New Music Reviews

Pawn Shoppe Heart

(Sire)

This new album from the Von Bondies may be the most compelling reason yet to give Meg White the slip. On Pawn Shoppe Heart, this Detroit quartet combines neo-blues-rock with a monster of a punk rock rhythm section, to often startling results. Is it blues-punk, finally? Almost.

“I’m a broken man, this here’s my broken band, from a broken land,” announces Jason Stollsteimer, the singer with a broken face. As ubiquitous as Stollsteimer’s battered image became following his thrashing at the hands of former mentor Jack White, the stars on this album are bassist Carrie Smith and drummer Don Blum. Their powerful playing breathes new urgency into a blues-rock formula that’s already starting to grow stale on the edges.

It may be telling that far-and-away the best track on Pawn Shoppe Heart, “C’mon C’mon,” is nothing if not power pop. With a desperation appropriate to it’s title, the song leads one to wonder when the White Stripes started substituting artifice for emotion, and whether the blues-rock tag isn’t just holding these guys back.

The rest of the album holds much closer to the Sex Pistols spend an evening with Eric Clapton format, which works brilliantly on the album-opener “No Regrets” but begins to sound cursory in the middle stretch of the album.

Stollsteimer has a voice versatile enough to draw on a wide range of influences. He sounds great when channelling Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, as on the overpowering title track, less so when channelling Jack White, as on “Crawl Through the Darkness.” But I doubt we need to worry about that anymore.

—Nathaniel A. Smith

TV on the Radio

DesperateYouth, Blood Thirsty Babes

(Touch and Go)

The thing that TV on the Radio have going for them is that they really do sound like nothing out there at the moment. They may borrow beats and keyboard accents from the retro-wave fad that’s sweeping the current New York scene, but they add to them in such interesting and entertaining ways that it’s hard to make comparisons between TV and any of the old-time greats.

Tunde Adebimpe’s distinctively shiny voice, combined with the hypnotic falsetto chiming of Kyp Malone, is what makes this record so unique. The music, looping beats and random instrumental coloring, plays background to the luscious vocal harmonies. A capella love song “Ambulance” is positively entrancing as the duo sing on hauntingly syncopated beats over the constant bounce of backing bass.

Opener “The Wrong Way” begins with pumping jazz saxophones and turns into some kind of evangelical gospel cry as soon as the vocals kick in. The song is a poignant call to arms for liberty in the face of racial and social adversity, a message that resonates powerfully despite the track’s playful pace. “Hey, desperate youth! / Oh, blood thirsty babes! / Oh your guns are pointed / your guns are pointed the wrong way,” Adebimpe sings with disarming import.

The repetitive simplicity of the music on Desperate Youth gets old by about the sixth track. But somehow, the so-vibrant-you-could-touch-it personality of the vocals and lyrics captivate over even well-explored territory.

—Sarah L. Solorzano

David Byrne

Grown Backwards

(Nonesuch)

David Byrne’s voice is unmistakable. Despite the thick layers of strings and intricate pop sensibilities on his new solo album, his voice immediately recalls the geeky, smart angularity of the Talking Heads. But without the quirkily quibbling guitars—lavish orchestral arrangements in their place—Byrne’s new solo album Grown Backwards is worlds away from the music of the Heads.

Byrne has a reputation for an obsession with worldbeat, but on this album he not only makes musical leaps around the globe, but also through time. Bizet’s “Au Fond du Temple Saint” and Verdi’s “Un Di Felice, Eterea” pop up in orchestral forms not too distant from their 19th-century originals, except, of course for the presence of Byrne’s Francophone chops. He is joined on the Bizet cover by Rufus Wainwright, another artist from the northeast known for operatic pop. The two singers’ distinctly diverging croons weave in and out of the sounds of Texas’ Tosca Strings, a superb juxtaposition of very different vocal stylings.

On other tracks Byrne sticks to more contemporary forms of theatrical pop. “The Other Side of My Life” is an afternoon stroll, driven by a lengthy violin opener that leads into Byrne’s description of a happy day, when “beautiful angels appear at my side / corporate sponsors will act as my guide.” Any fears that the cynicism of the Talking Heads would be absent here be rested.

Grown Backwards is a record ripened with middle age, the sort of thing that your classical-music loving parents might record, if they had spent their younger years playing in one of the most revolutionary rock bands ever.

—Christopher A. Kukstis

Brad Mehldau Trio

Anything Goes

(Warner)

Fifteen years ago, violinist Nigel Kennedy blew hot air up the skirts of the somewhat dowdy old lady that is classical music with his recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. He played sections fast, slow, ornamented. He played his own cadenzas. He had a punk’s hairstyle. He shot a music video in which the entire orchestra wore sunglasses during the “Summer” movement.

Jazz pianist Brad Mehldau seems to be pulling off a similar feat with much less fanfare and indignant old ladies in the similarly stuffy realm of classic jazz. Mehldau packages his music like a popular rock artist and has the quirky, rumpled good looks of an indie frontman. But it is the music that makes the man. For his latest album, Anything Goes, Mehldau tackles a collection of standards with his accomplished trio. Mehldau ably reinterprets songs by Thelonius Monk and Henry Mancini, his lithe playing superbly set off by the popping rhythm section.

But Mehldau’s idea of standards extends beyond the more traditional jazz fare, wherein lies much of his appeal to non-jazzheads (such as myself). Mehldau reinterprets Paul Simon’s wistful “Still Crazy After All These Years” as a perplexed and perplexing song that marvels at itself even as it brushes with indecision. The trio’s take of Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place” is much more of a group piece, allowing bassist Larry Grenadier to shine on the insistent bassline that underpins the obsessive-compulsive song, which ranks a close second to Mehldau’s earlier interpretation of “Paranoid Android.”

Anything Goes is simultaneously a tribute to the ongoing vitality of jazz in the right hands and some of the finest songwriting on offer.

—Andrew R. Iliff