record reviews

SUSAN BOYLE

Album: “The Gift” (Columbia)

Grade: C

Like a lot of holiday presents, Susan Boyle’s “The Gift” doesn’t live up to expectations.

On the second album from the “Britain’s Got Talent” sensation, Boyle offers a selection of holiday classics, plus a few others, including Leonard Cohen’s now ubiquitous “Hallelujah” and the puzzling choice of Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over.”

The choice of music isn’t the problem here. Surprisingly, it’s her voice. While she became a YouTube sensation for displaying heavenly but powerful vocals on “Britain’s Got Talent,” here, she sounds like a timid child. She coos shakily and rarely uses the full potential of her voice. The arrangements don’t help her because they sound like dreary background music: You’ll need a pick-me-up after listening to this album all the way through.

In case you make it that far, put on “O Holy Night,” the EP by her label mate, Jackie Evancho of “America’s Got Talent,” to combat the holiday jeer. Though she actually is a child, Jackie has a magical, soaring voice that shows her fellow reality-show contestant how a Christmas album should be done.

— Nekesa Mumbi Moody, Associated Press

Kanye West

Album: “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” (Roc-A-Fella Records)

Grade: B

We knew well before “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy” that Kanye West is a tortured genius. He had made enough headlines and leaked enough music to make that clear. The main question left for his fifth album was, what’s in it for us?

A lot — if you like reality TV, celebrity tabloids and car crashes. As a producer, Kanye’s immense gifts have reached a new peak, and his lyrics remain double-edged blades of young black pathos. The only thing missing from this “Fantasy” is a good time, like its predecessor, “808s & Heartbreak.”

But Kanye did warn us with the album title, and his subject matter doesn’t disappoint. There’s no happiness, vicarious thrills or funny stories, no touching odes to his mentor or his mother, just a man torn apart by the world and himself. You get women, ego, fame, evil, power, pain, even sex and religion as unholy bedfellows — all delivered in defiant rhymes laden with multiple meanings and punch lines.

Such bleakness still sounds incredible, though, because West lays down his torment on beds of sound that reveal new beauties with each listen.

Some of his musical compositions are made for the stadium, such as “All of the Lights” and its A-list of 14 vocalists ranging from Elton John to Charlie Wilson. Some are destined for European discos, such as “Lost in the World” and its bipolar declarations: “You’re my questions, you’re my proof / You’re my stress, and you’re my masseuse.”

But this is emphatically a hip-hop album. “So Appalled” sounds like new-millenium Mobb Deep; “Monster” is a throbbing menace where Jay-Z psychoanalyzes Kanye and millions of other scary black men to a T: “Everybody wanna know what my Achilles heel is / Love! I don’t get enough of it ...”

Love does seem to be the root of Kanye’s issues, which he deconstructs on the simply brilliant “Runaway,” bravely discarding the Auto-Tune and building a single piano note into a glistening monument to his problems.

— Jesse Washington, Associated Press