Lil Waynes guitar leaves listeners gently weeping
Lil Wayne, ‘Rebirth’
Give him this: Dwayne Michael Carter isn’t coasting on his fame. Coming off his 2008 album, “Tha Carter III,” which sold nearly 3 million copies and confirmed his status as one of the decade’s best hip-hop MCs, Lil Wayne returns with an album that can charitably be described as a “left turn.”
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, because Wayne has made a career out of his gadfly boldness, usually presenting his latest twist in the savviest way: scene-stealing cameos on other artists’ records, free mix tapes that buffed up his underground credentials and an ability to embrace an otherworldly persona even ashe serves up mainstream hits.
So “Rebirth,” his seventh studio album, arrives as a huge letdown. Wayne’s normally impeccable instincts desert him. The album cover depicts the dreadlocked rapper with an electric guitar draped across his lap, signaling his full-on embrace of rock. but how does Wayne define “rock”? Apparently, for him, the state of the art is the pedestrian (if best-selling) rap-rock of Linkin Park: angstridden lyrics barked over arena-size riffs and fat, sluggish beats. “Rebirth” doesn’t swing, it staggers, and Wayne’s bullfrog rasp is distorted by Auto-Tune, apparently to mask the fact that he can’t sing.
The lyrics are crushingly banal. Wayne revels in his cartoonish persona, but some of his lines wouldn’t get a laugh in a high school locker room. “Listening to my own voice in my black Rolls Royce/Get the girls of my choice to take off their shorts and blouses,” Wayne boasts on “American Star.” “Drop the World” plays like a parody of Eminem’s venomous nihilism, with Eminem himself contributing. “Da Da Da” references “Star Trek” and demands, “give me that funky monkey,” over a beat that couldn’t be any less funky. Only the sinister “Ground Zero” ranks with Wayne’s best work, in which the paranoid narrator sees demons everywhere: drugs, suicide, government conspiracies.
Otherwise, this rivals the worst career misstep by a major artist in recent memory. think Garth Brooks’ infamous “Chris Gaines” project stank? And how awful was Chris Cornell’s ill-advised collaboration with Timbaland? Yes, “Rebirth” is that bad.
Midlake, ‘The Courage of Others’
Back in their days as music students at the University of North Texas in Denton, the future members of Midlake reveled in chord and tempo changes and then morphed into a Radiohead-lite knockoff. but over three albums the erstwhile jazzfunk group has simplified its sound. The quintet’s second release,”The Trials of Van Occupanther” (2006), won accolades for its dusky melodies and sublime harmony vocals, which yielded the sublime indie hit “Roscoe.”With “The Courage of Others” (Bella Union), Midlake singer Tim Smith sounds like a refugee from the late ’60s English folk scene. The hues aredarker, the arrangements slower, more reflective. Guitars rise up from a thicket of Renaissance Fair-style orchestration, while the songs indict “the acts of man (that) cause the earth to break open.” Like a host of contemporary bands — Fleet Foxes, Blitzen Trapper, Animal Collective — Midlake taps into a pagan impulse, a long-ago time when human beings strived to live in harmony with nature. Midlake wants to bring that sense of wonder back in this beautiful and occasionally beautifully unsettling album.
Lil Waynes guitar leaves listeners gently weeping