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Paris Hilton — Paris (Warner)
Best track: Stars Are Blind Worst track: Jealousy Rating: ** Sonic Youth — Rather Ripped (Geffen)
Best track: Do You Believe in Rapture? Worst track: What A Waste Rating: *** Scritti Politti — White Bread Black Beer (Nonesuch)
Best track: Dr Abernathy Worst track: Snow In Sun Rating: *** Album of
the month
Best track: Idlewild Blue (Don’tchu Worry About Me) Worst track: Chronomentrophobia
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WITH the release of Paris,
the heiress to the Hilton family fortune and The Simple Life star
proves she can do more than flip her blonde locks and mumble "That’s
hot." The album begins with a thumping beat, heavy on the bass drum
and amplified by artificial string blurts. Paris takes a page from Gwen
Stefani on the pop-perfect Not Leaving Without You and the
R&B-inflected Stars Are Blind. The best track is the first
single, Stars Are Blind, a winsome piece of chirpy pop-reggae. Fightin’
Over Me, featuring Fat Joe and Jadakiss, touches the realm of rap.
Hilton blatantly croons about how hot she is with an air of arrogance
only an heiress could successfully get away with.
This album sees Sonic
Youth reinventing itself again. Switching from producer Jim O’Rourke
to self-production (alongside John Agnello) has given things an urgent,
spontaneous feel. The band sounds riotously playful. Rather Ripped vibes
along through a set of moody songs, then peaks over the last five
tracks, Turquoise Boy, Lights Out, The Neutral, Pink
Steam, and Or. The new cut Incinerate climbs and
rushes and tumbles just like Daydream Nation’s Teen Age Riot. Do
You Believe In Rapture? Is as reflective as Sonic Youth has ever
been, while Jams Run Free positively skips along with a jovial
lightness before the last thirty seconds are dappled with restrained,
yet insistent, guitar murmur. Rats, meanwhile, is built around a
dense back wall of growling feedback, atop which a dappled melody is
allowed to sprawl. While Sonic Youth has experimented with a few
different musical approaches, it has always had a sound that’s its
alone. And no one sounds quite so cool.
The first new studio album
in years for Green Gartside’s Scritti Politti and a return to his
spiritual Home Rough Trade records. White Bread, Black Beer emerges
seven whole years after the pop-meets-hip-hop glory of its predecessor
Anomie and Bonhomie. White Bread Black Beer is an intimate experiment in
pure dream pop, recorded entirely by Gartside at his home. The spare
synth accompaniments are as good as an afterthought. Throw shows
how Gartside’s vocals, given the right amount of strength and not left
to drift away in their own listlessness, can command the type of
attention that gained the singer notoriety as both a post-punk pioneer
and a soul machine. "There is no end", Gartside sings
on dreamy Petrococadollar, while his own voice replies as if in
extension of the same thought, "I’m very strange about
love." Sometimes lilting (Road to No Regret) and
sometimes sensually nudging (The Boom Boom Bap), these pieces
exude a sneakily intoxicating ambiance. Thus White Bread, Black Beer
marks a welcome return to the more specific intellectual concerns of his
earlier lyrics, and is a rediscovery of the pure pop sensibility which
made his later, more mainstream, work so addictive.
The album is a musical
companion piece to Outkast’s big-screen debut of the same name.
Despite being billed as an official album, the project primarily serves
as an admirable musical counterpart to Kast’s theatrical performance,
set in the jazzy 1930s. The music of the ‘30s seeps through a handful
of tracks, the best of which is led by Big Boi protégé Janelle Monaé,
a young vocalist who stomps and sways in the spotlight. Mighty O,
the first single, offers a rare treat: the two rhyming side by side.
Dré 3000’s precise and off-balance raps seem like proof enough that
he’s not ready to quit. The mournful Hollywood Divorce flatly
accuses the film industry of racism: "All the fresh styles
always start out as a hood thing ... by the time it reaches Hollywood,
it’s over ... take our game, take our name, then they kick us to the
kerb." The ultimate realisation of this nostalgia is Call
the Law, a fine, pulsating, piano-driven, gospel-inspired throwdown
sung by Jonelle Monae. A merger of big band and modern funk rhythms, the
music attempts to recapture the histrionic energy and appeal of the
group’s biggest hits.
