MUSIC BOX |
Josh Bell |
Ferry Corsten
Right of Way (3 stars)
A club DJ can make one of three albums: he can make a mix disc; he can collaborate with a number of guest vocalists and musicians; or he can write, play and sing his own compositions. The third option, the road much, much less traveled, has seen its share of funky, melodic successes (Sasha's Airdrawndagger comes to mind) and thudding, overproduced failures (as much as I like his singles, Paul van Dyk can't sustain an entire album).
Trance superstar Ferry Corsten takes the third road, and while he's unlikely to catch up with Sasha, he makes good time with Right of Way. Having remixed everyone from U2 to William Orbit, Corsten knows a few things about making his beats stickier with good melodies. The best tracks here, the dreamy "Kyoto" and "In My Dreams," the atavistic "Punk" and "Rock Your Body Rock," sound like they were grown in a lab. Which they were. Anyone who's really listened to one of Corsten's remixes will instantly recognize the way he subtly builds a melody, then blows it out full-bore at the track's halfway point.
That said, there's no getting around the fact that he's perfected the formula. The way the one-fingered melody of "Rock Your Body Rock" moves to the foreground is absolutely brilliant. It's like a surprise party: You're so gratified, you really don't mind that he's pulled one over on you.
Geoff Carter
David Byrne
Grown Backwards (3 stars)
If for no other reason, you should get a hold of David Byrne's Grown Backwards for "Au Fond du Temple Saint," his duet with Rufus Wainwright. The song has an unusual pedigree, it was penned by Georges Bizet for his opera The Pearl Fishers, but Byrne handles the vocal as earnestly as he does any Talking Heads song, raising his voice into that perfect, somewhat goofy yodel of his while Wainwright does his arty deadpan.
"Au Fond" is soulful, refined, earnest and nearly perfect. Bizet would have loved it, perhaps enough to have joined Byrne's eclectic group of collaborators, a group which has grown these past few years to include members of Belle & Sebastian, Morcheeba and Devo. Few musicians have quite the thirst for learning that Byrne does, and he throws every last bit of that education back into his records. That means the records sound better and better, but don't necessarily move your body the way "Once in a Lifetime" did.
What I'm saying is that while Grown Backwards is an enjoyable record, full of bright, poppy songs, "Pirates" and "Empire" foremost among them, it's almost too refined. Byrne could stand to dismiss the string section for one album and chunk out some of his own naïve melodies, the kind of thrumming geek chic that drew all those collaborators to him in the first place.
However, if it's not to be, that's fine, too. His next record will be as well-crafted and thought-out as this one, and I'll give it three stars, also.
Geoff Carter