Broken by Desire to Be Heavenly Sent [Capitol, 2023]
When I finally took the plunge and back-to-backed this with Harry's House, I was pleased to conclude that while Capaldi's 2019 debut was strong, this follow-up is a triumph I admire even more than I do Styles's estimable consensus fave. Moreover, it's in a mode I've never had much use for: the power ballad. Formally we're talking Celine Dion and Michael Bolton only with more character, variation, and textural range, or if you want to stretch it try Springsteen or Garth Brooks or even Ray Charles--tempos moderate, vocals pushed, jokes sparse to nonexistent. This last matters because in concert Capaldi plays his tween-song material for laughs he gets on a scale with John Prine or Loudon Wainwright only they write their share of funny lyrics where Capaldi's material is soaked in lovestruck avowal, romantic angst, and emotional apercu--which for some reason generate a credibility the likes of Bolton and Dion seldom succeed in selling skeptics and intellectuals like Prine and Wainwright shy away from. A

>>126927365
Van Halen [Warner Bros., 1978]
For some reason Warners wants us to know that this is the biggest bar band in the San Fernando Valley. This doesn't mean much--all new bands are bar bands, unless they're Boston. The term becomes honorific when the music belongs in a bar. This music belongs on an aircraft carrier. C

>>126898491
Sour [Geffen, 2021]
This manifestly competent 18-year-old actress has a two-boyfriend romantic history dating back to 2018 that pop aesthetes who avoid the Disney channel can just Google--both, unsurprisingly, with actors a year or two older than she is. Also unsurprisingly, she's gorgeous. But that's never stopped women from worrying that their bodies aren't "perfect," which along with other inevitable insecurities was enough to fuel an exquisite teen-breakup concept album produced by 38-year-old helper bunny Daniel Nigro. Again and again dainty melodies meet big drums and are only stronger for it as every simple word comes clear. She doesn't drink yet but knows how he likes his coffee and let's bet her own; she says "fuck" and "bullshit," the latter to modify "eternal love." Though he did the driving let's also bet he gave her some of the lessons that flowered into her first megahit even if she still can't really, in everybody's favorite trope, parallel park. But when he transfers his attentions to "someone more exciting," it's Olivia's jokes he's telling, Olivia's Billy Joel he's playing. And for a transcendent finale she leaves her own pain behind and sends her very best to an abused boy she knew when they were small and a middle school friend with parents who "hated who she loved." A

The Meadowlands [Absolutely Kosher, 2003]
I keep waiting for the moment when I need to put this away for a while, and it keeps not coming. Instead, four years of takes and tweaks build and cohere--pealing and shifting, wafting and pounding, sinking into babble and soaring into, to choose my very favorite, the bright intro, garbled vocal, and guardedly exultant chorus of "This Boy Is Exhausted." The theme is failure, take it or leave it--not just failure to get rich and famous, which does rankle, but failure to love. But their labors imbue both aging-alt whines with excitement and dignity. Anybody who can create a record like this deserves more than 13 thou a year. And anybody capable of "13 Months in Six Minutes" deserves another shot at a woman too good to take for granted. A

Master of Puppets [Elektra, 1986]
I feel at a generational disadvantage with this music not because my weary bones can't take its power and speed but because I was born too soon to have my dendrites rerouted by progressive radio. This band's momentum can be pretty impressive, and as with a lot of fast metal (as well as some sludge) they seem to have acceptable political motivations--antiwar, anticonformity, even anticoke, fine. But the revolutionary heroes I envisage aren't male chauvinists too inexperienced to know better; they don't have hair like Samson and pecs like Arnold Schwarzenegger. That's the image Metallica calls up, and I'm no more likely to invoke their strength of my own free will than I am The 1812 Overture's. B-

>>126866468
Breakfast in America [A&M, 1979]
I like a hooky album as well as the next fellow, so when I found that this one elicited random grunts of pleasure I looked forward to listening hard. But the lyrics turned out to be glib variations on the usual Star Romances trash, and in the absence of vocal personality (as opposed to accurate singing) and rhythmic thrust (as opposed to a beat) I'll wait until this material is covered by artists of emotional substance--Tavares, say, or the Doobie Brothers. C+

A Farewell to Kings [Mercury, 1977]
The most obnoxious band currently making a killing on the zonked teen circuit. Not to be confused with Mahogany Rush, who at least spare us the reactionary gentility. More like Angel. Or Kansas. Or a power-trio Uriah Heep, with vocals revved up an octave. Or two. D

Master of Reality [Warner Bros., 1971]
As an increasingly regretful spearhead of the great Grand Funk switch, in which critics redefined GFR as a 1971 good old-fashioned rock and roll band even though I've never met a critic (myself included) who actually played the records, I feel entitled to put this in its place. Grand Funk is like an American white blues band of three years ago--dull. Black Sabbath is English--dull and decadent. I don't care how many rebels and incipient groovies are buying. I don't even care if the band members believe in their own Christian/satanist/liberal murk. This is a dim-witted, amoral exploitation. C-

>>126844700
Nevermind [DGC, 1991]
After years of hair-flailing sludge that achieved occasional songform on singles no normal person ever heard, Seattle finally produces some proper postpunk, aptly described by resident genius Kurt Cobain: "Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo." This is hard rock as the term was understood before metal moved in--the kind of loud, slovenly, tuneful music you think no one will ever work a change on again until the next time it happens, whereupon you wonder why there isn't loads more. It seems so simple. A

>>126834351
The Chronic [Interscope, 1992]
The crucial innovation of this benchmark album isn't its conscienceless naturalization of casual violence. It's Dre's escape from sampling. Other rappers, as they are called, have promised to create their own musical environments, usually without revealing how much art and how much publishing fuels their creative resolve. But Dre is the first to make the fantasy pay out big-time. The world he hears in his head isn't the up-to-date P-Funk fools say they hear--that would be too hard. Instead he lays bassline readymades under simulations of Bernie Worrell's high keyb sustain, a basically irritating sound that in context always signified fantasy, not reality--stoned self-loss or, at a best Dre never approaches, grandiose jive. This is bell-bottoms-and-Afros music, its spiritual source the blaxploitation soundtrack, and what it promises above all is boom times for third-rate flautists--sociopathic easy-listening. Even if it's "just pop music," as some rationalize, it's bad pop music. C+

Tim [Sire, 1985]
No songwriter in memory matches Paul Westerberg's artful artlessness, the impression he creates of plumbing his heart as he goes along. Statements like "Hold My Life" and "Bastards of Young" are pretty grand when you think about it, but you don't notice in the offhand context of the tastelessly amorous "Kiss Me on the Bus" or the tastelessly resentful "Waitress in the Sky." So far Westerberg hasn't been touched by the pretension and mere craft that seem to be inevitable side effects of such a gift, and I see no reason to anticipate that he will be. With a band this there, presence is all. A-

Van Halen [Warner Bros., 1978]
For some reason Warners wants us to know that this is the biggest bar band in the San Fernando Valley. This doesn't mean much--all new bands are bar bands, unless they're Boston. The term becomes honorific when the music belongs in a bar. This music belongs on an aircraft carrier. C

Elastica [DGC, 1995]
Punk-pop as self-consciously noncanonical market ploy, wound tight as a methedrine high. The Buzzcocks weren't deep, Wire wasn't deep, but these sassy London girls are shallow on principle, accentuating the desperation of a fun they refuse to grant any emotional resonance. I love their bright, tough veneer and hectic sexuality. I'll happily get juiced on their quick charge. And I can imagine myself discarding them without a second thought. After all, they're asking for it. A-

Starsailor [Straight, 1970]
In which a man who was renowned for his Odetta impressions on Jac Holzman's folkie label switches to Frank Zappa's art-rock label, presumably so he can do Nico impressions. C-

Greatest Hits Vol. 2 [Atlantic, 1979]
Fourteen cuts, close to an hour of polyvinyl chloride, and only two of 'em made U.S. top ten. We have met the enemy and they are them. C