ALBUM REVIEWS
Pop
GREEN DAY
Dos! (Warner)
(out of 4)
Last month’s boilerplate Uno! was a passable, if not terribly memorable, kickoff to the three-album trilogy Green Day will release by the end of 2012, but there’s not a whole helluva lot going on with Dos! to justify its existence.
Were this a record by a new band, in fact, no one would likely pay it much attention. It’s so thoroughly ordinary that one wonders why the California pop-punk trio — here supposedly steering its trademark three-chord snark in a more “garage-rock” direction than usual but not really deviating that much from the standard, adolescent, pre- American Idiot plot — didn’t just bite the bullet and scale its ambitions back to fit a double album.
With the exception of the crabby-assed “Ashley,” the rockers are programmatic and astonishingly tuneless coming from a band that can usually be depended on for a few hooks in the absence of innovation.
Dos!’ s intermittent stabs at experimentation, meanwhile, don’t do much to enliven the program; “Stray Heart” is an amiably bouncy Motown knockoff, but the reggae/ rap/rock hybrid “Nightlife” — featuring guest MC Lady Cobra, who gets another song named after her but definitely doesn’t deserve it — is a disaster.
A closing ballad, “Amy,” dedicated to the late Amy Winehouse is a sweet sentiment and ripe for analysis given that frontman Billy Joe is in rehab, but its “Amy, don’t you go” chorus doesn’t have a patch on “Good Riddance.”
Tré! is due Dec. 11. Fingers crossed.
Ben Rayner
Classical
AMICI CHAMBER ENSEMBLE
Levant (ATMA)
This new made-in-Toronto album makes an eloquent case for a wide range of pieces that bridge the cultural and religious divides of easternmost Europe and the Middle East. Thanks to powerful performances by core Amici members — clarinetist Joaquin Valdepenas, cellist David Hetherington and pianist Serouj Kradjian — as well as violinists Benjamin Bowman and Stephen Sitarski and violist Steven Dann, all 10 pieces on this disc beckon enticingly.
Although the emphasis is on the 20th century, most of this music is attractively tonal. All the performers manage to capture the roiling passions and exotic melismas with power as well as elegance. Highlights include evocative Piano trios by Armenian composer Gayané Chebotaryan and Iraqui-Syrian Solhi al-Wadi.
John Terauds
Jazz AMY MCCONNELL & WILLIAM SPERANDEI Stealing Genius (Femme Cachee Productions)
For its jaw-dropping chutzpah, Stealing
Genius deserves a Juno. The nerviness begins with the Oscar Wilde aphorism used for its title. It continues as singer McConnell, who sings in French and English, and trumpeter Sperandei take on the A-list of musical egos: Elvis Presley (“Suspicious Minds”), Edith Piaf (“La Vie en Rose”) and Robert Plant and Jimmy Page (“Thank You”). The pluckiness hits warp drive, though, when the pair bring an upstart brashness to “From Russia With Love” that’s entirely absent in Matt Monro’s original crooning of the Bond flick’s theme. There are moments in this 13-song offering that leave you a little shaken, mostly when McConnell hits high notes; other moments can stir you, however. In “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” from The
Fantasticks, she’s cool, calm, breathy and collected. Sperandei’s playing is lush and well-matched to McConnell’s voice. Pianist Mark Kieswetter’s arrangements are intuitively right and Douglas Romanow’s production brings a big-money feel.
Peter Goddard