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Jelly Road
Blake Mills
Pop - Released July 14, 2023 | Blake Mills Artist
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Dr. Boondigga & The Big BW
Fat Freddy's Drop
Reggae - Released June 5, 2005 | The Drop
This Maori/Samoan/New Zealander band claims influences as diverse as highlife, Berlin techno, and bhangra, but what their music sounds like most consistently is a strangely modern and soulful version of jazzy reggae. Lead singer Dallas Tamaira (aka Joe Dukie) has an airy, soulful voice that sometimes comes across like a more nimble version of Roland Gift's falsetto, while the band can shift with equal agility between house, dancehall, funk, and one-drop grooves, sometimes within a single track. "The Nod," for example, starts out in a slowly chugging one-drop reggae mode before a lovely trombone solo heralds a segue into a New Orleans second-line funeral jazz interlude; "Big BW," on the other hand, juxtaposes a dark and bumping club groove with light soul-jazz vocals. "Pull the Catch" is straight-up funky dancehall, while "Shiverman" slowly builds a strong house beat beneath a chestier and more robust vocal -- it's a great sound, but at over ten minutes, the song is too long by half. It's hard to understand why the band chose to end the album with the relatively enervated and pedestrian reggae-soul of "Breakthrough," but overall this album is a hoot and a triumph.
© Rick Anderson /TiVo
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The Breakthrough
Mary J. Blige
Rock - Released January 1, 2005 | Geffen*
At the end of 2005, Mary J. Blige's career was supposed to be anthologized. The singer had her way, however, and one of her best studio albums came out instead. In retrospect, her previous album, 2003's Love & Life, was awkward; the P. Diddy collaborations, likely intended to recapture the magic the duo put together on What's the 411? and My Life, didn't always pay off, and Blige was about to become a wife, so the songs steeped in heartbreak and disappointment weren't delivered with as much power as they had been in the past. The Breakthrough also contains some of the drama that fans expect, despite Blige's continued happiness, but it's clear that she has gained enough distance from the uglier parts of her past that she can inhabit them and, once again, deliver those songs. The past does play a significant role in the album, as in "Baggage," where she apologies to her husband for bringing it into their relationship. "Father in You" sounds like a note-perfect facsimile of a classic soul ballad, rising and falling and twisting with a sensitive string arrangement, but the lyrics are pure Blige, acknowledging the ways in which her husband has made up for the absence of her father. On the nearly anthemic "Good Woman Down," she sees a less matured version of herself in young women and uses her experiences to advise. She jacks the beat from the Game's "Hate It or Love It" for "MJB da MVP," where she reflects on her career, thanks her supporters, and reasserts her rightful position as the queen of hip-hop soul. It's one of several tracks to beam with a kind of contentment and confidence that Blige has never before possessed. Take "Can't Hide from Love," where she's such a force that Jay-Z dishes out a quick introduction and knows to stay out of the way for the remainder of the track, or the glorious "I Found My Everything," her "(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman." Beat for beat, the album features the best round of productions Blige has been handed since the mid-'90s. Apart from only a couple lukewarm tracks and a poorly recorded version of "One" with U2, it is completely correct.© Andy Kellman /TiVo
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She Came to Me (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Bryce Dessner
Film Soundtracks - Released September 29, 2023 | Warner Classics
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Lemonade Mouth
Lemonade Mouth
Film Soundtracks - Released April 11, 2011 | Walt Disney Records
Based on author Mark Peter Hughes' 2007 novel of the same name, Disney’s Lemonade Mouth follows the exploits of five disgruntled Rhode Island teens who bond during a stint in detention and end up starting a band -- it's kind of like The Breakfast Club with a battle of the bands at the end. With 11 original songs that span teen pop, punk-pop, hip-hop, and rock, Lemonade Mouth (the band) tackle the usual teen subjects (self-esteem, standing by your friends in the face of adversity, following your dreams, being silly) and successfully blend the dewy-eyed romanticism of the Jonas Brothers and the quasi-rebellious angst of early Avril Lavigne, resulting in a winning, if not entirely original, collection of new High School Musical-inspired homeroom anthems.© James Christopher Monger /TiVo
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In Hearing of Atomic Rooster
Atomic Rooster
Rock - Released January 1, 1971 | Castle Communications
Much less bombastic than the band's earlier releases, In Hearing Of is almost funky at times, with "The Devil's Answer" sounding like a meeting between Memphis soul and British rock. The lyrics are doom-laden in the spirit of much of this genre of British hard rock at the time, and pseudo-classical references crop up from time to time, but Vincent Crane's keyboards are generally tasty, and the melodies are often downright memorable.© Jim Newsom /TiVo
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HELIX
Amaranthe
Metal - Released December 2, 2021 | Spinefarm FI
Danish metal group Amaranthe return with their follow-up to 2016's Maximalism. The 12-track Helix is the first to feature vocalist Nils Molin, following the departure of Jake E, to complete the trio of vocalists on the record. Their fifth album was produced by Jacob Hansen (Black Dahlia Murder, Kamelot).© Bekki Bemrose /TiVo
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Syrian Dreams
Maya Youssef
World - Released November 17, 2017 | harmonia mundi
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When war erupted in Syria in 2011, Maya Youssef was living in London. For this virtuoso qanun player from Damascus, faced with unbearable violence and suffering of her homeland, her only refuge was in music. The compositions on this album came to her as antibodies against extreme sentiments. This album follows her journey across six painful years. In it, she has exchanges with the Iraqi oud player Attab Haddad, English cellist Barney Morse-Brown and the oriental percussionist Sebastian Flaig, under the helpful direction of the mythical producer Joe Boyd. Grave or airy, sad or pacific, the notes of the "eastern piano", also known as the qanun, always hit the mark, and the interventions of the other musicians frame and sharpen them. The central piece, The Seven Gates Of Damascus, is a summary of a musical and poetical spectacle that the musician put together to comfort refugee children in the camps. It holds out the promise of a little sunlight breaking over a dark and devastated world. Everywhere, nostalgia dominates but hope persists. Brilliant! © BM/Qobuz
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Bigger And Deffer
LL COOL J
Hip-Hop/Rap - Released July 22, 1987 | Def Jam Recordings
LL Cool J rocketed to the top of the hip-hop world in 1985 with Radio, his astonishing debut, but he lost his footing a bit with Bigger and Deffer, his mildly disappointing follow-up that proved to be a commercial breakthrough all the same. It's a powerful album that gets underway with a bang, as LL raps, "No rapper can rap quite like I can," and makes his case throughout the album-opening "I'm Bad," a ferocious hardcore rap with a great DJ-scratched hook. While that song ranks among LL's best (and most popular) ever, Bigger and Deffer doesn't boast too many other standout moments, with the exception of "I Need Love." Its balladic tenderness comes as a late-album surprise, considering how ferocious LL sounds elsewhere here. Nonetheless, like it or loathe it, the song set the template for a number of such lovers raps that would bring LL much crossover success in the years to come. "I Need Love" aside, Bigger and Deffer is consistently solid, produced entirely by the L.A. Posse (Darryl Pierce, Dwayne Simon, and Bobby Erving) and filled with the sort of hard-hitting hip-hop that was Def Jam's staple at the time. But while the album is mostly solid, it does lack the creative spark that had made Radio such an invigorating release only a couple years prior (the absence of Rick Rubin here is unfortunate). In those couple years since LL had put out Radio, rap music had taken big strides. Now, in 1987, LL had to contend with the likes of Eric B. & Rakim, Kool Moe Dee, Public Enemy, and Boogie Down Productions, with others like EPMD, Big Daddy Kane, Ice-T, and N.W.A on the horizon. When put in such a context, Bigger and Deffer pales a bit; in the years since LL's Radio rocked the streets of New York, rap had taken leaps and bounds while LL hadn't. So it was no surprise when LL suddenly came under attack by his rivals and a few fans, sending him back to the drawing board for his next effort, the whopping 18-track Walking with a Panther (1989).
© Jason Birchmeier /TiVo
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We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves
John Maus
Electronic - Released April 4, 2011 | Ribbon Music
On his third album, John Maus continues his pursuit of immediacy-in-action mixed with a certain calm, developing a further tension that infuses both his music and words. The immediately cheery lead synth sparkle of the opening "Streetlight" contrasts with both the melancholic background tones and his heavily echoed singing, suggesting above all else an uneasy joy in the moment, as if everything were being celebrated under a microscope or through gun sights. For all the '80s-redux claims often pushed in his direction, Maus' looming dread is much different from the nuke/AIDS paranoia of the time -- there's a sense of a new kind of rage against a dying of the light, a reaction against entropy. Whenever something starts seems sweetly winsome or romantic, as "...And the Rain" does (in its title alone almost directly referencing the early solo work of John Foxx), something else slides in to cause a darker cloud to bubble up -- in that song's case, it could be the wordless vocal breaks, but that's one addition of many throughout the album. High energy -- or even more literally Hi-NRG -- tracks like "Keep Pushing On" rub up against slower ballads like "Hey Moon," but all throughout Maus maintains his reserved, swathed voice, occasionally matching the music with a quicker pace but otherwise more seeming to soothe here. Even a song titled "We Can Breakthrough" is less charge than steady if strong progression, a sense of an unstoppable force lost in the texture but never fully quashed, voices carried along. As for "Cop Killer" -- an original song, though there's an inevitable association with the Ice-T/Body Count song and controversy of the same name -- the slow beauty of the arrangement and the serene way Maus sings about who should be up "against the wall" makes it its own attractive, unnerving effort.
© Ned Raggett /TiVo
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Breakthrough
The Gaslamp Killer
Miscellaneous - Released September 17, 2012 | Cuss Records
Breakthrough, William Bensussen's first album as the Gaslamp Killer, provides more of the left-field beat psychedelia he offered through his 2009-2010 Brainfeeder EPs, his production work on Gonjasufi's A Sufi and a Killer, and all of his other collaborative work dating back to 2006's "Cadillac Steeze" (recorded with Blu under the name Bobby Johnson). Whipping through these mostly brief tracks, whether in order or at random, one gets the sense that Bensussen is everlastingly scatterbrained with a voracious musical appetite, regardless of origin, from east to west, whether it came from a Turkish opium den or a Midwestern U.S. garage. He takes the trip with several past and new recording partners. The psych-folk freak-out "Apparitions," featuring Gonjasufi, sways drunkenly with random organ filigrees. "Dead Vets," made with Adrian Younge, is nightmarish funk with a gnashing beat, somewhere between an amateur David Axelrod cover band and early Funkadelic. The likes of Shigeto, Samiyam, and Daedelus also assist, but the most fruitful collaboration comes from Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, whose suspenseful strings and Wurlitzer work on "Flange Face" is magnetic and petrifying. Breakthrough splatters so many short ideas across its 47 minutes that a front-to-back listen is wearying, like hearing a dozen erratic interludes mixed in with a handful of lengthier sketches that are no more settled. Better to dip in and out, and approach it like a trio of EPs thrown into a shuffled playlist.© Andy Kellman /TiVo
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The Odd Tape
Oddisee
Hip-Hop/Rap - Released May 13, 2016 | Mello Music Group
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Breakthrough
The Don Pullen - George Adams Quartet
Jazz - Released January 1, 1986 | Blue Note Records
Yes, this is a career breakthrough in a sense, for the Don Pullen/George Adams Quartet finally got a chance to record for a major American label after several Europe-only opuses. They seemed genuinely thrilled about it, for the supercharged leadoff track "Mr. Smoothie" sure sounds like a breakthrough with its ebullient mood. While grounded in hard-swinging post-bop, soul-jazz, and the blues, Adams and Pullen use the mainstream as a base for taking off into free regions at times, Adams with his gritty, combustible tenor, Pullen his trademark piano clusters. They can also groove in a melodic yet highly charged fashion on "Song From the Old Country" and reflect yearningly in the opening bars of "A Time for Sobriety." Drummer Dannie Richmond adds his Mingus-trained flexibility and drive, fluidly teamed with bassist Cameron Brown. Throughout the record, the band's creativity burns at white heat, making this disc a good first choice for newcomers to Pullen.© Richard S. Ginell /TiVo
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Breakthrough!
The Cedar Walton/Hank Mobley Quintet
Jazz - Released January 1, 1972 | Savoy Jazz
As strong as pianist Cedar Walton plays on his session, the main honors are taken by two of his sidemen. Tenor-saxophonist Hank Mobley, whose career was about to go into a complete eclipse, is in brilliant form, showing how much he had grown since his earlier days. Baritonist Charles Davis, who too often through the years has been used as merely a section player, keeps up with Mobley and engages in a particularly memorable tradeoff on the lengthy title cut. Mobley is well-showcased on "Summertime," Davis switches successfully to soprano on "Early Morning Stroll," and Walton (with the trio) somehow turns the "Theme From Love Story" into jazz. Highly recommended.© Scott Yanow /TiVo
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Sound of Breakthrough + Rattle! (Live)
The Rock Worship
Miscellaneous - Released January 21, 2022 | Rockrusher Music
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Breakthrough
The New Colony Six
Rock - Released July 1, 1966 | Numero Group
Breakthrough was one of the very finest American garage LPs, fusing Midwestern guitar-organ pop with the raunch of British Invasion groups and stressing well-written original material. It is also extremely rare and, should you locate an original copy, extremely expensive. But take heart -- ten of the 12 tracks have been reissued on Sundazed's At the River's Edge CD. The two other songs are routine, dispensable covers of the Yardbirds' "Mr. You're a Better Man than I" and the McCoys' "Hang On Sloopy," so you shouldn't fret about their absence from your collection.© Richie Unterberger /TiVo
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The Breakthrough
Maoli
Reggae - Released December 18, 2020 | Awong Entertainment - Precise
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Breakthrough: The Exodus
Ricky Dillard & New G
Gospel - Released January 21, 2022 | Motown Gospel (EGS)
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Breakthrough!
The Cedar Walton/Hank Mobley Quintet
Jazz - Released January 1, 1972 | Savoy
As strong as pianist Cedar Walton plays on his session, the main honors are taken by two of his sidemen. Tenor-saxophonist Hank Mobley, whose career was about to go into a complete eclipse, is in brilliant form, showing how much he had grown since his earlier days. Baritonist Charles Davis, who too often through the years has been used as merely a section player, keeps up with Mobley and engages in a particularly memorable tradeoff on the lengthy title cut. Mobley is well-showcased on "Summertime," Davis switches successfully to soprano on "Early Morning Stroll," and Walton (with the trio) somehow turns the "Theme From Love Story" into jazz. Highly recommended.
© Scott Yanow /TiVo
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