2013 VMAs: As They Happened

By Kara Tucker

Tonight’s MTV Video Music Awards in live blog form.
9:00 p.m. – Is Lady Gaga the Eggman? Goo goo ga joob.
9:03 p.m. – Gaga is clearly premiering her Vegas act. Multiple costume changes on stage..well…a jacket on and off and a variety of bad wigs.
9:04 p.m. – On to the clam shell bikini. Her homage to Botticelli or perhaps Ed’s Clam Shack on Route 52.
9:05 p.m. – That was…underwhelming
9:06 p.m. – Did that guy from One Direction just say, “Whatsup, Brooklyn?”..he did it again. Please don’t say “homies in the hizzouse.”
9:08 p.m. – Selena Gomez wins “Best Pop Video.” Bruno Mars more surprised than Taylor Swift.
9:17 p.m. – Miley Cyrus, apparently appropriating Japanese TV Commercial culture now.
9:18 p.m. – Drake bobbing along to the beat…of a Miley song.
9:18 p.m. – “We Can’t Stop." Is the song subtitled "(Dancing With Furries)"?
9:19 p.m. – One Direction is unimpressed.
9:20 p.m. – Robin Thicke here to do his creepy hit song…with Miley Cyrus.
9:20 p.m. – Miley shaking her butt next to Thicke’s crotch and doing masturbatory moves with a foam No. 1 finger. Robin Thicke is 36 years old. Miley Cyrus is 20.
9:22 pm. – Is this a high school production with these props? Seriously cheap.
9:23 p.m. – Robin Thicke forgot his straw hat to go with that striped outfit.
9:24 p.m. – Song medley is over…ending opportunity for Miley Cyrus to embarrass herself further. Seriously, she was doing something cringeworthy whenever the camera showed her again.
9:27 p.m. – Drinking game…every time Macklemore says “homies,” do a shot.
9:27 p.m. – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, clearly glad not to be part of that hallucinogenic medley that preceded the presentation for the Best Hip Hop Video award.
9:28 p.m. – Announcement: “Kanye West will be onstage next.”…at least he’s supposed to be this time.
9:36 p.m. – Did Kevin Hart basically do a joke implying Robin Thicke would kidnap a child? Ugh.
9:37 pm. – Jared Leto onstage. Evidently Anthony Kiedis had a garage sale.
9:38 p.m – Kanye West performing the worst song on his new album, the execrable “Blood on the Leaves.”
9:39 p.m. – Please, God. Let his Autotune break down so we have to hear his real voice.
9:40 p.m. – He’s doubling down on the imagery from the “Strange Fruit” sample with the trees. Kanye, your troubles with women (apparently all of them are money-grubbing groupies according to this song) have nothing to do with lynching.
9:41 p.m. – Stop it, Mr. West. For the love of God.
9:41 p.m. – Miley Cyrus came across more dignified than Kanye West did. Okay, no she didn’t. But the fact that Kanye’s even in that ballpark speaks volumes.
9:48 p.m. – Nile Rodgers!  Awesomeness.
9:48 p.m. -- Pharrell, mentioning who Rodgers has worked with but not mentioning Chic? * Cue shaking of head *
9:48 p.m. – The two gentlemen from Daft Punk not speaking. If only Kanye West did the same.
9:49 p.m. – Random thought..that could be anyone inside those Daft Punk masks.
9:50 p.m. – Best female video to Taylor Swift. Somebody clothesline Kanye if he approaches the stage.
9:51 p.m. – Best video with a social message..what? Miley’s twerking video not nominated? Ohh…
9:51 p.m. – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis win for “Same Love.” Good.
9:52 p.m. – Did Gaga just high-five Will Smith?
9:56 p.m. – Commercial break. It just occurred to me that none of the people Kendrick Lamar called out in that verse performed onstage with the Miley Cyrus Furrypalooza.
10:00 p.m. – Justin Timberlake is the “President of Pop” now? Umm…
10:01 p.m. – Timberlake performing as the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard award winner, per-recorded segment of him in the Barclay’s Center. Lip sync-tastic!
10:02 p.m. – What happened to the sound feed on this medley? Sounds like a radio station not tuned in correctly.
10:04 p.m. – Seriously, someone needs to fix this. It sounds unlistenable.
10:04 p.m. – A shame because this would be halfway entertaining if the sound worked.
10:05 p.m. – A Super Bowl Halftime Show has broken out onstage at the Barclays Center.
10:10 pm. – Apparently JT is doing a snippet of every song he ever recorded.
10:10 p.m. – Worst-kept secret of the weekend. Onstage reunion of N*Sync. What a shock. Sound still not fixed.
10:11 p.m. – You can tell the audience is into it. Even one of the One Direction members managed to not look bored.
10:12 p.m. – Reunion over. Timberlake leaves his former bandmates behind. Literally.
10:13 p.m. – “Suit and Tie” or, perhaps more accurately, “I’m The Star Now, Guys.”
10:16 p.m. – The Distorted Timberlake Medley is finally over. Seriously. Who butchered the sound on that?
10:18 p.m. – “N*Sync. What was that?” About two minutes of screen time, Mr. Fallon, if we're being generous.
10:18 p.m. – If Lance Bass and JC Chasez had been under those Daft Punk masks, they’d have doubled their onscreen time.
10:26 p.m. – Kevin Hart back on, playing catch-up in an effort to get more screen time than Timberlake and as many laughs as Kanye.
10:28 p.m. – “Song of the Summer” nominees. Should be Daft Punk. It won’t be.
10:30 p.m. – Of course, it’s One Direction. They win one for the Shipper.
10:32 p.m. – “Hating someone for their sexual orientation is the same as hating someone for the color of their skin”..good sentiment. Incomplete sentiment, but it’s a start.
10:33 p.m. – Macklemore and Ryan Lewis performing “Same Love.” Cue predictable outrage from the usual cast of characters on the Far Right.
10:34 p.m. – “Have you read the YouTube comments lately?” Not if I can help it.
10:37 p.m. – It IS a little easier to avoid crying on Sunday when you have a Moon Man.
10:38 pm. – “To learn more about marriage equality…”graphic on the screen. Times have changed.
10:42 p.m. – Adam Lambert, sadly only a presenter this year. Emili Sande for that matter.
10:43 p.m. – Austin Mahone, a pop flavor of the month. wins Best New Artist.
10:44 p.m. – God gets His first shoutout of the night.
10:45 p.m. -- If you did a shot any time a white person said “Homies” tonight, you’d be dead of alcohol poisoning.
10:46 p.m. – Drake’s turn to perform…getting videobombed by some dude in a backwards adjustable baseball cap and shades. Again, an adjustable cap.
10:50 p.m. – Seeing the house DJ at the VMAs answers the question of “What happened to Robin Thicke’s straw hat?”
10:50 p.m. – Amazingly, this is the first time most of these videos have appeared on MTV when it wasn’t third shift hours.
10:55 p.m. – Time for the Best Male Video. Bruno Mars and his hat win.
11:03 p.m. – Mars (and hat) back onstage to perform his new song. And it has an actual hook. Not sure about the lyric on it, though.
11:06 p.m. – A planetarium laser show has broken out at the Barclays Center.
11:15 p.m. – Video of the Year goes to Justin Timberlake for “Mirrors.”  Thank goodness it wasn’t “Blurred Lines.”
11:15 p.m. – Timberlake has switched to what looks like a bowling shirt.
11:17 p.m. – Timberlake dedicates the award to his grandparents, a genuinely sweet moment.
11:18 p.m. – Katy Perry at the Brooklyn Bridge performing “Roar” doing the boxing theme.
11:19 p.m. – I can’t really begrudge this one. The song has a pretty strong hook. I would have been shocked if it hadn’t been a big hit.
11:21 p.m. – Jumping rope? Mmmmkay. Waiting for "Mama Said Knock You Out" to break out.
11:21 p.m. – Singing from the turnbuckle now before bringing the hook back for the rest of the song.
11:24 p.m. – As the show rebroadcast starts, all in all, no huge surprises. A lot of live “performing”, but not as much singing. Lady Gaga seemed conventional. Miley Cyrus was a trainwreck creating buzz for the wrong reasons. Kanye screamed his way through an autotuned monstrosity of a song that is the worst on the worst-selling album of his career. Timberlake’s performance took over 15 minutes and seemed twice that long because of horrendous sound that was never fixed. The N*Sync “reunion” lasted all of two minutes and wasn’t worth two seconds of pre-show hype for that short of an appearance.
Given how much time the network gives over to shows like “Teen Mom,” it felt like a music show designed by people who hate music – a cynical “let’s put out whatever” affair that offered a few decent performances, but almost no inspiration.

First Listen: Franz Ferdinand, Nine Inch Nails

By Kara Tucker and Deborah Sprague

Franz Ferdinand: Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Action
DEB: When Franz Ferdinand slipped off the radar a few years ago, fans were left wondering what the heck was keeping them out of the fray – was it something pedestrian, like garden variety artistic differences, or a more intriguing predicament….say, Alex Kapranos battling chronic gout due to that restaurant critic moonlighting gig?

The emergence of Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Actions doesn’t answer that question, but it does deliver the same sort of synaptic jolt the quartet seemed capable of mustering up in their sleep around the time they threw down the gauntlet with “Take Me Out.” Just in the nick of time, too – the band’s unlikely blend of urbanity and hyper-activity is sorely needed in these days of faux-hick folksiness and geekily ironic twerk-fests.

The sleek-yet-sweaty tone is set within the first few bars of the de-facto title track, “Right Action,” which lopes along like some sort of bastard grandson of vintage Duran Duran and “Heart of Glass”-era Blondie – propelled by an irresistible bassline and Kapranos’ arch tones (which he wraps around such teasing lines as “come home, practically all is nearly forgiven”). It’s playful, but not altogether jolly, his smile framed by a slightly menacing wisp of Gauloises smoke.

“Evil Eye” ratchets up the rhythmic intensity and the verbal paranoia a level or two, conjuring a mood reminiscent of the Clash’s dancefloor endeavors circa Sandinista –without the unconvincing hip-hop veneer. That vibe, airy without being breezy, has long been a FF trademark, and they capture it more effectively here than on the disappointing You Could Have It So Much Better.

While the band uses a lot of primary colors here, concentrating on stark landscapes without too much detail, there are some bracing dayglo interludes as well – notably “Love Illumination,” which tosses simple, angular solos (both guitar and keyboard) into the mix, adding a spoonful of sugar in the form of lovely swinging sixties backing vocals.

Right Thoughts, Right Words, Right Actions isn’t without its missteps – “Stand on the Horizon” aims for a languid ripeness but ends up collapsing under a leaden lattice of synths. “Fresh Strawberries” falls similarly short in its Kinks-wannabe jauntiness, a hollow sort of exercise that’s all too fitting for Kapranos’  blasé assertion that “I believe there’s nothing too believe.”

But that snide mindset doesn’t last long. The spaghetti-surf  “Treason! Animals” – which could pass muster on one of those lost-gem garage collections, if not for Kapranos’ affably cool croon – ranks among their grooviest offerings, while the closing “Goodbye, Lovers and Friends” pokes the listener with lines like “I hate pop music…I hate bright colors,” all the while presenting both, deftly wrapped in a tantalizingly tasty shell and shimmering sexily in a way that would make Bryan Ferry smile.

KARA: Scotland’s Franz Ferdinand is perhaps testing to see just how short attention spans can be in the world of 24-hour news cycles and 140-character bursts of response.
There was a four-year wait between their second album – “You Could Have It So Much Better” and 2009’s “Tonight.”
Now comes the Glaswegian’s fourth album after another four year wait.

Franz Ferdinand’s breakout hit  – “Take Me Out” – off their self titled debut was a song full of hooks that also set the template for much of its approach. They specialized in angular post-punk you could dance to with hints of the UK pop of their forebears. Start the album, bop your head, shake your booty, maybe even a little air guitar to the occasional riff, done.
“Right Thoughts..” is not really a deviation from the bands formula for better and worse. When the songs click, catchy smart fun ensues – the kind to get you moving. When it doesn’t, the seams show.
Luckily, Franz Ferdinand has a pretty solid ratio of hits to misses.

“Right Action” starts the album off with an intro ready-made for handclaps and the album title being sung twice in the first 45 seconds. The lead single, it should fit nicely on a future best-of compilation for the band.
“Evil Eye” follows with a funkier feel. Alex Kapranos asks, “What’s the color of the next car?” and the backing voices answer “Red, ya bastard” and the song is off-and-going headfirst into ‘80s Land. The pull it off without feeling dated (no overly boomed up drums here).

Indeed, there’s a bit of spot the influence one can easily play with “Right Thoughts..” – “Oh hey! There’s a Bowie-esque croon! Oh, there’s a little New Order-style guitar!”
But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand manage to keep things from sounding too derivative, in part because they keep things moving briskly enough and in well-crafted fashion as to not sound like copycats.

“Stand on the Horizon” goes from a quiet ballad start (a relief in pace) before going into more familiar territory with that croon, even if it could use a touch more swoon.
Not every song works. “Fresh Strawberries” has the promising line of “Soon we will be rotten, We will all be forgotten, Half-remembered rumors of the old”, but the darker, gothy feel is lost with a sunny-sounded chorus. It’s a graft that doesn’t take.

“Brief Encounters” opens with a track that could be used to the theme for some basic cable show about space in the ‘80s before going into almost reggae-inflected Britpop. Again, the seams show.
On the other hand, the insistently catchy “Bullet” is about as subtle as its chorus implies. They WILL hammer this song into your brain, but it works in spite of its obviousness.

The final song on the album might just be the best, as it combines craft with refreshingly pulling back a touch. There’s a more subtle chorus to go with the reverbed vocals on the percussion-driven verses. It’s enough to make you wish for more subtlety elsewhere on the album.
At the end, Kapanos sings, “So sad to leave you. When they lie and say this not the end, you can laugh as if we’re still together/But this really is the end.”

It could be a break-up with a lover song or it could be a song about the period where the band was facing breakup rumors a couple years ago. Or it could just be more irony piled into a song where he croons about how he hates pop music.
It’s for the best that it’s not a song about FF’s current state of internal affairs. “Right Words…” isn’t quite a return to form as much as it is a simple return. A welcome return it is with pop featuring Brofolkian mandolin circles, teen pop with hip-hop-for-hire bolted on and, well, a certain celebrity offspring’s creepfest.
For its occasional faults, “Right Words…” is another solid effort.
Consider your head bobbed, your booty shaken and your air guitar strummed.
 
Song – Nine Inch Nails: Everything
“
Hesitation Marks”, Trent Reznor’s first album under the NIN name since 2008, will be released Sept. 2.
Three songs have been put out so far. “Came Back Haunted” is a mixture of synths a plenty, a chantable title in the chorus. The song’s over halfway through before the guitars kick in. It was a solid initial shot.
Copy A is somewhat of a grower with its paranoid feel, even if it isn’t prime NIN and sticks more to the light dance side of things.

Now comes…Everything. And, um, it’s, um, different.
It’s Trent Reznor goes pop. Seriously, the verses musically sounds like something someone would write for Katy Perry and the pitch altering on Reznor’s vocals becomes distracting.
Even when the distortion kicks in on the chorus, it doesn’t last, as guitars off a Cure record and layered harmonies appear.
Then distortion, then the “Hey, Think Katy Perry Would Like This?” verse again and then the Cure guitars and it’s all just disorienting.
Of course, odds were that Reznor wasn’t going to write the same way in his 40s that he did in his 20s. And maybe “Everything”, with its lyrics of trying to assure one’s self that things are good, fits better in context of the album.
Or maybe he’s just prepping us for a Slam Bamboo reunion.
But for now, we are left trying to absorb the fact that Trent Reznor has written a song you can do The Carlton to.

What Did Yeezus Do?

By Deborah Sprague and Kara Tucker

It’s been a few months since the self-promotional machine that is Kanye West began to emerge from a cocoon of secrecy.
He stood amidst a hype machine that included a performance of two new songs on the season finale of “Saturday Night Live” and a New York Times interview that amply displayed an ego so large and vast it could apply for statehood.
But while the ever-so-modest West was busy comparing himself to Steve Jobs, Henry Ford and Anna Wintour, among others) or backpedaling further from his fauxpology for crashing the stage to interrupt Taylor Swift’s acceptance at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards and turn himself into an “Imma Let You Finish” instant-meme punchline, there was the matter of one thing..the product.
West was looking to continue a run of five straight No. 1 albums (his debut, “College Dropout” peaked at No. 2). He’d come back from the artistically awkward “808’s and Heartbreak” (full of wretched Autotuned “singing” and a mostly bleak backdrop which still sold very well) with the more expansive “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” and semi-placeholder “Watch the Throne” (an album shared with Jay-Z and various other guest stars) that held up better as art while holding up commercially.
There was much secrecy  for a long time surrounding the album (which would be released with the potential eye-rolling title of “Yeezus”). There were reports claiming that West and producer Rick Rubin were still finalizing work on the album a week before its release.
Was the work worth it? Would West have another hit on his hands? Reviews tended to run heavily in the positive camp.
The album leaked four days prior to its release, but the album still debuted at No. 1 with solid numbers for a hip-hop release, although sales were less than projected. More ominous was the sharp drop (80 percent) in sales in the albums second week, the fourth-largest drop for an album to debut at No. 1 in the SoundScan era.
To date, the album has sold less than half of what its immediate processor. Was this a case where the majority of critics missed the boat or was this a case of a fickle fanbase not able to appreciate a quality effort.
First, let’s look at the album itself.

DEBORAH'S TAKE


Kanye West has never come across as bolder, louder or more aggressive than he does on Yeezus, the most in-your-face album of his career. But as the disc’s final notes resonate their last, it’s hard to escape the thought that the whole endeavor is merely, to borrow one of Shakespeare’s most enduring lines, a tale…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

Not that West is, as the skipped part of that quotation would put it, an idiot. Far from it. He’s sharp enough to orchestrate the press as dexterously as he does the samples that he’s woven together over the course of his career, brilliant at marketing and yes, an on-again, off-again master of that amorphous entity known as flow.

 Kanye’s problem, however, is that he’s really only capable of writing about one topic – Kanye. When he first came onto the scene, he was a middle-class kid with a chip on his shoulder about the same sorts of things most indie-rock middle class kids had chips on their shoulders about – all delivered while wearing the ugliest sweaters since Bill Cosby’s heyday.

These days, things are a lot better for West – in terms of bank account and fashion sense – but you wouldn’t know it by listening to Yeezus. To his credit, he’s taken his bitterness and poured it – like some sort of alternate-universe honey – over some of the most sustained sonic anger hip-hop has seen in years. While there’s nothing particularly new about an MC incorporating elements from the world of hard rock and metal, most have divined their inspiration from guitar tunes that cleave closely to the tenet that it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.

Yeezus ain’t got that swing. It’s got unrelenting thump, screech and discord, a mix that, at its best – the neo-horrorcore “I Am a God” and the hung-over sounding room-spinner “Guilt Trip” – leaves the listener roiled and flailing, without a center to hold onto. It’s a pretty impressive trick to pull off, the beckoning of the sound waves outweighing the sense of doom, luring the listener like a siren.

At times, West and his synth-slinging compatriots channel the spirit of confronto pioneers Suicide to the point that he seems almost willing to see Alan Vega and Martin Rev as co-equals in terms of musical divinity – a holy (smokes) trinity of sorts. That legitimate grittiness transcends studio boundaries, mixing the vibe of a Spanish Harlem street corner, a Crenshaw soul food joint and a tenement rooftop slaked with summer breezes, replacing ‘Ye’s usual constricted coldness with a genuine humanity that plays nicely off the minimal futurism of the backdrop.

But just when you think he can pull you in, West pushes you away violently – well, if you’re female, gay, Asian or (most ironically) wealthy. His misanthropy pokes through the surface of a half-dozen of the pieces here, sometimes in cartoonishly frat-boy fashion (the eye-roll worthy yellow-fever segment of “I’m In It”), but more often in a way that’s more infected than infectious.

When he gives in to his id, the old-enough-to-know better rapper allows himself the “luxury” of wading into a fetid pool of violent sexual imagery, where he wallows with meat-headed glee. His tin ear clangs especially atonally when the aforementioned “I’m In It” reaches its vortex, threatening to “put his fist in [a woman] like a civil rights sign” (a metaphor that no doubt has Malcolm X, not to mention West’s activist mom, spinning in the crypt).

 He hits similar bum notes with “New Slaves,” on which he seems to conflate his own addiction to luxury cars and trophy women to the problems facing actual addicts in the prison system – on which he can be found lingering acidly on the homophobic he-doth-protest-too-much aside “I’d rather be a dick than a swallower”

He saves his worst, however, for the best-constructed, most sonically gripping track on the disc. “Blood on the Leaves” uses the sparse, mournful tenor of the Billie Holiday popularized hymn “Strange Fruit” – a musing on lynching that painted a hellishly dark picture of “black bodies swinging in the southern breeze” – as a vessel to carry his First World grudges about alimony  (“Gold Digger” redux) and the unwillingness of “bitches” to let him put together a harem.

 Kanye’s musical radicalism is undeniable – and he’s to be commended for not merely pushing, but shredding the envelope on that front. But when you pare away the screaming synthesizers and pounding sequencers, the little man behind the curtain sounds suspiciously like a typical Tea Partier – all too ready to point fingers at those who are out to get him, and kick wildly at those on lower rungs of the ladder in order to make sure they stay in their place.

 In other words, Donald Trump, you may have a new golf buddy.

KARA'S TAKE
“Yeezus” is the latest and perhaps purest distillation of West, as the man can be thought-provoking and infuriating, capable of getting both reactions in the matter of consecutive lines.
The album is often hard and abrasive, recalling more spare electronic music and industrial alternative than anything else. Even at first listen, the challenge was apparent – where were the singles going to come from?
The answer to date is “nowhere.” The lead track, “Black Skinhead” only reached No. 69 on the Billboard chart and thus far, no second single.
“New Slaves” is a perfect example of the getting it right, then derailing it that pops up throughout the album.
It starts off as a critique of consumerism (which might strike some as rich given that West hasn’t exactly been a champion consumer restraint before, but I digress).
He finishes the first verse with “Used to only be niggas, now everybody playing/Spending everything on Alexander Wang/New Slaves.”
Could this be a new Kanye rethinking his..oh wait, there’s the hook line “You see there's leaders and there’s followers/But I'd rather be a dick than a swallower.”
Am I detecting a whiff of homophobia there? More than a whiff?
West makes an even stronger (and justified) statement going after the private prison complex, but instead of raging further at the unjust nature of that complex, he brags about taking the privateers’ women with the line – “I’ll fuck your Hampton spouse. Came on her Hampton blouse and in her Hampton mouth.”
Because, after all, what are women there for but Kanye’s sexual pleasure with a side order of revenge..and apparently derailing what he was trying to say about the prison system. And what better way to show he “ain’t a swallower” by coming in the mouth of some woman in the Hamptons? Yeezus is protesting way too much.
“Black Skinhead” is one of the album’s standout tracks, set to a tribal beat that you could almost drop the “Rock and Roll, Part Two” riff over. It’s full-on braggadocio with shots at racism. It’s a strong moment overall.
But Kanye can’t resist and undercuts later with “Blood on the Leaves,” a low point on the album.
It’s a bold move to start with a sample of Nina Simone’s version of “Strange Fruit,” one of the most heartbreaking songs ever written and one of the strongest about racism.
It’s a bad sign when West chooses to start his Autotuned mewling over Simone’s sample vocals. The effect is unwelcome, but once the words he’s tunelessly warbling sink in, it becomes like smearing the waste product of a hog operation over the most sublime meal.
It’s one of the strongest backing tracks on the album..but West opts to take a song and turn it into invective aimed at those evil women who are just after his money or wanting to crimp his or his buddies’ concubine-accumulating style.
Oh, and there’s the whole uneasy introduction of the woman telling her she loved him while under the influence of ecstasy, creating  blurred lines, if you will.
Even though he takes the drug with her in the next verse, it still comes off as extremely creepy and disturbing that he relies on the woman telling her she loved him when she was drugged up.
While a literal interpretation of the themes of “Strange Fruit” might have been obvious, the decision to use its sample to build a rant at groupies, twodels and gold diggers is a poor choice. Not as poor as Lil Wayne’s execrable “poppin’ pussy like Emmett Till” line from earlier in the year, but poor regardless.
“I Am a God” is another standout – claustrophobic, full of pounding (and not just from Kanye’s fists to his chest). It’s an arresting boast track, cut with a smidge of humor (most gods don’t whine for their croissants).
Then again, “I’m In It”, turns to the cringe-inducing side with its line about oral sex about Asian women that wouldn’t be out of place on THAT Day Above Ground song, not to mention the “put my fist through her like a civil rights sign” line that isn’t as clever or transgressive as West probably thinks it is.
Then there’s the part where he raps “Uh, you know I need that wet mouth/Uh, I know you need that reptile” in a single entendre, dexterity-free couplet that wouldn’t be out of place on an old AC/DC album (or a new AC/DC album, for that matter).
“Yeezus” is a fairly claustrophobic affair with its minimal sonics (reportedly a late-in-production decision by West), electronic and industrial noise and general aggro feel. It manages to be arresting much of the time, but the lyrical fumbles make the album feel less immersive than it should be and more like you’re being cornered at the bar by some guy talking about “all the bitches who’ve done me wrong” and about what a “badass” he is. It makes the album feel longer than its relatively short (for the modern CD era) 40-minute (and pretty much single-free) running time.
The ultimate frustration with West is that he seemingly lacks the self-awareness to truly wrestle with the darker demons of his nature or to edit what he’s trying to say. Rather than confront the challenges his ego presents, rather than look in the mirror at the misogyny, homophobia and other –isms he traffics in too easily, rather than look at anything in the world that doesn’t directly affect Kanye West -- he’s intent to lay it all spread out there and insist that it’s all “awesome truth and awesomeness - beauty, truth, awesomeness.”
No, no it isn’t. Some of it is ugly. Some of it is stagnation. By insisting that it’s all a strong statement, ultimately none of it is.
The “Yeezus” experience can leave one teeming with the frustration that West is so drunk on his sense of self-importance that he can’t always tell the difference between wheat and chaff or, more tellingly, that he doesn’t want to.
The result is that one is left being all too aware of West as one thing above all else – aggressive marketer of the Kanye brand.
A fair amount of the time, West gets out of his own way enough to produce product that succeeds as both product  and art anyway. This time, he couldn’t get out of the way and the result is an album that is frustratingly close to great, but so deeply flawed that it leaves one more exhausted than exhilarated. The album is one that not only is, at its best, easier to admire than enjoy, it is one that failed commercially to a degree that none of West’s albums have before. What could have been a career peak is, at the end of the day, an interesting misfire.

First Listen -- Neko Case, Travis, Lady Gaga

By Kara Tucker

Neko Case – “The Worse Things Get, The Harder I Fight, The Harder I Fight, The More I Love You”
The new album, Case’s sixth studio release plays like a greatest hits collection, both in its overall quality and in the way its tracks reflect various moments of her career.
The lead single, “Man” is a stunner, exploring gender politics (or perhaps even identity) over a propulsively hooky track that would have made for a killer contribution from her on any New Pornographers album. Oh, and  "I am the man in the fucking moon/ 'Cause you didn't know what a man was/Until I showed you” ranks as one of the better drop-the-mic-and-wipe-dust-off-the-shoulder lines.
“I’m From Nowhere” features Case’s gorgeously timeless voice in a reverb-soaked sound that recalls her earlier days, even if the song itself goes more into soulful classic pop than torch-and-twang.
“Local Girl” goes farther into classic girl group sound (bells, glockenspiel, etc.), tinged with twang.
“Bracing For Sunday”, a swaying mid-tempo number with horns wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place on 2009’s “Middle Cyclone” or, with a more spare arrangement, on her first couple albums.
“Nearly Midnight, Honolulu” goes spare, going a capella with a chorus of Case’s vocals multitracked.
The languid lovely “Calling Cards” would have fit nicely on “Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.”
Case trots out a wonderful cover of Nico’s “Afraid.” It shows that more spare instrumentation  suits her just as well as more elaborate. It’s as gorgeously beautiful as anything she’s recorded.
Things get a little less straightforward at the end of that album. “Where Did I Leave That Fire” evokes different moods in 3:27, including the line “I wanted so badly not to be me. I saw my shadow looking lost, checking its pockets, looking for some lost receipt.”
Ragtime starts off like it’s going to be a  subdued guitar pop track, but manages to be inspiring and cacophonous at the end (as the song picks up even if not in clichéd fashion), as Case repeats the last lyrics of the album -- "I am one and the same / I am useful and strange.”
For its varied styles, the album remains cohesive, tied together by that voice and by Case’s sharp songwriting, where she’s capable of loveliness and cutting sarcasm, accessibility tempered by enough artsy touches to keep things interesting.
Case hasn’t released a bum album in her career. With the always engaging and often excellent “The Worse Things Get…”, she might just have put together one that tops “Fox Confessor” as her best yet.

Travis – “Where You Stand”
It’s the first album in five years for the Scottish band who, at various times in its career, represented a more polite Oasis minus the coke or, more often, a less overtly anthemic Coldplay (the latter’s Chris Martin referred to Travis as “the band that invented my band and lots of others.”)
The second album from Fran Healy, Andy Dunlop, Dougie Payne and Neil Primrose, 1999’s “The Man Who” represented the career peak with some top-notch songcraft. They had some high spots in the intervening years, but sometimes seemed too settled, too comfortable in its niche.
“Where You Stand” shows that Travis still isn’t back to the peak of its early years, at least it’s starting to round back into form.
It has a better combination of energy and hooks than it’s had in a while, even if it doesn’t…quite…reach..the old spark.
“Mother” is a catchy enough beginning, avoiding the bombast of pop acts like fun. and, well, Coldplay.
The album deviates from its immediate predecessors, fittingly, in the little details – the whistling on the intro to “Reminder”, the combination of almost-Portishead intro to “These New Shoes” or the way the latter gets into a slinky (and here’s a word not often associated with Travis) groove.
“On My Wall” is one of the album’s highlights, as punchy as they’ve sounded and years and in service of a good tune to boot. “Warning Sign” gets the head bopping. “A Different Room” shimmers in the way that Travis excels at in its best moments.
The album can’t quite sustain its momentum to the finish as “The Big Screen” sort of lays there looking pretty without sinking in or soaring. The preceding “Boxes” would have made a better choice of album closer, even if it doesn’t kick much up must dust, either.
Even if Travis isn’t a band that screams “Wow Factor” or “rocking out,” it’s not a band without its charms. “Where You Stand” manages to be pleasant without (for the most part) being bland.
It’s not “The Man Who”, but it’s worth checking out. It’s enough to make fans of the band or even people who remember their salad days to say, in response to what Healy sings in the chorus to “Mother” – “Yes. Why DID you wait so long.”

Single: Lady Gaga – “Applause”
The first single of Gaga’s third full length album had its official video release Monday.
As one would expect, it features numerous costume changes, a number of which feature toned down makeup. But don’t worry, she’s also seen wearing clam shells as a bikini and a leather hands bra. There’s the effect with multiple Gagas on the screen veers too close into Beyonce’s most narcissistic territory.
Actually, given the quick cuts and the massive array of outfits and looks, the whole effect screams “Look at me, I’m Lady Gaga” anyway.
Then again, Lady Gaga’s certainly been all about the fame from the beginning (what with the title of the first album and follow-up EP containing the word). So it’s no surprise to hear her repeat that she “lives for the applause.”
Rest assured, the video contains its usual dancing and over-the-top bits, too, none of which make sense other than to say, “Ooh, that looks cool, doesn’t it?!?!” The track works as a catchy enough dance tune even if the lyrics are have all the depth of an 8”-by-12” cake pan. It should be a hit, but Gaga has done better and, more to the point, one wishes she had tried a little harder than having top dollar spent on costumes, makeup and effects for a filmed version of a glossy fashion magazine slideshow. She’s always going to be glossy, but would it kill her to throw in a little more grit, a little twist, a little more depth? At this point, we’ve seen Lady Gaga. Catchy single or not (and it is catchy, make no mistake), it’s going to take her to do more than basically yelling, “Look at me!!!!” for a lot of people to keep looking at some point.