The New York Times-20080128-Critics- Choice- -The Arts-Cultural Desk-
Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080128
Critics' Choice; [The Arts/Cultural Desk]
Full Text (1675 words)VAMPIRE WEEKEND
Vampire Weekend (XL)
Outside of marching bands and glee clubs, hardly a group anywhere is as proudly collegiate as Vampire Weekend, the Brooklyn band of four Columbia graduates that releases its self-titled debut album this week. Vampire Weekend has songs about heartbreak at school (Campus) and about punctuation (Oxford Comma), and in its brisk, neatly constructed tunes it flaunts musical erudition, from Afropop guitars to mock-Baroque strings.
Vampire Weekend's model, musical and otherwise, is Talking Heads, who picked up rhythms from all sorts of places and never pretended to be lower-class or unintelligent. Ezra Koenig, on guitar, sings in an unabashedly slender voice about the studious, the well traveled, the privileged and the preppy. Walcott urges, Don't you want to get out of Cape Cod?, and it's only one of the album's two Cape Cod songs; the other, Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa (named after a Congolese dance style), is about trying to seduce a sophomore girl on her Benetton linens.
The music keeps a light pop touch, setting up neat grooves that dip into bubble gum, new wave and Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Guitars riffle precise chords and lilt through arpeggios, keyboards go boop, and every flick of a drumbeat is in place. There are nimble touches everywhere: the hooting vocal harmonies in One (Blake's Got a New Face), the bright six-beat syncopations in Bryn, the buildup to a full gallop -- without speeding up -- in Mansard Roof. The music is so perky that the band can breeze right through its more cryptic lyrics: Eyes like a seagull/No Kansas-born beetle could ever come close to that free. And the sheer cleverness of every track is endearing. But it's also brittle; these songs could use just a little more heart. JON PARELES
WILLIE NELSON
Moment of Forever
(Lost Highway)
Back in the 1970s, Willie Nelson helped define outlaw country music by turning away from Nashville's production formulas to follow his Texas instincts. But he's a try-anything guy. For Moments of Forever he's back in Nashville, backed by the city's regular session musicians and produced by the country hitmaker Kenny Chesney and Mr. Chesney's longtime producer, Buddy Cannon.
They build much shinier arrangements than Mr. Nelson gets with his own band. That's not bad. The Nashville pros infuse drama into the songs, and they don't make Mr. Nelson sound like anyone but himself. Out of his familiar context, and perhaps meeting some resistance, he can't coast. He bends current Nashville country to his own agenda with his kindly, grizzled tone, his ahead-of-the-beat vocal phrasing, his acoustic lead guitar (named Trigger) and his choice of songs. Moment of Forever comes close to being a concept album about facing death and loss with grace.
Mr. Nelson is 74, and he moves between sage advice, in songs like his own philosophical mariachi ballad Always Now, and portents of mortality, in songs like Dave Matthews's Gravedigger. In I'm Alive, written by Mr. Chesney with two collaborators, he teeters between depression and tenacity: Everybody's got their share of battle scars/As for me, I'd like to thank my lucky stars/That I'm alive and well.
Mr. Nelson takes his familiar role as a thoughtful codger in the wistful Moment of Forever and behind the jaunty veneer of his own You Don't Think I'm Funny Anymore. But his avuncular ease doesn't disguise the album's somber tone. Over You Again, written by Mr. Nelson and his sons Lukas and Micah, rises like a U2 anthem, and Mr. Nelson mourns for New Orleans with his version of Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927. He turns to '70s funk, complete with clavinet and horns, in Takin' On Water, singing, I know you won't be there to rescue me. As slick as his backup is, Mr. Nelson stays unvarnished. JON PARELES
PAT METHENY
Day Trip (Nonesuch)
The guitarist Pat Metheny has made some of his most engagingly forthright music in trios, enlisting just a bassist and a drummer for support. Bright Size Life (ECM), his auspicious 1976 debut, falls into this category. So do a surprisingly small handful of subsequent studio albums throughout his prolific career: roughly one per decade, each with a different trio, and each more or less a classic. It's no small thing that Day Trip, his second since the turn of the century, is at least as good as any of the others.
Mr. Metheny entrusts a lot of heavy lifting to the bassist Christian McBride and the drummer Antonio Sanchez, a rhythm team he has already tested on the road. (They'll start up again in a few weeks for a tour that ends March 18 at Town Hall.) And he savors the contrast between these proficient sidemen, which might fancifully be described as the difference between earth and sea. Mr. McBride is a bedrock player, authoritative with tempos; Mr. Sanchez has a way of articulating pulse as a play of current and tide.
To anyone even casually acquainted with the big-horizon sweep of the Pat Metheny Group (which also features Mr. Sanchez), what comes next is obvious: Mr. Metheny stands in for sky. Yet his playing, on the brisk near-sambas that bookend the album and virtually all that comes between, only occasionally feels diaphanous or airy. More often it conveys a sense of proportion, substance and coherence, along with rigorous clarity; solid benchmarks for any great improviser at the peak of his game.
And for the first time on a trio record, Mr. Metheny includes only original compositions here. They make unpretentious sense as a whole, with foursquare ballads clearing a bit of breathing room between ebullient post-bop exertions. More than halfway through, there's a pair of pointedly titled songs: Is This America? (Katrina 2005), a calm acoustic elegy, and When We Were Free, a waltz first heard on the Pat Metheny Group album Quartet. But the message takes a back seat to the music, which tenders its own rewards. NATE CHINEN
BEN ALLISON
& Man Size Safe
Little Things Run the World
(Palmetto)
Skittering, spindly electronic drum-and-bass rhythms have been heard before in the music of Ben Allison, one of New York's more interesting jazz bandleaders. But often those rhythms have been a passing feature. In his new record, they are part of the architecture of the music, and the songs form around them.
Those rhythms have become part of Radiohead's sound too, and that's the more meaningful link here, because Little Things Run the World is more or less a rock record, with moody, almost filmic songs. The first track, Respiration, relays the record's basic plot. Mr. Allison has recorded the song before, on an earlier record called Buzz; there, its dynamics were more idiomatically jazz, with a Keith Jarrett-like piano solo and light, slow drums with open cymbals. Here the drums crackle with tiny snare hits and clenched high-hats; Mr. Allison's bass, boosted higher in the mix, blips along with the backbeat; and the electric guitarist Steve Cardenas defines the track with a loose, jangly, sawtoothed style and harmonic vocabulary, more like John Scofield-through-Neil Young than, say, Wes Montgomery.
It's a record worth hearing not just for Mr. Allison's sturdy, memorable songs and his knowing control over his band's sound, but for the three soloists. Besides Mr. Cardenas, the saxophonist Michael Blake takes almost guileless tumbles, cleverly songlike despite their roughness. The trumpeter Ron Horton, a streamlined improviser, plays a long, sweetheart of a solo in Language of Love, which sounds as if it were written under the spell of Burt Bacharach. BEN RATLIFF
YO GOTTI
Cocaine Muzik (mixtape)
My last album dropped/And you may think I flopped, raps Yo Gotti. And you wouldn't necessarily be wrong. He doesn't deny that his strong 2006 album, Back 2 da Basics (TVT), found fewer buyers than he might have liked. But he's not asking for sympathy, not least because he knows he won't get any. Instead he has returned with a brash new mixtape, Cocaine Muzik, compiled by DJ Smallz, which gives listeners another chance to appreciate two of his greatest assets: his slurpy voice and his stubbornness.
As the title suggests, Yo Gotti still specializes in rhymes about the risks and rewards of the drug trade. He's a Memphis rapper with an unusually musical voice, a warm drawl -- enriched by a rasp and a slight lisp -- that turns just about every phrase into a sing-song melody.
In Aww Man, a collaboration with Juelz Santana, Yo Gotti is almost whispering as he delivers the chorus: Hood faaame/Got my swag' so hot -- yeah, I'm the maaan. (With a voice like his, you can make just about any two words rhyme.) And in Pure Cocaine, which borrows the tune from Prince's Purple Rain, Yo Gotti doesn't just rap his verse (in which he claims to keep old hundreds in a sour-cream Ruffles bag), he moans it. In the tone and texture of his voice, it's not hard to hear evidence of hip-hop's debt to the blues.
In the months before Back 2 da Basics arrived, Yo Gotti released I Told U So, a mixtape collaboration with DJ Drama that sounds as good, and as rich, as any CD he has made. By contrast, this mixtape is a teaser, meant to prepare listeners for Yo Gotti's new album, which is, he promises, coming soon.
The first single from that forthcoming album, a greasy slow jam called Let's Vibe, appears here, alongside a sneak preview of another potential album track, Walkin' in Memphis, based on an obvious but hugely effective sample from the Marc Cohn hit. There are also a handful of songs borrowed from I Told U So. One of them, Back in the Hood, sounds even better now than it did then. For a few moments the bravado evaporates, and all that's left is a hip-hop semistar, weary and wary, trying to keep desperation at bay: E'ybody want me to pay they bills, give them a car, buy them a grill/Come on, be real, if I do that then I'll be broke/Probably look stupid, back in the hood, selling dope. KELEFA SANNEH
[Illustration]PHOTOS