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No Roots
Arista
THIS LAME-ASS TRIP-HOP ACT IS HUGE IN THE U.K. SO IS ROBBIE WILLIAMS. FUCKIN' BRITS.
In the fine tradition of U.S.-U.K. music relations, an album like No Roots by Faithless topped charts in Britain early this summer and, as usual, didn't make a dent stateside. For once this is a good thing. Crowding in the worst trappings of trip-hop and club music, No Roots is an album aimed at being danceable musically and profound lyrically. But if you remember back, trip-hop was worn out and used up by the time Massive Attack released the genre's apex, Mezzanine, in 1998. Mixing dub-bass lines, programmed beats and lethargic raps about the trials of the everyday was getting stale then, and the paint-by-numbers sound is pure mold now, especially when done by a group trying to balance the delicate aesthetic with Acid House-derived trance. Some of the tracks achieve the exact goals set for them--getting London clubbers to shake their British arses. The production is slick (by Dido's producer brother Rollo Armstrong), but the overall effect is an interchangeable sound that can be heard pulsing from any dance-floor PA. Maxi-Jazz and LSK rap about love ("Love lives on my street") and world politics (the deceptively pro-war "Mass Destruction") over the beats. But the thumping beats are underwritten, overproduced and about as credible as when Tricky started showing up on albums by Live and inviting Cyndi Lauper onto solo outings. Some things are best left across the pond. Along with boiled mutton and Robbie Williams, Faithless is one more thing to add to the list. (Richard Shirk)
Adelaide
Adelaide
Self-released
PORTLAND'S SOOTHING INSTRUMENTALISTS PLAY THE SOUNDTRACK TO YOUR BLISSFULLY BORING LIFE.
When a band that has painstakingly cultivated a visual and sonic presence during live shows releases a CD, logic tells you that something is going to be missing. In the case of Portland's Adelaide and its debut self-titled release, that something is the found 16 mm footage of early 20th-century street scenes the band projects during its hypnotic instrumental sets. Formed in the summer of 2003 by Michael Bauch, Adam Porterfield, Ethan Rose, Bob Muscarella and Ryan Jeffery, Adelaide began playing local clubs and parties where they would succeed in transfixing rooms full of cross-legged onlookers, turning evenings into intense screenings of their antiquated footage. The magic of Adelaide, though, is in the music. On the self-titled release, the band members blend their Rhodes, guitar, bass, synthesizer and drum parts into quietly pulsing dirges that fade out as seamlessly as they fade in. The songs rarely build to anything more than a hushed ripple, at most dabbling in some frantic-by-comparison high-end synth, as on the woozy and wonderful lead-off track, "Games Without End." The music does nothing to make the listener sit up and take notice, opting instead to give texture to scenes,. Live, Adelaide focuses its accompaniment on the film footage, the extended songs giving listeners the feeling of watching a dream in which scenes repeat themselves and nothing gets done. But Adelaide's 32-minute album seems a more appropriate soundtrack to the banalities of cleaning the living room than the dreaminess of watching long-forgotten storefronts pass in a yellowed haze. (Mark Baumgarten)
Adelaide celebrates the release of its album with Invisible and Cherry Blossoms on Wednesday, Aug. 11, at Berbati's Pan, 231 SW Ankeny St., 248-4579. 9:30 pm. $4. 21+.
WWeek 2015