Review: Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster

Lady Gaga has risen to the peak of the pop star world in just two years. Managing to generate staying power and interest within the highly dispensable genre, she’s somehow found a way to charge two hundred dollars for her sold-out arena shows despite having only one and a half albums to her name. The wet dream of gossip columnists, and flamboyant champion of the flamboyantly gay, what the hell is it about her heavily synthesized music that’s turned her into such a juggernaut?

It’s part inspiration, part liberal borrowing, and part her being a good pianist; Gaga’s one-off performances of her songs on talk shows and radio programs (check Youtube) are far more interesting to listen to than the songs as they appear on her albums. Fame Monster is a much more polished and pleasing product that its predecessor. Straight away, the first three tracks are criminally catchy, sappily romantic dance songs, one of which was strikingly familiar on the very first listen…

I was fortunate enough to spend my entire childhood listening to the records of ABBA, easily one of the best pop groups that ever was. And the second track of Fame Monster, Alejandro, is a composite song of several of ABBA’s singles and melodies, and feels much like electronic re-creation of ABBA’s style, and if ABBA hadn’t fallen by the wayside a decade ago, I’m sure some kind of stink would have been raised over this, but alas.

Speechless is both refreshing, and a sore thumb juxtaposed to the rest of the album. A piano/rock ballad doesn’t fit very well on a sexualized dance album, nor does the use of acoustic piano and drums, and electric guitars with weeping riffs. And it’s after Speechless that the album kind of falls apart. Dance in the Dark and Telephone feel like a rehashed return to the styles of the first three tracks, in a not-so-good sloppy seconds kind of way. So Happy I Could Die almost gets it right, but oddly emphasized masturbation references and an out of place hook of ‘Aay’s’ and ‘Yay-hah’s’ interrupt the slow and mellow groove of the song. Lastly, Teeth is a strange country-gospel-blues song that manages to have a full brass section playing above the synthesizer bass that Gaga seems unable to leave home without.

Fame Monster is half great and half unsuccessful experiment. Fortunately, the good and bad parts are already neatly organized from the start to save you the trouble. It’s kind of sad though, because nothing on any of these songs is as good as this bare-bones variation of Paparazzi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3R3KqrJAI4 She doesn’t need all these programmed beats and overdubbed vocals to play great music, and her album works are definitely performing below her potential. Hopefully her future work will show some of the musical complexity that she’s really capable of.

Review: Cherry Suede's Cherry Suede

Cherry Suede is a little-known rock band from Ottawa, Canada whom I discovered through a Facebook advertisement that touted them as a ‘Classic rock band that sounds like Boston meets Def Leppard’. That was enough to get my attention, so off I went to see if their deeds could match their Facebook words. I was very pleased.

Boston meets Def Leppard indeed. Classic rock indeed. Their debut (and so far only) 2006 self-titled album is twelve songs that are absolutely reminiscent of 70’s and 80’s rock. Plenty of love songs, the word ‘baby’ pronounced ‘baybay’, all that good stuff. Mix these songs in with Boston’s own debut, or Def Leppard’s work, and it will feel right at home.

While obviously a modern recording, all the instrumentation and effects are straight out of thirty years ago; two guitars, bass, drums, keyboards, and a singer (with one track’s exception of a very cheesily implemented harmonica). The guitar effects are bare-bones. Distortion, of course, but the analog, tube-amp distortion that came before all the direct-intervention electronic modification that exists in modern amps, and just a single wah pedal enable the guitars to be used properly: as something more than power chord dispensaries. We’ve got actual, fully-realized chords in every track, frequent use of modulations, both direct and chromatic, and secondary dominants, techniques that sadly elude many current artists, and guitar solos that feel at home in the song, and not just an excuse for the guitarist to go off on a fast-as-possible shredding tangent.

Given the small pool of instrumentation and effects, and the budgetary limitations of a debut album, the risk of the songs ending up as samey-sounding is large, and they band does not escape this entirely. The uptempo songs all follow similar formulas, and the slower songs their own. Majority of the songs are in G, E, D, or C major – pretty standard for this music. However, the arrangements are very carefully done, and there are enough tricks and surprises in each track to keep the whole album sounding fresh enough.

Best of all, the whole shebang is free. The band has, for whatever reason, decided that they’re going to give away the whole album for free online under Creative Commons on their website, just Google their name. This is a very cool, very selfless move on their part, and while it doesn’t affect the content of the music, the act of gifting this music to anyone who wants it, with no aim for profit or fame gives the album as a conceptual item a very personal feel, which is very rare in music.

This is an album that strives to tread the same ground as the rock artists of the late 1970’s, and I really believe that if it had been released then, Cherry Suede would be a household name today. I’m aware that the realm of classic rock is a dangerous area to assign musical merit within, classic rock fans being a very entrenched community, but this record is made with the same styles, themes, and attitudes as the rock of thirty years ago. It simply took a while to get to us.

Review: Fall Out Boy's Take This to Your Grave

Fall Out Boy’s first proper album, Take This To Your Grave, was released in 2003, and is a very, very straightforward pop punk recording. Lyrically and musically, the comparison to New Found Glory, Simple Plan, and all the other early 2000’s groups of that nature are all too easily made. It’s a 40-minute series of 4/4 power chord songs and pretty basic melodies.

My real problem with this album is that it all sounds pretty much the same. The only way I’m really able to tell the different songs apart is that here or there, there’s one little melodic accent or hook going on that triggers my ‘Oh, this one isn’t that other one that I don’t like, so I shouldn’t skip it’ reaction. Track to track, there is so little variation in style that it all bleeds together. I will use a metaphor.

Listening to the twelve tracks on this album is like eating twelve grilled cheese sandwiches in a row. The first sandwich, being grilled cheese, is delicious, and you immediately want more. And the second sandwich is just as pleasing as the first. “This is going to be a great meal!” You think, “Twelve delicious grilled cheese sandwiches in a row!” But after the fourth or fifth, your hands are far too greasy, and the remaining sandwiches are starting to get cold. You’ve thrown up somewhere around the tenth and stagger back fifteen minutes later to reluctantly finish the final two, lumpy, hardened and cold sandwiches and the butter on the bread is starting to get runny and it’s really no longer the amazing sandwich buffet that you signed up for.

What I’m saying is that wherever you start listening to this – be it the beginning, middle, or just putting your player on shuffle and diving right in – the first song you hear you’ll enjoy, and will probably become your favorite of the bunch. The rest of the songs are just as good, but after you get through a couple more, it’s all leftover grilled cheese from there on out.

I’m aware that the band went on to preposterous success and fame, and that this record was their launching point. But the truth is, the difference between this album and their last, Folie A Deux is night and day. And I’m grateful that the group was able to grow so much in the five years between those two albums, because Take This to Your Grave just isn’t doing it for me.

Bet it’s great moshing music, though.

Review: My Chemical Romance's Danger Days

My Chemical Romance has a brand new album with a stupid name: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys. A departure from their established, dark style of their earlier work, Danger Days represents a change of direction and style for the band, reportedly sparked by the departure of, and replacement of, their drummer Bob Bryar for reasons unknown to the public at large.

While not necessarily a full-out concept album, Danger Days definitely has a consistent theme, and as far as it matters, a character and a setting. The best way I can describe the album’s theme is that it’s directly evocative of the small-town let’s-get-out-of-here themes and circumstances of so many characters in so many stories. Images of highways, deserts, discontented small-town Midwestern youths absolutely fill every single square inch of the lyrics. Every track either directly contains the words ‘run away’, ‘this town’, or some very direct allusions toward the narrator’s discontent of his situation, his presumption that life is better somewhere else, and his desire to bring his girlfriend on the journey with him.

The only real character is a fictional radio DJ named DJ Dr. Death Defying, whose radio program is supposedly the length of this album. Dr. D.D. occasionally interrupts the succession of songs to take the role of a caretaker of sorts, and seems to think that the youth of the world are at war with the generation which begot them, and champions the ‘Fabulous Killjoys’ in their battle against the adults/their parents/the cops. Also interesting to note is that his presence in this album was immediately reminiscent of DJ Dr. K, who, in the videogame Jet Grind Radio played the exact same role in almost the exact same setting.

So why have I just spent three hundred words without even mentioning the music? Because these themes of discontent and escape really really hit you over the head right away. I’ll get to the other half of the album now.

Musically, the record is far more interesting than its lyrical or contextual/conceptual counterpart. These guys have become very talented songwriters in all aspects. Several styles of music are explored in the album, from club-thumping techno (Planetary GO!), puke-in-your-lap punk rock (Party Poison), ass-shattering confrontational rock (Save Yourself, I’ll Hold Them Back), and flowing, beautiful singalong tracks that beg to be danced to (Bulletproof Heart, SING, and Summertime).

In nearly every track you will find a finely written vocal melody, that is almost always wonderfully sung by teenybopper lust-magnet Gerard Way. Occasionally he will maul his vowel sounds to make a few lines rhyme, like the chorus of Bulletproof, rhyming ‘gravity’ with ‘me’, but pronouncing them ‘gravitay’, and ‘may’. The melody serves as an excellent counterpoint to the rest of the band, and in Bulletproof, Save Yourself, SING, and Summertime, I found myself looping the song several times over, just to hear the subtle intricacies in all of the instruments, and how they’ll all come together from different sides of the dominant chord into one of the most pleasing resolutions I’ve heard in a pop song in a long time.

Please do not let my disparagement of the lyrics and imagery turn you off from this record. The lyrics are pretty stupid at times, and so is the title, and the album art style, and pretty much everything that isn’t the music. But those aren’t the important aspects anyway, so it won’t detract from the listening experience unless you’re really trying to analyze the record, like I am. Danger Days is a fabulously written work of music from a group of musicians who have truly found a good vehicle and style for their self-expression. Give it a listen, you won’t be disappointed.

Review: Cartel's Cycles

October 20^th, 2009 was the date of Cycle’s release, the third album by the six-man Georgian pop-rock outfit Cartel. Forty minutes of unsophisticated love songs are contained in the eleven track span of the work. Let’s get down to business.

When I say this is pop-rock, I mean that in the most straightforward sense. This is as poppy and rocky as we’re going to find for a while. The first three tracks, Let’s Go, The Perfect Mistake, and Faster Ride are a trio of dangerously catchy tunes that I’m sure have slain the hearts of teenage girls in numbers too great to count with the ‘Me and you baby, true love’ lyrical style that each and every track boasts. Melodic, and strongly sung vocals from Will Pugh, who is arguably one of the more competent vocalists in this genre usually filled with waifishly-voiced effete men in tight jeans who can’t quite get to their notes without belting out, or throwing their voices toward the correct pitch and hope they don’t miss by too much.

It’s tough to say a whole lot about Cycles. It’s a (very nicely done) pop-rock album from a band that’s very good at this sort of thing after eight years of making this music. Every song is catchy, with good harmonies and just enough variation each time through the verses and choruses that there’s a definite evolution of the music over the brief length of each piece, as slightly more complex layers are added to the mix.

All in all though, the recording is tight, the songs are written well enough to stand apart from one another while still conforming to the very tight genre restrictions that Cartel has been married to for their whole career. In the end it’s not going to stand too far apart, or above any of the other artists in this field, like Boys Like Girls, All Time Low, or Tokio Hotel, because it really, truly is just too samey-sounding to say that any one group is really superior to another at this style of music. That said, however, Cycles is still an enjoyable listen, even if it won’t rock your world, at least it can rock your socks for forty minutes.