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Newman’s Dark comedy abides
In the 1999 song I’m Dead (But Don’t Know It), Randy Newman personifies a past-his-prime pop star. ‘‘I’ve got nothing left to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway,’’ he sings. It’s a fate that befalls most once-noteworthy pop-culture figures. Yet on his 11th studio album, Dark Matter (★★★1⁄2), the 73-year-old songwriter shows no sign of being at a loss for words about the dark comedy known as the human condition. He even puts a new twist on his already unconventional approach to song form.
The Great Debate and Brothers suggest mini-plays, with the deceptively laid-back singer playing several characters, mixing dialogue and singing, melody and exposition while mashing up several musical genres.
The eight-minute Great Debate pits science against creationism and ponders the reality of climate change. It brims with windy orators, show-tune pomp and gospel fervour. In Brothers, the singer channels John and Bobby Kennedy plotting the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1962, before breaking into a rumba-driven homage to Cuban singer Celia Cruz. There’s a jauntiness to Newman’s stride in these songs, a mischievous twinkle in his singspeak drawl that suggests an amalgam of Mose Allison, Allen Toussaint and bemused Mad magazine cover boy Alfred E Neuman. Yet Newman can also write a heartbreak ballad with the best of them, and Dark Matter contains a handful: She Chose Me, Lost Without You, Wandering Boy. Greg Kot, TNS
Tepid Fire disappoint
Arcade Fire, a band not generally celebrated for its sense of humour, recently posted a spoof review of its fifth studio album, Everything Now (★★1⁄2). It was perhaps designed as a pre-emptive strike against the type of reviews that inevitably rain down on a band that has moved past critical darling phase into mid-career stasis. What eludes them is an even better response to that sort of media scepticism: A great album, and Everything Now is not that.
To its credit, the Montreal sextet isn’t standing pat. After its surprise Grammy album of the year award in 2012 for The Suburbs, it returned with an ambitious double album, Reflektor, in 2013, a mix of propulsive dance tracks and slower, less-focused artrock songs.
Everything Now is a tighter, but not better album. Infinite Content, the title shared by two songs in the album’s middle, suggests a loose theme. This is an album-length requiem for the over-stimulated and the under-inspired, an ode to the numb generation.- Greg Kot, TNS