record reviews

November 7, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

N.E.R.D.

Album: “Nothing”

Grade: A-

Before putting out its excellent fourth album, “Nothing,” dance-beat trio N.E.R.D. had an argument with executives from its record label, Interscope. “You know, they’re like: ‘The club, the club,’” leader Pharrell Williams recently told The Canadian Press. “We’re more like: ‘The vibe, the vibe.’” Both ideas turned out to be correct. In a contrast from the band’s early hits, “Nothing” (Interscope) is all relaxed, well-crafted pop tunes grafted onto slinky dancehall beats, and the effect is a sort of fade from ’60s soul to ’70s funk to disco, stopping just short of hip-hop. Sometimes, this mixture is generic, as on “The Man,” a lightweight piece of bongo-driven, feel-good funk with a whistling sample from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly”; more often, it’s ridiculously potent, as on “Sacred Temple,” a disco homage to monogamy that builds from a sparse, tense bass line to a beautifully chaotic R&B chorus. The core of N.E.R.D. is Williams and Chad Hugo, better known as The Neptunes, who for a decade built hits for Jay-Z, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake and others. But Shay Haley, the band’s inexplicably unknown lead singer, frequently rises above the electric pianos, bleating horns and synths and whooping background vocals, channeling Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto on the whispery, Daft Punk-produced “Hypnotize U” and mimicking John Legend perfectly on the cooing, march-time “God Bless Us All.” T.I. (”Party People”) and Nelly Furtado (”Hot-n-Fun”) show up for the requisite star cameos, but it’s to N.E.R.D.’s credit that they come and go as additional sounds in the mix.

—Steve Knopper, Newsday

ELVIS COSTELLO

Album: “National Ransom” (Hear Music)

Grade: B

With last year’s “Secret, Profane & Sugarcane,” Elvis Costello settled in with super-roots producer T-Bone Burnett for an accomplished, if typically verbose, country-flavored acoustic set that faintly recalled the 1985 Costello-Burnett collaboration “King of America.” “National Ransom” picks up where “SP&S” left off and goes deeper and wider, once again working with Americana players like Jim Lauderdale and Jerry Douglas and Burnett helpmate Marc Ribot, while also bringing in ringers such as Vince Gill and Leon Russell. Stylistically and narratively, the album is all over the place — from the aggressively rocking title cut about the financial crises in 1929 and 2008, to the quick-picking, bluegrass-flavored “Doctor Watson, I Presume” about meeting guitar great Doc Watson, to the deeply felt parlor ballad “You Hung the Moon” about a British family trying to connect with a dead World War I soldier through a seance. Is it all a bit much to digest, and could the 16-song set do with a bit of pruning? Absolutely, but it just as surely finds Costello working at an improbably high level 33 years after he debuted with “My Aim Is True.”

—Dan DeLuca, Philadelphia Inquirer

DARIUS RUCKER

Album: “Charleston, SC 1966” (Capitol)

Grade: B

Yes, Hootie has gone country. But you can put aside the cynicism. Darius Rucker, lead singer of pop’s Hootie and the Blowfish, made a strong Nashville debut in 2008 with “Learn to Live.” This follow-up reaffirms that he’s no mere poseur, unlike the pop has-beens in the old Alan Jackson hit, “Gone Country.” For “Charleston, SC 1966” — that’s Rucker’s birthplace and birth year — the singer doesn’t try to pass off bland pop or ’70s rock as real country, unlike some putative country acts. He works again with one of Music City’s best producers, Frank Rogers, who helps ensure that the music has mainstream accessibility while maintaining vigorous country elements. And Rucker, who cowrote all 13 songs, sings with the conviction of someone who’s all in, whether it’s the sunny domesticity of “This” and “Might Get Lucky” or the darker situations of “Whiskey and You” and “I Got Nothing.” Even the superstar guest appearance works, as Rucker cuts up with Brad Paisley on the breezy honky-tonk of their cowritten “I Don’t Care.”

—Nick Cristiano, Philadelphia Inquirer

LIZ PHAIR

Album: “Funstyle/Girlysound” (Rocket Science Ventures)

Grade: A

“Released” download-only to horrible reviews back in July, Liz Phair’s Funstyle won’t be played often even by its stalwarts. Phair raps, performs comedy skits about her crumbling label deal, and sings a decent adult-contempo ballad called “Satisfied.” If this package were released as Girlysound/Funstyle, it would be considered a bonus disc. Treat it like one: The 10 Girlysound demos on Disc 2 (predating the epochal Exile in Guyville) beg for the entire vault’s release. Phair’s mastery of unusual hooks was already developed on “Miss Mary Mack,” “Speed Racer,” and the gorgeous centerpiece “Love Song.” But the uproarious “White Babies” takes the trophy: “My black market white baby dealer/ Is rooting around overseas/ My black market white baby dealer / Brings back fresh white babies to me.”

—Dan Weiss, Philadelphia Inquirer

A SUNNY DAY IN GLASGOW

Album: “Autumn, Again” (self-released)

Grade: A-

“Pop Songs 2010” is the subtitle of “Autumn, Again,” the new album from Philadelphia’s “A Sunny Day in Glasgow.” That’s significant, but pop, for “ASDIG,” is a relative term: My Bloody Valentine and the Cocteau Twins remain the relevant reference points, but “Autumn, Again” focuses on the brighter, lighter, and hookier end of the dreampop spectrum. It’s A Sunny Day’s sunniest; in Cocteau Twins terms, it’s their “Heaven” or “Las Vegas.” With 11 tracks in 33 minutes, “Autumn, Again” is barely longer than their “Nitetime Rainbows” remix EP, but the brevity befits the “pop”-centricity. Songs such as “Fall in Love” and “Drink Drank Drunk” build aural cathedrals from chorales of angelic voices, starbursts of guitar delay, bubbles of electronics, and cascades of drums. And the band is offering it as a free download at www.autumnagain.org.

—Steve Klinge, Philadelphia Inquirer

DIE ANTWOORD

Album: “$O$” (Interscope/Cherrytree)

Grade: B

Die Antwoord’s rap-meets-electro-rave noise comes at you quickly and busily, claustrophobically even. Perfect for strobe-light accompaniment, there are wobbling old tech-house synths in “Beat Boy,” hyper Jamaican dancehall in “Evil Boy” (with help from Philly’s master of the genre, Diplo), and more speeding rude squirts and squelches throughout this debut CD than a closet full of whoopee cushions. Yet South Africa’s Die Antwoord never misses, at least in terms of its wildly contagious melodies, that it’s a pop act. When hard-as-nails MC Ninja (Betty Boop-voiced singer Yo-Landi Vi$$er and a tracks-building DJ Hi-Tek complete the trio) isn’t acting as a deadpan motivational speaker on the epically hypnotic “Enter the Ninja,” he’s intoning salacious hometown slang on “Scopie” and dissing your mom on “Fish Paste” through songs so sonorous you might embarrass yourself singing them out loud. Forget about the cheap dominatrix gear they wear or their now-famous Fincher-meets-Cronenberg videos. Die Antwoord is nasty pop for fans of the leather bar and the Disney Channel.

—A.D. Amorosi, Philadelphia Inquirer