Muse is epic, kitschy
Muse The 2nd Law (Warner)
★★★★ /5
The 1st Law is: Play some rock ’n’ roll. There are, of course, various ways to uphold or violate that law. The 2nd? I’m not even sure, but the opener of Muse’s 6th album, Supremacy, is a deranged fusion of progmetal riff, cat-in-heat screech, James Bond dynamics and is that a bloody Mexican trumpet? But then, this is the band that recorded the theme to the 2012 Olympics, the predictably Valhallan Survival.
And it is perhaps telling that singer-guitarist (do we also call him “conceptualist”?) Matt Bellamy describes lead single Madness as “minimal 12-bar blues.” Yes, you can hear the John Lee Hooker in there — as played by R2D2 pretending to be Bono.
The album has quite a range. It’s almost criminal. It’s certainly epic, inescapably kitschy, and possibly synthesized for some arena on Mars where — but wait, is this Survival, with its string opening, mincing segue and bombastic vocal posture?
Muse gets away with whatever it chooses to get away with. That, in itself, is reason for a grudging admiration.
Mark Lepage, Postmedia News
The Tragically Hip Now For Plan A (Universal) ★★★★ /5
Plan A? Surely it’s Plan Y at this point. After We Are the Same was pretty much slated, one wonders what the Hip have left.
The snakey, mean opener At Transformation — it’s almost goth for a minute. Then it’s Gord. Cue the urgent pleading of Man Machine Poem. We Want to Be It may be the best of its type since Ahead by a Century. “Nothing short of everything’s / enough” he sings in the magisterial, burnished title track. The Modern Spirit is emphatic and succinct, and Take Forever is tough the way My Music at Work was. They’ve found a way to renew this. Sounds like the Canadian Shield reasserting its tectonic inviability. Sounds like Plan 8½ out of 10.
Mark Lepage, Postmedia News
Diana Krall Glad Rag Doll (Universal) ★★★★ /5
Diana Krall singing rockabilly? Far cry from the jazz standards and the bossa nova, ain’t it? Granted, the stylistic shocker happens only on I’m a Little Mixed Up, and maybe this kind of thing will occur every so often when T Bone Burnett is producing — but there’s something more interesting going on than simple genre-hopping.
With this collection of often playful songs, many of them from the 1920s and ’30s, Krall has made what she calls a “song and dance record,” but its resonance goes deeper. Krall could have gone on making a killing playing easy-on-the-ear jazz forever, as some of her contemporaries have been satisfied to do. But as she has proved more than once (The Girl In the Other Room, her excellent 2004 singer-songwriter album, being another notable example), she doesn’t always play it safe.
So don’t be fooled by the cheesecake cover shot, showing Krall (barely) dressed as a Ziegfeld girl. With this batch of beautifully played songs that rock when they have to and whisper when they must, she proves herself, once again, to be an artist whose body of work grows more interesting with time.