no doubt - return of saturn
i'd love no doubt if they could just stop pretending to be a "ska" band, and just do what they do best: play gwen stefani's openly transparent songs that act as a scope into her life. that's what worked best on tragic kingdom, and that's what works best here as well. "simple kind of life", "artificial sweetner", and "too late" are the best examples that will outlast their radio play. my next project will be to burn half the tracks from each disc into one great one.
jets to brazil - four cornered night
although i was glad to receive a pre-release copy of this disc from jade tree ( i actually got to enter this disc into the cddb! ) , um, can i send it back? as where orange rhyming dictionary was a masterpiece, night lacks all the feeling, inventiveness, and confusion that made ord great. this disc makes me want to go watch golf. what a letdown.
unified theory - unified theory
speaking of pearl jam drummers...ever wonder what original pj drummer, dave krusen, responsible for the hard-hitting sounds found on ten and then ousted for a reportedly bad drinking problem, is doing these days? the answer is tooling around with the nucleus of blind melon on this amazing disc, which has managed to be released with little to no publicity. blind melon was probably one of the most underrated guitar bands of the late 90's, due to heavy mtv play of one of their worst tracks, "no rain" and that annoying girl in the bumble-bee outfit, and heroin death of lead singer shannon hoon was largely a footnote in the shadow of kurt cobain's suicide. well, melon guitarist and bassist chris thorn and brad smith respectively carry on to form unified theory with krusen and vocalist chris shinn, who coincidentally does not sound that different than hoon. whatever works though, and unified theory does work in a big way. the result is a disc that will appeal less to the phish/dead crossover and more to the post-grunge crossover we like to see here.
pearl jam - binaural
well...back to the short-take format, let me say it short. binaural is good, but not great. although pj has finally replaced the drumming chops of jack irons (imo, their worst drummer) with matt cameron of soundgarden, binaural for some reason doesn't rock quite as hard as it should. some standout tracks do exist such as "light years" and "of the girl" - but filled like tracks like "evacuation" stuffed in between. i've given it time, and although every pj disc took time to grow on me, this one hasn't found the place that no code has in my collection...yet.
