The Roots. "How I Got Over." Def Jam.
Any hip-hop act but the Roots would be bragging about camera time on "How I Got Over," their first studio album since becoming the supremely flexible house band for "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon." Reaching a nationwide television audience every weeknight, the Roots may be the most widely seen hip-hop group ever. But there's no TV-star smugness on the Roots' ninth studio album, "How I Got Over." Instead, the group's first album since starting the "Late Night" job is a serious deliberation on perseverance: a message for an era of recession. "Some feeling a pinch, some feeling a bite/They ain't ready to talk, they all ready to fight," goes the chorus of "Radio Daze."
"How I Got Over" is named after a gospel standard - a Clara Ward song made famous by Mahalia Jackson - and there's a streak of the church in the Roots' new songs. Many of them ride piano chords, talk about God and prayer and call on listeners to keep struggling, as the album sequence moves from solitary desperation ("Walk Alone") to determination ("Now or Never").
But the optimistic certainties of gospel are rare. Most songs are in stark minor keys, and hope is never guaranteed. The first single, "Dear God 2.0," spins off the Monsters of Folk song "Dear God (Sincerely M.O.F.)," in which Jim James (from My Morning Jacket) sings, "Sometimes it's so hard to believe"; Black Thought, the Roots' rapper, adds grim details. The album's title track is not the Ward song, but advice on ghetto survival.
"How I Got Over" ignores hip-hop's fantasies of fame, lust and strip-club VIP rooms. "You came to celebrate/I came to cerebrate," Black Thought declares in "The Fire." The music also spurns current programmed beats and Auto-Tuned choruses (until the final track, "Hustla"). The Roots prefer Ahmir (Questlove) Thompson's sinewy boom-bap drumming, voices that sound human and vintage-style soul vamps played by the band itself (though there are samples, too).
Black Thought and guests, including Phonte (from Little Brother), Peedi Peedi, STS (Sugar Tongue Slim) and Dice Raw, rarely use their rhymes for autobiographical minutiae. Self-promotion isn't their priority. Even in its boasts, "How I Got Over" is selfless: an album of doubts, parables and pep talks.
- Jon Pareles, c.2010 New York Times News Service
Travie McCoy. "Lazarus." Decaydance/Fueled by Ramen.
Travie McCoy would have you think everything's cheery on "Lazarus," his first solo album. McCoy, the Gym Class Heroes frontman, is an elastic, jokey-sounding rapper with an ear for bright melodies and optimistic, buoyant rock.
But on almost every song here something sinister lies underneath. "Dr. Feel Good" opens the album with swooning disco-rock and characteristically joyous guest vocals by Cee-Lo, but throughout McCoy is fighting off addiction, romantic or otherwise: "No, no, don't let her in/ 'cause every time I do I end up upset again/ And then it's back to the waiting room."
On "Akidagain" he enlists a children's choir to remake the chorus from the Los Angeles rapper Ahmad's wistful 1994 mini-hit, "Back in the Day," but undercuts its sweetness with weary stories of life on the road: "I can feel my skin wearing thinner/ Fourth night, no appetite for dinner."
Even "Billionaire," a slight, reggae-influenced number that reached the Top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100, has a moody underbelly. The rising singer-songwriter-producer Bruno Mars sings a stirring hook, but McCoy, in between cataloging the benevolent acts he would undertake if he were rich, slips in a quick potshot: "It's been a couple months that I been single, so/ You can call me Travie Claus, minus the ho-ho."
Last year McCoy split from his longtime girlfriend, the pop star Katy Perry; he's talked in interviews about releasing a mixtape called "Forgetting Katy Perry" (after the movie "Forgetting Sarah Marshall," which starred Perry's fiance, Russell Brand).
Certainly, there's heartbreak pulsing underneath "Don't Pretend," which closes the album. Here he raps as if he's catching his breath between fits of tears: "I guess that's what friends are for/ and I've come to the conclusion that you're/ nothing but a .... " But then he catches himself and goes for the wink, skipping the obvious rhyme in favor of a more reasoned conclusion: "very selfish person."
- Jon Caramanica, c.2010 New York Times News Service
Jason Moran. "Ten." Blue Note.
Jason Moran's new album lands with an accumulated weight, both intrinsic and external. The external part has to do with his stature as a jazz pianist of rare institutional approval: a recipient of commissions and fellowships, a collaborator of choreographers and visual artists, a mixed-media conceptualist. The intrinsic part has to do with the decade-long experience of his trio, the Bandwagon, and his attendant growth as a bandleader.
The intrinsic part is what matters. It's what nudges "Ten" toward a spirit of greatness. This is a product of sturdy intelligence and untroubled confidence driven by the inseparable commitment of Moran and his fellow Bandwagoneers, the drummer Nasheet Waits and the bassist Tarus Mateen. Their rapport, distinctive from the start, now suggests a model of lithe collectivism. Moran's piano forms the core of the group, but its sound is inconceivable without the thumbprints of Mateen, with his nimble, nubby bass guitar style, and Waits, with his earthy mutable approach to rhythm.
And the songs on "Ten," the covers especially, have been fixtures of the trio's repertory long enough to be fully metabolized. There is a smartly reinvented player-piano piece by Conlon Nancarrow ("Study No. 6," in two versions) and songs by the jazz pianists Jaki Byard ("To Bob Vatel of Paris"), Thelonious Monk ("Crepuscule With Nellie") and Andrew Hill ("Play to Live," written with Moran). "Nobody," a hidden track, was the theme for Bert Williams, the minstrel star. "Big Stuff," a bluesy stroll, was composed by Leonard Bernstein for the Jerome Robbins ballet "Fancy Free" and recorded by Billie Holiday.
Moran has a ballet theme of his own here: "Pas de Deux - Lines Ballet," a sternly gleaming ballad for solo piano. He also has pieces commissioned by an art museum and a jazz festival, and one conceived as the soundtrack to a documentary film. Each feels shaped by the practices of the trio rather than imposed from the outside, with a style governed by the full sweep of jazz tradition, and by hip-hop, blues and gospel besides.
In that sense, "Gangsterism Over 10 Years," which appears near the album's midpoint, may be its most appropriate talisman. Since the start of his solo career, Moran has been reworking this "Gangsterism" theme on each successive album, coming up with new idiomatic angles while staying true to the thing. Each version is a status report, but this one, with its retrospective title, doubles as a statement of principle.
- Nate Chinen, c.2010 New York Times News Service
Nina Nastasia. "Outlaster." Fatcat.
Nina Nastasia is a singer-songwriter dedicated to the subjects of love and dread, slightly primitivist and distantly inspired by pre-industrial European ballad traditions. Such types abound, but her records give you more than that. They're performances, and they're ultrasuspenseful.
The point of a Nina Nastasia record - this is her sixth - is that there's something threatening right over your shoulder: a sudden dynamic shift, a wail out of a whisper, drumming that trickles into a violent clatter. Her signature sound, beyond her clear, unaffected voice, is the worry in the air around the notes.
She's made her past records with small bands or with only the drummer Jim White; the musicians, as well as the recording engineer, Steve Albini, leave space in the arrangements and the sound on her albums. Here, on "Outlaster," she's got a rhythm section and a small orchestra of strings and woodwinds, arranged by Paul Bryan. At best, in "Holy Man," "You Can Take Your Time" and the title track, her simple, monochrome songs, with repetitive threads of acoustic guitar, are plumped out and colorized; instead of making over the entire thing, Bryan applies the arrangements selectively, to discrete bits of the songs, which heightens the creepiness.
Nastasia keeps a tight control over her gloom, and that's what makes her whole project work: the modesty in the baleful lyrics invites you to guess at their meanings. But Bryan's job is to raise more goose bumps, and here and there the balance gets lost. In "This Familiar Way" Nastasia goes a little ill-advisedly into tango; the music gets romantically overwrought, with weeping strings. It doesn't seem like her mood.
She won't back down from darkness. Even when she sings to make someone happy - as in the consolation she offers to a friend in "You Can Take Your Time" - she sprinkles vinegar on the advice: "Take your time to work things out/ It'll be all right; just don't screw up."
- Ben Ratliff, c.2010 New York Times News Service