03.27.2008
Spins: Snoop Dogg, The Gutter Twins
Snoop Dogg
Ego Trippin’
Label: Geffen Records
If you like: Snoop Dogg
Song to download: “Deez Hollywood Nights”
3 stars (out of four)
More than a decade ago, Snoop Dogg became one of the major forces in West Coast rap, rhyming about gang life in South Central, Los Angeles, chasing women and getting high.
On his ninth album, Ego Trippin’, Snoop Dogg sets out to prove that despite the fame, he hasn’t forgotten the streets that bred him.
But those streets haven’t trapped him, either. Ego Trippin’ shows a more mature Snoop, one who still gets high, but who also has a wife and children (he now has a reality TV show called Snoop Dogg’s Father Hood).
The album is filled with funky beats, heavy synths and smoothed-out soul, the perfect accompaniment to Snoop Dogg’s laid-back, near-melodic flow.
But Snoop Dogg isn’t afraid to step out of his comfort zone. The best example is “Sexual Eruption,” which features Snoop Dogg singing through a Vocoder, an electronic gadget that synthesizes and alters the voice into something vaguely robotic-sounding.
On the song “My Medicine,” Snoop tries his hand at country. The experiment actually works, and it is that sense of the unexpected, that bold adventurousness, that keeps the album from getting bogged down in a formula long familiar to his fans.
Snoop Dogg is still that lanky gangsta rapper to his fans, but Ego Trippin’ shows that he is also much, much more.
The Gutter Twins
Saturnalia
Label: Sub Pop
If you like: The Twilight Singers, but darker
Song to download: “God’s Children”
3 1/2 stars
Saturnalia is the debut album by The Gutter Twins - Greg Dulli (The Afghan Whigs, The Twilight Singers) and Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, Queens Of The Stone Age), two post-grunge musicians with a knowing penchant for gloom and doom.
This is, creatively speaking, not a bad thing. The worse these guys feel, the better music they make; once combined, the minor-chord misery is mesmerizing, combining the big-guitar soul noir common to Dulli with the gritty, nicotine-stained gutter-rock of Lanegan.
The results are magnificent - shadowy, scorched-world attempts to balance hope and abject abandonment that musically shine but emotionally fail. Mortality, regret, guilt, death and all the flotsam and jetsam of losing with dignity in life and love are given a barroom poet’s touch. The result is hyper-melodic dirty boogie, a sinister backroom ballet for a new world. Guitar riffs slice, backbeats pound and the combined singing of Dulli and Lanegan creates a maelstrom of woe that is majestic.
Jack Bruce and Robin Trower
Seven Moon
Label: V-12 Records
If you like: Cream (calm), Robin Trower (Hendrixian)
Song to download: “Distant Places Of The Heart”
3 stars
There is something to be said for persistence, at least in the case of bassist and singer Jack Bruce (Cream) and Robin Trower (Procol Harum, successful 1970s solo act). Each musician, a master in his own right, had found great success working in power trios, so their pairing seemed inspired.
Bruce and Trower have tried teaming up several times since the 1980s, never to particularly satisfying results. In the new millennium, the two have paired again, with drummer Gary Husband, and, on the new Seven Moons, finally found magic.
Bruce is in fine and familiar voice, and his tasteful bass playing, usually so fiery and commanding, is atypically restrained, never taking off into the expected flights of fancy. He is content to solidify the foundation for Trower, who has never sounded better, mixing his Hendrix-inspired playing with pointed blues-rock solos of startling taste and power. The songs are airy and good, few overly memorable, but the playing and singing is superb, making this an album for fans of classic power trios grown nuanced.
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