CHRISTINA AGUILERA
“Lotus” (RCA)
Christina Aguilera is one of the most powerful singers of her generation; is a friend to raunch, and an expert at making it broadly palatable; never lets tabloids get the best of her; has made it safe for still relevant midcareer pop stars to take sabbaticals for judging reality television competitions; hasn’t had a worthy hit in quite a few years; has maybe forgotten what Christina Aguilera does well.
“Lotus” is Ms. Aguilera’s fifth original studio album in English since 1999, which, in pop star longevity terms, is a slow drip. (She has also released a Spanish album and a Christmas album.) But consider that a strength: Ms. Aguilera imprinted herself far more authoritatively than many of her contemporaries and those who have followed her. She is, and has been, unmistakable.
Which is why the anonymity of much of “Lotus” is its biggest crime, more than its musical unadventurousness or its emphasis on bland self-help lyrics or its reluctance to lean on Ms. Aguilera’s voice, the thing that makes her special. All around her female pop stars are making pop that is forward and modern and often complex, while Ms. Aguilera, who used to play that role but is perhaps beginning to see herself as an elder stateswoman, is playing it straight.
Largely that’s by working with Alex Da Kid, who of all of the breakthrough pop producers of recent years, has the dullest, most monochromatic style, mistaking scale for emotion. Of his contributions, only on “Best of Me” does Ms. Aguilera push her voice beyond comfort; mainly she lets him dictate the arc, and it’s predictable.
Also, there are job requirements to fulfill. She collaborates here with two of her fellow judges on “The Voice,” probably just to give them duets to perform this season: with Cee Lo Green on the dull “Make the World Move,” and with Blake Shelton on the surprisingly warm “Just a Fool.” (She already collaborated with the third, Adam Levine, on Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger.”)
There are flashes of the Aguilera of old, though. Her voice veers volcanic on a pair of slow-build ballads, “Sing for Me” and “Blank Page.” The single “Your Body” is sweaty and bold, the characteristics that Ms. Aguilera once held tight to, and “Around the World,” which has flecks of reggae, is gauche and aesthetically vulgar in the way Ms. Aguilera once proudly was. As ever, Ms. Aguilera’s talent is in taking something tacky, and making it beautiful. JON CARAMANICA
Continue reading the main storySOUNDGARDEN
“King Animal”
(Universal Republic)
Soundgarden deftly acknowledges its long absence — 16 years between studio albums — with the title of “Been Away Too Long,” the opening track and first single from its new album, “King Animal.” Later, in the glum and stately “Bones of Birds,” Chris Cornell, the band’s singer, main lyricist and rhythm guitarist, intones, “Time is my friend till it ain’t and runs out.”
But time has stood still, rightfully and triumphantly, for Soundgarden’s music, which is still the moody, heaving, asymmetrical hard rock that made the band a trailblazer of grunge.
On the five albums it released from 1988 to 1996, Soundgarden started out seesawing between Led Zeppelin and punk. But the band went on to add its own subtleties of emotion, melody and structure. Its lyrics set aside blues-rock swagger for resentment and desolation, and it explored a Beatles streak that culminated in the gorgeously doleful “Black Hole Sun.”
Soundgarden also reveled in odd and shifting meters that kept its songs veering away from expectations. It’s wasn’t the pop with grunge guitar tones that would take over rock radio playlists; it was darker and more stubbornly gnarled.
After the long hiatus — and a preview this year with the reunited Soundgarden’s first new song release, “Live to Rise,” in the film “Marvel’s The Avengers” — “King Animal” simply plugs in and bears down again. The songwriting is largely collaborative, in various combinations of Mr. Cornell, Kim Thayil on guitar, Ben Shepherd on bass and Matt Cameron on drums (who joined Pearl Jam during Soundgarden’s separation). And for much of the album, the band sounds like four musicians live in a room, making music that clenches and unclenches like a fist. Added layers — of guitars, vocal harmony or horns — are for heft, not decoration.
Soundgarden’s gift for the stop-start riff, both slow and fast ones, is back in force with the coiling, leaping, warped blues-rock of “Non-State Actor,” the getting-nowhere grind of “Blood on the Valley Floor” and the zigzagging rise and fall of “Worse Dreams.” So are its moments of quasi-Indian, quasi-Beatles drone, in “A Thousand Days Before” and “Black Saturday,” and the occasional spacey psychedelic interlude.
And the band’s morbid pessimism hasn’t been leavened by the years; the lyrics are full of references to blood, drowning and war. The album’s finale is “Rowing,” a testament to basic perseverance: “Don’t know where I’m going, I just keep on rowing/I just keep on pulling, gotta row.”
Soundgarden doesn’t advance beyond reclaiming its proven strengths on “King Animal,” but those strengths are substantial. JON PARELES
BRIAN ENO
“Lux” (Warp)
Is Brian Eno’s ambient music pure bliss or pure tension? You can definitely hear it as tension — not so much music’s usual tension of harmonic relationships, of development and resolution, but the listener’s tension of taste and judgment, between recognizing what is beautiful and what is vapid.
This is my problem, or yours, but probably not his, because “Lux,” his new album — his first ambient record in seven years — is complete in itself. It is killingly beautiful and doesn’t do any more than it sets out to do, which is, in a sense, very little.
Since it doesn’t set up traditional expectations, it won’t receive traditional judgment. Do what you like with this record. Mr. Eno has been making what he calls ambient works off and on, between other projects, since the mid-’70s; they don’t especially demand to be considered as a corpus, because they don’t demand much of anything at all.
I first heard “Ambient 1/Music for Airports” 30 years ago. I liked it a little then, on the outer levels, and have found no reason to listen to it in the meantime. Hearing it again last week, I was surprised how well I remembered the sound of it, and even the melodic flow of the piano and voices, in all its vapidity. I like it more now, and I doubt I’ll listen to it again for another 30 years. That’s going to be O.K.
“Lux” was created as a commission to be heard in the Great Gallery at the Palace of Venaria, a reverberant space in Turin, Italy. It has only one 75-minute track, with 12 sections. It consists of a multitracked keyboardist — that’s Mr. Eno, though does it matter? — playing a fixed selection of notes around a tonal center, in varying or perhaps improvised orders, on various keyboards, in various long-decay note durations.
There are strings, too: Nell Catchpole, playing multitracked and interwoven long tones on violin, and the guitarist Leo Abrahams, subtly broaching your hearing through Mr. Eno’s careful mixing and processing. You’re pretty sure you’re in a new section when the tonal center shifts. Otherwise, that’s it: no development per se.
“Lux” can be background music, yes, especially for an activity you aren’t invested in. It can be foreground music, too, perhaps, until you lose patience with it. Mr. Eno is interested in any means of perceiving music outside of how it is normally consumed: we tend to look for controlled narrative, clear hooks and signposts and signifiers, and some sort of emotional path to learn more about its creator, whereas he likes to suppose that none of this matters. He likes to talk and think about music as atmospheres or ecologies, rather than, oh, police states.
There are moments of tension in each section of “Lux” — possibly accidental in composition, probably intentional in postproduction. But these sounds are ravishing: piano notes rich in reverb and overtones with hail-drop hammer strikes and deep burgundy finishes, ice-pop synthesizer tones and, at points, a strangely distressed and chipped-up little sound, like air whistling through a keyhole, or a furious and quiet violin pizzicato. It’s hard to tell if it’s real or digital.
Despite the title, I don’t think of light when I hear this music. I think of the motion of water, small and endlessly interlocking chains of wave formations in a bay. Maybe it’s short for luxurious. BEN RATLIFF
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