BRMC’s new tunes are emotional but too familiar. (Akpanudosen/Getty Images)
Albums of the Week
JUSTIN TIMBERLAKE
“The 20/20 Experience”
★★★
THE return of Justin Timberlake in pop-star form has been nearly seven years in the making, but the result is so meticulous and expansive, you can almost understand why it took so long. His third album is a slick love letter to all things groovy and encompasses lush blue-eyed soul (“Pusher Love Girl,” “Strawberry Bubblegum”), brassy R&B (“That Girl”) and even Latin-flavored funk (“Let the Groove Get In”).
Timberlake’s lusty mindset sends the lyrical side of the album into cornball territory on occasion, but that shortcoming is generally overshadowed by his immense musical ambitions. With a second part of “The 20/20 Experience” strongly rumored to be arriving later in the year, it seems like Pop Star Justin might stay awhile. It’d be great to have him around.
Click here for a track-by-track review.
BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB
“Specter at the Feast”
★★
YOU only need to look at the title of BRMC’s sixth album to see that they are in mourning. Three years ago, the father of lead singer Robert Been (and the band’s sound engineer) died backstage at a show, and his ghost haunts some of the San Francisco trio’s new songs. Been’s naked emoting through the funeral drones of “Returning” is almost unbearably poignant, while the delicate “Lullaby” is also heavy with a devastatingly beautiful sorrow.
But the album is dragged down by BRMC’s tendency to resort to the standardized fuzz-rock they’ve long purveyed. A tune like “Teenage Disease,” for example, has plenty of snarl but is ultimately a minimal variation on an over-familiar theme.
At it’s best, though, “Specter at the Feast” is a striking testament to the power of grief.
Downloads of the Week
BEYONCÉ
“Bow Down/I Been On”
★
WE get it, Bey. You don’t want to be known as a goody-goody peddler of Top 40-ready R&B anymore. Fine. But trying to reinvent yourself as a roughneck from the streets of Houston by rapping badly over tinny hip-hop beats and 8-bit Nintendo samples is not a good idea.
We still love you, so let’s make a deal: Leave this off your new album, and we’ll pretend like it never happened.
MARNIE STERN
“Year of the Glad”
★★★
FOR having the audacity to call her new album “The Chronicles of Marnia,” New York guitar heroine Marnie Stern deserves kudos. For forcing together absurd time changes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style riffs and what sound like monkey impressions into the album’s bizarrely brilliant opener, Stern deserves nothing but adoration.
LOW
“On My Own”
★★★
EVEN after two decades of gorgeous indie gloom, Low’s melancholy remains firmly in place on the new album “The Invisible Way” — and it’s a damn good thing, too. The marriage (both actual and musical) of principal members Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker is especially strong on this track, which swells dynamically into the album’s one true rock moment.
THE LONDON SUEDE
“It Starts and Ends With You”
★★★
BEFORE Blur and Oasis battled the Britpop wars in the mid-’90s, TLS were the indie kings of the UK, and they’ve returned to reclaim the crown with the excellent new album “Bloodsports,” their first in more than a decade. This single finds them strutting like a band revitalized, while singer Brett Anderson belts out the kind of monumental chorus he once churned out so effortlessly.