Golden Child
Neptunes protégé still hungry for a hit
Balkan Beat Box:
A musical forum for settling
international disputes
Kenna
Make Sure They See
My Face ½
ITUNES MYSPACE

Chicken” and 60-second freak-out “Porcupine or Pineapple” display the band’s mad shriek at its most unhinged. LINDSEY THOMAS

On their second album, this atmospheric post-hardcore quintet—emo’s simultaneous answer to Yes and U2—mostly prove that Sunny Day Real Estate combined those two influences much better a decade ago. Merging elliptical lyrics about personal-spiritual renewal with circular rhythms and effects-soaked guitar, but without any of Sunny Day’s hooks or dynamics, Circa Survive hang everything on the dramatic, upper-register pipes of vocalist Anthony Green ( ex-Saosin). But his bandmates get so lost trying to fill up the space around him that sometimes Green sounds as if he’s singing on another record altogether. AARON BURGESS

the luscious pedal steel that gooses the latter two tracks proves. Still, ringleader Alasdair MacLean can be a sad sack, and his band succeeds best when it shakes off the doldrums: “Here Comes the Phantom”—a sweet-and-sunny “Daydream Believer” pop rocker—and the disco-inflected “Bookshop Casanova” are the album’s best moments. SHANNON ZIMMERMAN

You can understand why Kenna wants people to see his face: New Sacred Cow, this Ethiopian-born synth-hop savant’s inventive 2003 debut, won him buckets of buzz but didn’t make him the household name his record label and producer (the Neptunes’ Chad Hugo) were hoping for. (Check out Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller Blink for an illuminating account of the album’s tortured history.)

Looking for the pop validation that eluded him last time, Kenna hired Hugo’s partner, Pharrell Williams, to helm two tracks on this follow-up to New Sacred

Cow. Williams’
Midas touch has
lost some of
its sure-shot

gleam of late, but on “Loose Wires,” while Kenna bemoans “all the hits that I’ve been missing,” the producer hooks up a radio-ready beat that sounds like a choice outtake from Kelis’ “Milkshake” sessions. “Say Goodbye to Love,” Williams’ other contribution, has a jittery live-band feel, like Chic fronted by Dave Gahan.

The rest of the album,
produced by Hugo, proffers
similarly clever juxtapositions:
In “Sun Red Sky Blue,” Kenna
works a rock-guy yowl over
percolating drum-machine
funk, while “Out of Control”
cribs both the Ramones’
lyrics and the Rapture’s disco-
punk groove. That left-field
sonic alchemy is Kenna’s
creative strength, and he
hasn’t sacrificed it here in the
name of mainstream
accessibility. He’s
realized that a little
studio bling is just
one more trick in
his bag. MIKAEL
WOOD

FROM LEF T: SETH KUSHNIR/COURTESY JDUB RECORDS; MICHAEL MULLER/COURTESY UNIVERSAL

The Bravery The Sun and the Moon ITUNES MYSPACE Harmless trendiness devolves into grating self-importance

Step back a bit and the Bravery look like a lark: bouncy, bass-driven, fashionista New Yorkers channeling New Order and inadvertently biting the Killers’ style—things could be worse. But zoom in on this overpro-duced second album, dripping with newly emboldened lyrical pretensions, and you’ll find cracks in the enjoyable clichés. A couple of Killers-lite rump-shakers remain, but they’re sunk in the mire by hackneyed ballads about troubled teens (the god-awful “Tragedy Bound”) and choruses that strain for the rafters in the most painfully obvious ways. JOSH MODELL

 

Circa Survive
On Letting Go
ITUNES MYSPACE
A long-distance runaround
to a very forgettable fire

The Clientele God Save the Clientele ITUNES MYSPACE

Rainy-day pop that could stand to get out more often These Londoners specialize in melancholic, Beatles-esque melodies threaded through phrases like “The world is dark” (“No Dreams Last Night”), “You end up alone” (“Isn’t Life Strange?”), and “It’s gonna be a lonely, lonely day” (“The Queen of Seville”). That’s not necessarily a problem, as

Chris Cornell Carry On ITUNES MYSPACE

Grunge forefather suffers from
amnesia—or just bad taste?

Apparently, Chris Cornell spent his grunge glory days wishing that he were in Stone Temple Pilots. On his second solo outing, the former Soundgarden and Audioslave frontman dresses down the faux-Zeppelin balladry of 1999’s Euphoria Morning with heaps of fuzz and cock-rock posturing that suspiciously recall a certain much-maligned San Diego quartet. The opener sounds like a rip of radio smash “Sex Type Thing” and is even called “No Such Thing.” Maybe this is what living in France does to you. KYLE ANDERSON

Left-field sonic
alchemy is
Kenna’s creative
strength.