Inside Music Album Guide - 10/23/08

Inside Music Album Guide
Jenny Lewis’s tongue is sharp, Anberlin are emo… still
By Stephen Mason

Jenny Lewis – Acid Tongue (Warner Bros.) 4.5 out of 5
Taking a break from her main group, Rilo Kiley, Jenny Lewis has decided to take a rootsier route with Acid Tongue, an album full of folk, southern rock, and even alternative country. It’s a strange transition for sure, but Lewis’s second studio album may be better than anything she’s done with Rilo Kiley. After the epic nine-minute “New Messiah,” a series of amazing moments happen. The rollicking “See Fernando” and “Jack Killed Mom,” the piano ballad “Godspeed” topped with upper-register vocals, and the album’s title track, a simple acoustic song that someone like Neil Young will have wished he wrote. Acid Tongue is an amazing statement by one of rock’s more underrated female stars.

The Streets – Everything is Borrowed (679) 2.5 out of 5
Apart from the interesting synthesizer progression on the opening number, Everything is Borrowed finds the Streets – an alternative hip-hop artist named Mike Skinner from Britain – saying things that have been said better. It’s obvious he doesn’t care too much for right-wing politics or religion, but even his bigger statements (“The Way of the Dodo”) only create cringes. Skinner’s heavy accent distracts from his messages, especially when he decides to sing. It’s not a travesty, but it’s certainly nothing bold as he might want us to think.

Keane – Perfect Symmetry (Island) 3 out of 5
Groups like the Killers brought new wave “back,” and groups like OK Go made dorkiness cool. Keane is somewhere in between, as they’ve fully adopted the cheesy sounds of the 80’s and are trying to embrace being quirky, but still take themselves too seriously. It was passable with songs like “Somewhere Only We Know,” but when you create an album driven by synths, trying to appear noteworthy is difficult. The energy that Keane has works for a short while, as “Spiralling” and “The Lovers are Losing” start things off in style. But that level of energy is hard to obtain and hard to keep going without seeming drab, and Keane can’t quite pull it off. If they aren’t onto anything altogether groundbreaking, they’re at least entertaining… for a few moments, at least.

Anberlin – New Surrender (Universal) 2 out of 5
Emo is a fad. I wish I could have written “was”. Even bands like Fall Out Boy have begun to back into more pop and punk influences (as heard on Infinity On High). Anberlin, however, stand strong – in the sense that they haven’t changed their sound. If they could get any louder, they did. If they could get any faster, they did. If they could get more annoying… well, they did that, too. New Surrender is a by-the-numbers emo album chockfull of three-to-four minute tunes that never amount to anything more than they’ve already done. Experimentation into the unknown isn’t necessary to progress as a band, it can be done in subtle ways. Cranking the amps to “11” isn’t one of them.