N.E.R.D.
Seeing Sounds
(Interscope)
Intentionally or not, N.E.R.D. has made a concept album chronicling everything annoying about modern nightlife. "Everybody Nose" is about club girls queuing for bathroom booger-sugar breaks, and references to text messages and comparing iPods abound. Expert hook-writing and musicianship mostly keep the album from becoming an episode of Gossip Girls set to a hip-hop beat, but it suffers from a lack of focus. Elsewhere, annoying intros and ill-considered bridges bury otherwise mean hooks.
—Adam Bulger
Street Dogs
State of Grace
(Hellcat Records)
Hot on the heels of the Boston renaissance, Street Dogs are cut from same figurative Irish linen as Dennis Lehane, Kevin Smith, The Departed and every Boston pro sports team. Slinging punk rock tinged with post-Pogues, post-Clash Irish swagger, they put on a fairly honest, working class show of it. At first I got a wee bit of a pre-fab vibe, but singer Michael McColgan carries the legit-as-they-come credentials of Gulf War veteran, former Boston firefighter and one-time frontman for the now-global Dropkick Murphys. "The General's Boombox" is a decent paean to Joe Strummer, though the more traditional Irish folk-flavored "Elizabeth" is among their best, featuring some first-class female vocal harmonies.
—Tom Sturm
Karl Blau
Am
(Whistler)
The multi-instrumentalist Karl Blau has pioneered an unlikely musical niche, making childlike, white dub with an animistic nature-worshiping outsider-art streak. Blau plays in songwriter Laura Veirs' band. His solo recordings are by turns unhurried, avant-garde, jumbled, ambient, oddly beautiful and off-puttingly weird. Detuned guitars, melodica, layered harmonies, rinky-dink drum programming, lurching bass and fluctuating tempos make for a strange and haunting record of haiku-like songs.
—John Adamian
Beach House
Devotion
(Carpark)
Beach House's beguiling debut delivered an intoxicating concoction of hazy tunes, ethereal organ and guitar textures, and drum machines. The Baltimore duo's follow-up delivers more songs in the same woozy and melancholic vein, but it's too much of a good thing. Although Devotion may be more robust, featuring splashes of brash Phil Spector sonics to enliven the gauzy Mazzy Star melodies, these small adjustments aren't enough to distinguish the album from its predecessor. The tunes blur into a single rainy afternoon daydream. If you're new to Beach House, this isn't a terrible place to start. But unless you're a complete stooge for cough syrup slowcore soul, you probably only need one of their albums.
—Jeff Jackson
