Hamilton’s latest endorsement of basic pleasures over conspicuous consumption. “Cool,” the first single from his new album, “The Point of It All,” has a guest appearance by the Mississippi rapper David Banner to share Mr.
BEN RATLIFFĪNTHONY HAMILTON “The Point of It All” (Mister’s Music/So So Def)Ī Southern soul singer in a hip-hop world, Anthony Hamilton flaunts his cultural differences. Ritter’s overwrought-deadpan singing presents a single emotion: it’s a defensive sort of cool. But now, either when smugness is the desired point (“Gives You Hell”) or not (“Mona Lisa”), it’s built into the music, with chord changes you can see coming from 20 paces. This band has been smug before, as on “Dirty Little Secret,” from 2005, its first significant hit, a memorable and clever piece of mixed-messaging. Ritter comes from the same stylized-frustration vocal school as Joe Jonas) and not nearly as many as Fall Out Boy. They’ve got a few more amperes of snarl than the Jonas Brothers (though Mr. But they have learned from U2’s anthemic sound and they seem to have found their way to the new wave of Elvis Costello and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. They have nothing to do with black pop or dance music, and they probably don’t have fantasies about the Clash and rock authenticity. To map them a little more, they’re a power-pop band, but still quite a distance even from starter punk. The All-American Rejects lie somewhere between two American energies: Radio Disney and the Warped Tour. It’s completely clear and even traditional pop music, but those over 16 will likely have no use for it The band’s third album, “When the World Comes Down,” isn’t striking obscure poses, inventing slang or playing with the audience through distancers like tension and distortion. It’s best not to believe a handsome rock star from Oklahoma when he says something like that it’s like saying he was raised by wolves but the claim seems to fit his band’s kind of rock-ribbed emo.
Two years ago he said in an interview that he had seen only four concerts in his life, other than ones he’d played in. Tyson Ritter, the singer and bassist of the All-American Rejects, is 24 now. THE ALL-AMERICAN REJECTS “When the World Comes Down” (DGC/Interscope) “I think you should come see about me/Maybe here is where you need to be.” On her other albums, this story wouldn’t end well, but for now Ms. “All I want is your company/Ain’t no need for you to front for Keysh,” she sings. “It’s gonna take more than one drink to get me home.”īut even this cad can’t spoil Ms. “Before you start telling me things, I don’t wanna hear/Before you pull up a seat, let me make it clear/I can buy my own liquor,” she warns a potential suitor. Tension is what animates her, and there’s hardly a rebuke in sight.īarely a note of skepticism is struck until well past the album’s halfway point, following a variety pack of love songs featuring Beyoncé-esque pomp (“Make Me Over”), 1980s robo-soul (“Erotic”), Lifetime-movie slow burn (“Brand New”), unusually affirming guest raps from Nas (“Oh-Oh, Yeah-Ya”) and Tupac Shakur (“Playa Cardz Right”), who died in 1996 and was an early mentor to the singer.Īfter those songs, “Thought You Should Know,” about being courted in a club, sounds as if dissatisfaction has finally returned to Ms. Where her voice was once assured and three-dimensional, here, although many of the songs are pleasant, Ms. Cole’s version of swoon is decidedly temperate. This is, she notes, her “sexier side.” But Ms. Cole’s pleasures are no longer complicated. On “Love,” the signature heartbreak song from her first album, she sounded as if she was coughing out the words, barely holding the notes in between tears.īut on “A Different Me,” for the first time Ms. In her songs relationships are flimsy or worse, and their impact is felt in Ms. Blige as a template and, at times, improve on it. Cole was one of the most textured singers in R&B, one of the few brave enough to use a young Mary J. Cole displays here feels much more like an actual character. After all, Beyoncé’s recent attempt at a split identity, Sasha Fierce, was but a hypertrophied version of her longstanding personality, whereas the side of herself that Ms. Keyshia Cole didn’t invent an alias on this, her third album, but perhaps she should have.
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