superstar’s eighth album. Why anyone expected this album to be so much different than any of her others—which, ever since 2007’s top-to-bottom classic Good Girl Gone Bad, usually yield two or three huge singles and then a lot of material that wastes her talent—is a bit of a mystery.

Expectations get lowered further with lead single “Work,” a dancehall pop song featuring Drake that’s one of the fluffiest things either has ever done. And yet it’s probably the most uptempo number here, on an album that starts out strong with the atmospheric dub-influenced slow burner “Consideration” and then proceeds to offer nothing but bummer after bummer—redeemed mostly by two very-old-school ballads, the acoustic “Never Ending,” which features a side of Rihanna we’ve never heard before, and the ’60s girl-group homage “Love on the Brain.” Along the way there’s a terrible nod to ’80s L.A. power ballads with “Kiss it Better,” and an interminable interpolation of Tame Impala’s “Same Old Mistakes.” Yes, this is the record where Rihanna reaches beyond her usual comfort zone, but she falls flat more often than she scores.

She’s always been a better singer than her super-produced singles would suggest, and she feels compelled to prove that here on the album’s final four tracks. On “Higher,” she tries way to hard and makes Sia sound subtle by comparison; on the closing piano ballad “Close to You,” she at least leaves us on a high note and wanting more. Because Rihanna does have much more to offer us, but Anti is just a mere glimpse. (Feb .11)

Stream: “Consideration” feat. SZA, “Never Ending,” “Love on the Brain”

Sia – This is Acting (Sony)

Sia writes great songs: we already know this, because that’s how she’s made her career, writing hits for Rihanna, Beyoncé, David Guetta and more. We also know she’s a powerhouse vocalist, as her 2014 smash “Chandelier” aptly demonstrated. This is Acting, therefore, is unsurprisingly full of killer melodies (“Bird Set Free”) and knockout vocal performances (“Alive,” written for and rejected by Rihanna). It’s not, however, a Carole King record: Sia doesn’t rearrange or tone down the songs she writes for multi-million-selling artists. Instead, she goes for the gusto and dresses her work up with every trick of the pop charts and EDM clubs. Which is unfortunate, because almost without exception these songs would be improved by removing the punishing, maximalist arrangements that seem designed for nothing more subtle than the Olympic closing ceremonies. “Move Your Body” takes what sounds like a Brazilian maracatu rhythm fed through EDM drum machines; the inspirational anthem “Unstoppable” also benefits from bigness, as does the peppy bubblegum of “Cheap Thrills.” But if there was ever an album that immediately made me want to seek out an unplugged version, this is it. (Feb. 4)

Stream: “Bird Set Free,” “Move Your Body,” “Cheap Thrills”

Sons of Kemet – Lest We Forget What We Came Here to Do (Naim)

Saxophone, tuba, and two drummers. What more do you need? This U.K. quartet, led by woodwind player Shabaka Hutchings, is driven by what sounds like a New Orleans backbeat, in part because it’s accented by bass lines on a tuba as per that city’s brass band tradition; the rhythms are actually Barbadian, as per Hutchings’s lineage. His melodies hint at Eastern influences (the name is a reference to an ancient name for Egypt), but his use of punchy repetitive riffs owes a large debt to James Brown and American soul music. To these ears, having two drummers in a band that’s neither African nor Latin is normally little more than a visual gimmick, but these two players complement each other perfectly; on the more frenetic numbers here, their interplay alone could carry this band without any bass or melody.

About a decade ago in Toronto, a duo of former hardcore punk musicians started a band featuring just saxophone and buckets, called Feuermusik. Anyone with fond memories that should seek out Sons of Kemet. (Feb. 25)

Stream: “In Memory of Samir Awad,” “Play Mass,” “In the Castle of My Skin”

Mavis Staples – Livin’ on a High Note (Anti)

If you were Mavis Staples’s record company, what would you do with this 77-year-old legend of American music? Staples has already revisited her roots with an album of civil rights standards; she’s made a live album with her hot new band; she’s made two albums with Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy that were a mix of covers and new originals by Tweedy and a few of his friends. The last one, 2013’s One True Vine, was a masterpiece. Where does she go from here?

Anti Records decided to shake up the scenery a bit, partnering Staples up with another young(ish) producer, M. Ward, best known for being one half of She & Him with Zooey Deschanel (but who has a far superior solo discography), and 10 songwriters penning custom-made material. The roster includes Neko Case, Nick Cave, Ben Harper, Bon Iver, Aloe Blacc, and relative newcomers Tune-Yards, Benjamin Booker, The Head and the Heart, and Valerie June.

Yet as is almost always the case in star-studded match-ups like this one, the results fall short of the sky-high expectations. Just because I love Neko Case or Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards doesn’t mean the songs they wrote for Mavis will be the best things on here. No, the real appeal is M. Ward’s production and arrangements, matching the strength of Mavis’s live band of more than a decade with Ward’s own studio atmospherics. The two songs Ward penned are also highlights: “Don’t Cry,” and “MLK Song,” which takes on the daunting task of adapting a speech by the civil rights leader—and old friend of the Staples family.

And of course, this is Mavis Staples: she could sing practically anything and bring you to tears. The talent assembled here ensures she has more than enough to work with. (Feb. 25)

Stream: “Love and Trust,” “Don’t Cry,” “History, Now”

Tindersticks – The Waiting Room (City Slang)

Worst marketing strategy ever: calling your album The Waiting Room. Images of interminable boredom in a hospital wing or a doctor’s office trapped beside the ill, the sad, the coughing, the desperate: sign me up!

For those not familiar with Tindersticks’ oeuvre of the last 25 years, the title might be all too apt, as in, waiting for something to happen. Tindersticks don’t do cathartic release: there are no big crescendos, nothing that might be mistaken for uptempo. Stuart Staples never sings in a way that doesn’t suggest he’s hugging the microphone as close as he can at 3 a.m. Tindersticks are all about tension, suspended states.

Very little changes in the Tindersticks world, other than occasional flirtations with lushly orchestrated ’70s American R&B, as framed through a group of well-dressed whisky drinkers in a subterranean European nightclub. It makes one wonder if bands like Tindersticks and Sigur Ros and Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor and whoever else ever break into a Beyoncé or AC/DC jam at practice, just for kicks. Unlikely.

And yet here we have the odd appearance of a surprising Afrobeat influence on “Help Yourself”—nothing too high-voltage, of course, more like a slow-burning, mid-tempo Tony Allen groove, with a punchy horn section driving it along. Savages vocalist Jehnny Beth drops by for a duet (“We Are Dreamers!”), as does—via the vaults—Montreal’s late Lhasa de Sela, a previous Tindersticks collaborator who died in 2010. These three songs help elevate what could have been a particularly dreary affair—exemplified by the title track, which features only a droning organ and Stuart Staples’s voice—a voice that really needs a rhythm section underneath it—singing “Don’t let me suffer,” over and over again. A Tindersticks album shouldn’t be something to suffer through. (Feb. 4)

Stream: “Follow Me,” “Help Yourself,” “Hey Lucinda”

Rokia Traoré – Né So (Nonesuch)

“Strange Fruit,” a song immortalized by Billie Holliday, is one of the most harrowing ballads ever written, about a victim of racist lynching in the American South. In 2016, it’s being sung by Malian singer Rokia Traoré, whose homeland has been ravaged by Islamist jihadists, radicals who have targeted women, so-called apostates, and even music itself. A song that for decades has been associated with American racism has proven sadly universal, and not even specifically regarding race.

The last time we heard from Rokia Traoré was 2013’s Beautiful Africa, on which she teamed up with producer John Parish (PJ Harvey) and made her boldest, most buoyant and confident record to date. Parish returns here, and guests include Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones and author Toni Morrison, but the mood is considerably more subdued. Understandable. Traoré works with young musicians in Bamako and for the UN Refugee Agency; she might be the daughter of a diplomat who also has a residence in France, but she’s deeply rooted and affected by the conflict in her native country. “Spare me these words that fill me
with woe /
These acts that blacken the heart
… I hate conflict,” she sings in the Malian language of Bambara.

Traoré has a voice that could reduce the hardest of hearts to tears with its beauty. One can only hope the barbarians trying to tear apart one of the richest musical cultures in the world would stop and listen. (Feb. 18)

Stream: “Mayé,” “Ô Niélé,” “Strange Fruit”

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”