Word: riffs
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...explained why lame, largely tuneless indie-rock that lacks anything resembling a halfway decent voice, riff or attitude should be allowed to exist beyond a debut album. The mystery is thickened when an elite set of rock critics lionize the banal incomprehensibility as if it held the secret of life, the universe and everything that only the enlightened, fortunate few can understand. Elf Power will gratify those who believe that only mindless plebs think that music is made for listening and enjoyment...
...sense of spooky drama and effortless beauty, without the prima donna histrionics that accompany many falsetto rock divas. Not one to ride on other’s coattails, Gottesman is soon on the move, via a couple of slightly sticky ballads, to an almost self-consciously Zeppelin-esque riff on “Survive.” This brings the element of hope back into the album, as Gottesman sings with his chorused self, “Got a new life to survive, survive / Here I am / Breathing and alive.” The bouncy...
...slips from quoting a standard hymn--"Just as I am, without one plea/but that Thy blood was shed for me"--almost straight into hip-hop: "Transform me/Translate me/I release you to rearrange me/Are you willing to be changed?" He does this without warning or acknowledgement. (If you miss one riff, don't worry, there will be another one along in moments.) And however leisurely Jakes' presentation may seem, each sermon eventually reveals itself as perfectly calibrated and balanced, cohering into an often exquisite extended metaphor...
...Goes Down sounds like any bad hard-core-rock ballad. The lyrics are cheesy high school poetry: "Will our 'twained lives split asunder?/ Will our love submerge and drown?" The vocals are often mumbled and atonal. And the instrumentals have all the professionalism of a Wayne's World guitar riff. But it's not every love song that features verses in which a man assures his beloved that "the color of our skin" will become "our uniform of war"--or every rock group whose name is short for Racial Holy...
Truck Volume, a track for The Wash, began with a Dre beat and an eerie keyboard riff played on an old Vox V-305 organ. ("I was watching VH1--The Doors: Behind the Music," he says, by way of explanation.) Dre then added layers of strings. Everyone from Eminem to Madonna has been known to beg Dre for tracks, but the Doctor decides who gets his music based entirely on feel. Truck Volume, with its exaggerated haunted-house vibe, seemed like a good fit for the exuberantly hoarse rapper Busta Rhymes. "Busta just sounds crazy to me," Dre says...