Danger Mouse's guest-heavy collaboration with Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous, Dark Night of the Soul, finally gets an official release this week, following a legal dispute with EMI Records that shelved the album last year. It's a more unnerving listen now than its creators intended: Linkous committed suicide in March, shooting himself through the hearta violent final act ominously foreshadowed several times on Dark Night of the Soul (The Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne opens the disc with a fantasy about murder/suicide, and another suicide victim, Vic Chesnutt, guests on a track). Those ghosts eclipse the album's considerably lighter moments, though. James Mercer contributes a symphonic romp about pleasant dreams, and the one song Linkous sings, "Daddy's Gone," is actually among the album's sweetest. Director David Lynch is responsible for the album's two most memorably creepy songs, as well as a book of colorful, mysterious photography that was intended to be packaged with the album (it was released separately when the album was delayed). The book is worth seeking out for David Lynch enthusiasts, but the album itself is nothing special. It's just another good but not great Danger Mouse project.
On her divisive new album MAYA, M.I.A. performs the unimpressive feat of taking the sounds of modern pop, electronic and dancehall music and turning them into something very, very ugly. Save for a handful of incongruously catchy grabs for the pop charts, it's a harsh, discordant album, all industrial clatter and suffocating digital compression. Maybe if she demonstrated the charisma she brought to past albums, the singer would have been able to find some order in all this hateful noise, but M.I.A. is surprisingly unlikable here. When she's not boasting that she runs that club, that everybody knows her name or that she's got "sticky, sticky weed," she's spreading paranoia about the government spying on us through "the Google." For listeners who for some reason craved a Ke$ha album with added misanthropy, conspiracy theories and drilling noises, your wish has been granted.
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Mark Kozelek goes completely solo on his fourth Sun Kil Moon album, Admiral Fell Promises, delivering the expected set of no-frills sad ruminations.
R.E.M.'s murky third LP, 1985's Fables of the Reconstruction, the one R.E.M. album I wasn't completely in love with as a kid, gets the deluxe re-release treatment today. After all these years, I still can't completely crack the album, but maybe that's its appeal. It's the one first-wave R.E.M. album that's truly challenging, removing the band from the melodic comfort zone they sometimes feel back on too quickly. Newcomers are still better off spending their money on the far more essential Reckoning reissue, though.
Also hitting shelves today: New ones from Sting, School of Seven Bells, Crowded House and Korn.
