Here are the CD reviews I wrote for the December 2010 issue of EL Magazine, which came out November 25. All the albums were released by local labels in Japan during the month of November 2010.
Speak Now
-Taylor Swift (Big Machine/Universal)
Libra Scale
-Ne-Yo (Def Jam/Universal)
The week it was released Taylor Swift’s Speak Now was the biggest selling album on the planet. It’s her third LP and her best. It’s also the first one where she wrote all the songs herself. Normally, a singer-songwriter of Swift’s commercial caliber starts out writing hits that gain a following and by the time she’s big has song doctors and producers coming out her ass. Speak Now is slick, but relative to most product coming out of Nashville these days it’s uncluttered and focused on its subject, who does a good job of cluing us in on what it’s like to be Taylor Swift, a middle class white girl who spent her teenage years studying herself under a microscope and letting anyone take a peek. Having transcended any country music stereotype, Swift speaks to a lot of people with her deceptively simple take on adolescent longing. Compositionally, there’s little here that Lady Antebellum or Sugarland can’t do better, and the melodic thrust of her tunes can get redundant when you strip them to their essence. But the narratives have such imaginative drive that you find yourself hitching a ride despite their appeal to the youngest common denominator. On the one hand you have “Mine,” an ecstatic description of first love leading to a rocky but otherwise perfect marriage, and on the other hand, “Mean,” a stiff-upper-lip, sticks-and-stones put-down of a recognizable type of cynic. Both songs are corny and calculated and contain lines that can break your heart, meaning corny and calculated works both ways. “Don’t make her drop you off around the block,” she sings to a girl of 14 on “Never Grow Up,” a girl whose purview shifts from second to first person and back again with such facility that the gimmick is immediately negated. Even more than “Mean,” this song confronts those critics who feel she’s selling a manufactured lie when all she’s doing it trying to make sense of an unusual existence. What is so terrible about being well-adjusted? It’s a question Ne-Yo, another singer-songwriter who first gained attention as a teen and has since topped the charts continually, has obviously pondered. Despite a franker approach to sex than Swift’s, Ne-Yo still presents a self-consciously moral persona on all of his songs. His last album, remember, was titled Year of the Gentleman, and his latest takes that idea almost to the point of self-parody. As Jerome, a member of a triumvirate of superheroes called the Gentlemen, Ne-Yo struggles between the need for love and the desire for fame-money-power, all of which adds up to easy sex. “I’m turned on but scared of you,” he sings on “Beautiful Monster” to a temptress The-Dream would have been in bed with an hour ago. The song is a detour from Ne-Yo’s standard benign grind into faux techno. The attempt at conceptual significance doesn’t compromise Ne-Yo’s melodic gifts, but it also doesn’t rock as tough as Gentlemen. Good manners has its limits.
More reviews after the jump. Continue reading →
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