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ARTISTdirect.com Recent Album Reviews
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Most Recent Album Reviews on ARTISTdirect
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"David Cook" by David Cook
If you're buying an American Idol record, whether you like it or not, you should expect a healthy dose of cheese. And 2008's winner, David Cook, surely has that spread all over his major label/post-Idol debut. It's no surprise that there are a lot of heavy, Soundgarden-style guitar riffs that somehow manage to sound less grunge and more '80s power ballad. What do power ballads typically dwell on? Well, typically they concern relationships and attaining said-relationships, not being good enough, and navigating the treacherous waters of stardom. Whereas those bands of yesteryear were mostly charting new courses in the rockstar mythology, we spent the earlier part of the year learning about how much of an average dude David Cook really was. He was a rockstar-in-the-making, but no real skeletons seemed to exist in the Cook closet that make him dark or beaten down, like the album's tone would suggest. This comes to a full head when he passionately belts out that he, "Won't let the
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"Pray the Devil Back to Hell" by David Cook
The Devil appears in many forms, and in the West African nation of Liberia, the Devil is Charles Taylor.
Liberia?s roots began somewhat idealistically, a dream for freed American slaves who returned to 19th Century Africa. In 1847, Liberia became an independent nation, and over a century later, the country fell into complete civil and political collapse. The eruption of two civil wars in the 1980s and the 1996 ?election? of warlord Charles Taylor as president (one of his campaign slogans: ?He killed my Ma, he killed my Pa, but I will vote for him?), should have left the people of Liberia hopeless. But the women of Liberia prove that hope is not lost, as a group of Muslim and Christian women decided to take a stand against Liberia?s tumultuous present. Pray the Devil Back to Hell unleashes their story on the world.
The riveting documentary follows Leymah Gbowee, a Liberian peace activist as she recounts her 2002 mobilization of ordinary Liberian women against the brutal Democratic
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"Frost/Nixon" by Frank Langella
Frank Langella delivers such a masterful performance in Frost/Nixon that he should have thrown both arms in the air and flashed victory signs at Oscar voters during the closing credits. He magnificently portrays disgraced president Richard Nixon's bitterness, bluster, and bile without descending into easy caricature. More importantly, he manages to elicit genuine sympathy for a man whose arrogance, self-deception, and criminality led to his well-deserved downfall.
Michael Sheen is also excellent as the ambitious and relentlessly optimistic David Frost, a Brit whose glory days as an American talk-show host are behind him. Hoping to revive his career, Frost approaches Nixon about doing a series of TV interviews in 1977, three years after Nixon's resignation.
Frost is prepared to pay dearly for the privilege, both literally and figuratively. He guarantees $600,000 to Nixon, much of it from his own pocket, despite the fact that no TV network wants the programs. Worse for Frost than
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"Theater of the Mind" by Ludacris
Oh, Ludacris. While all artists have their upside and their downside?Kanye has his breathtaking artistic ambition and his rampant egomania, Jay-Z has a mind made for writing great things but the tendency to write about nothing, Nas has a pen for the most incredible rhymes but an ear for the most lackluster beats?none are farther apart than Chris Bridges'. For every awe-inspiring rhyme exercise like "Southern Fried Intro" you get the insipidity of a "Money Maker." For every "I Do It For Hip Hop," you get a "Nasty Girl"?the list goes on. It's frustrating listening to him, knowing that he's got a really awesomely bizarre classic album rattling somewhere in his head, and yet feels fine dropping snoozy trash like "Contagious."
And so goes Theater of the Mind. There are flashes of brilliance, a chunk or two of mediocrity, and a whole lot of good songs. Which is fine, I guess. But the clock is running out on Ludacris' time to drop that career-defining classic album that all other great
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"I Can't Think Straight" by Lisa Ray
I Can't Think Straight recalls the indie romantic comedy Kissing Jessica Stein in how it tackles the difficulties of accidental lesbian relationships between vivacious young women hailing from disparate cultural backdrops. I Can't Think Straight, at its simplest, is a girl-meets-girl love story where mutual attraction supersedes race, class, and creed. But due to the film's underlying political premise, the romance is equipped with built in fall-out. That's why it's a multi-layered, cliche-skirting film.
Tala (Lisa Ray), an exotic, sassy Christian based in London, and Leyla (Sheetal Sheth), a British Indian and devout Muslim, couldn't be more opposite or beautiful. The raven-haired beauties embark on a torrid affair that's strictly forbidden by Leyla's devoutly religious family and Tala's fiancée, among others.
The film emphasizes an overt political agenda that celebrates non-Western cultures. The parents of Tala and Leyla are of an old-fashioned mentality and verbally spar
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"Circus" by Britney Spears
Our gal Brit Brit?Britney Spears to her momma and her extensive kin folk? has selected an appropriate title for her latest and greatest album. The pop tart's life has devolved into a can't-look-away-from-the-train-wreck, tried and true media Circus. Let's face it: for the past two years, her life has been a spectacle and a mess. At least we know Brit, who has never exactly been celebrated for her savvy, is gaining some perspective about her life by the way she named her album. One can't help but wonder when the hell she had time to record the music contained on Circus, since she spent 2007 and 2008 in the hospital and/or rehab, losing custody of her two young sons and landing under the conservatorship of her father. They say that trauma, drama and strife are the most fertile sources for an artist's musical catharsis. Brit has apparently funneled all the shit that's happened to her in the unfortunate past two years into Circus.
Her breathy yet thin voice erupts into full-on, sex
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"The Dukes" by Chazz Palminteri
Dreams often dictate the waking life of many human beings. The middle-aged men that populate The Dukes are no different. The lead characters, played by
Robert Davi, who also steps behind the camera to direct the film, and
Chazz Palminteri, are living in the past, when they were a part of a wildly popular doo wop singing group that had but one smash hit single. Clinging to the past certainly stunts the mens' growth and makes for quite a few laughs in the film.
You have to hand it Palminteri, portraying George, another version of the actor's quintessential New Yorker persona. Only this time his character is transplanted to Los Angeles and trying to revive his long-dead career. Palminteri is an expert at playing authentically ethnic characters in his films. He nails it as a classic gold-chain wearing, chubby chasing Italian once again.
The film is a "crimedy": a goofy concoction that fuses elements of comedy, crime drama, and musicals. It's part Jersey Boys served up with a
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"The Guitar" by Saffron Burrows
"Still feeling crappy" is the first thing that Melody (the lithe and lean tall drink of water known as
Saffron Burrows in real life) utters when asked how she feels in The
Guitar, which isn't a film about a rock 'n' roll instrument. It's a morality-free urban tale about life and imminent death.
To add insult to injury, Mel 's doctor (a surprise cameo by
Janeane Garofalo) tells her she is suffering from a rapidly developing inoperable cancer that will take her life within the next eight weeks. Mel's crappy day gets crappier when her job is downsized, her boyfriend dumps her in favor of locating his inner child, and the tumor pressing on her throat is causing breathing to became a labored activity. It sucks to be Melody Wilder, a woman blending into the vast and suffocating streets of New York City, a place that has so exceeded its carrying capacity it's nearly impossible to be original or unique.
Melody doesn't let the death sentence became an anchor around her neck, which
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"Happy in Galoshes" by Scott Weiland
Scott Weiland sounds free on his latest solo album, "Happy" In Galoshes. He's completely unshackled creatively, and he's made some of the best tunes of his career because of that freedom?going from grunge poet laureate to veritable legend. A charismatic, edgy and mysterious genius, Weiland's the kind of rockstar that they don't make anymore. Happy seesaws between smoky noir-ish subject matter and undeniably beautiful dream pop. In essence, it's the best '60s record to drop in 2008, and Weiland has unabashedly embraced his influences to the fullest. However, he goes beyond the template constructed before him, and he creates something that's his own. Isn't that what he's always done though? Velvet Revolver ventured beyond hard rock's confines, and Stone Temple Pilots left an indelible mark on alternative rock. So, it makes sense that, on this solo offering, Weiland would go the extra mile.
At heart, this is a road record. The first track, "Missing Cleveland," longs for winter with a
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"A Winter Symphony" by Sarah Brightman
It has become a fact of life that shelves and iTunes stores will be flooded with holiday-themed albums around this time of year. Like clockwork, we'll pick them up, play them constantly right up until the last relative waves goodbye and then away they go until next November. With her first Christmas album, soprano Sarah Brightman may have just given us a new tradition that, at least contains moments that transcend the very season it was intended for.
Aside from a campy, show tune rendition of Roy Wood's [Electric Light Orchestra] "I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday," much of A Winter Symphony is on a level with the operatic opus that was Brightman's January '08 release, Symphony. Larger-than-life arrangements and the pop/opera star's angelic voice make Christmas staples such as "Silent Night," "Jesu, The Joy Of Man's Desire," "Child In A Manger" and both versions of "Ave Maria" (one being a duet with Fernando Lima) included on the album slide right into place alongside
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