Sade:
Soldier of Love
Soldier of Love
Allmusic.com Biography by Ed Hogan
When singer Sade and her band of the same name were establishing themselves, their record company, Epic, made a point of printing "Pronounced Shar-day" on the record labels of their releases. Soon enough, the music had no problem with the correct pronunciation. With the breakthrough Billboard Hot 100 Top Ten single "Smooth Operator" propelling the debut Sade album, Diamond Life, to the same spot on the Billboard 200 chart in 1985, the band fast came to epitomize soulful, adult-oriented, sophisti-pop. Though only five more studio albums would follow during the next 25 years, the band's following abated only slightly, and each release was treated like a long-awaited public return of a mysterious yet beloved diva.
Born Helen Folasade Adu in Ibadan, Nigeria, about 50 miles from Lagos, Sade was the daughter of an African father and an English mother. After her mother returned to England, Adu grew up on the North End of London. Developing a good singing voice in her teens, Adu worked part-time jobs in and outside of the music business. She listened to Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Al Green, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Holiday, and studied fashion design at St. Martin's School of Art in London while also doing some modeling on the side.
Around 1980, she started singing harmony with a Latin funk group called Arriva. One of the more popular numbers that the group performed was an Adu original co-written with bandmember Ray St. John, "Smooth Operator." The following year, she joined the eight-piece funk band Pride as a background singer. Pride's opening acts often featured members of the band in different combinations. Pride and their off-shoots performed often around London and stirred up record company interest. Initially, the labels wanted to sign only Sade -- technically a trio featuring Adu, Stuart Matthewman, and Paul Denman -- while the whole of Pride wanted a deal. The members of Pride not involved in the Sade trio eventually told Adu, Matthewman, and Denman to go ahead and sign a deal. Adding keyboardist Andrew Hale, Sade signed to the U.K. division of Epic Records...
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U2:
No Line On The Horizon
No Line On The Horizon
Rollingstone.com Review by David Fricke..."I was born to sing for you/I didn't have a choice but to lift you up," Bono declares early on this album, in a song called "Magnificent." He does it in an oddly low register, a heated hush just above the shimmer of the Edge's guitar and the iron-horse roll of bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. Bono is soon up in thin air with those familiar rodeo yells, on his way to the chorus, which ends with him just singing the word "magnificent," repeating it with relish, stretching the syllables.
But he does it not in self-congratulation, more like wonder and respect, as if in middle age, on his band's 11th studio album, he still can't believe his gift — and luck. Bono knows he was born with a good weapon for making the right kind of trouble: the clean gleam and rocket's arc of that voice. "It was one dull morning/I woke the world with bawling," he boasted in "Out of Control," written by Bono on his 18th birthday and issued on U2's Irish debut EP.
He is still singing about singing, all over No Line on the Horizon, U2's first album in nearly five years and their best, in its textural exploration and tenacious melodic grip, since 1991's Achtung Baby. "Shout for joy if you get the chance," Bono commands, in a text-message cadence and drill sergeant's bark, in "Unknown Caller." He leads by example in the ham-with-wry pop of "I'll Go Crazy If I Don't Go Crazy Tonight" — "Listen for me/I'll be shouting/Shouting to the darkness" — then demands his piece of the din in the glam-fuzz shindig "Get on Your Boots": "Let me in the sound!...Meet me in the sound!" God, guilt, love, sin, terrorism and transcendence — Bono juggles them all here, with the usual cracks at his own hubris. ("Stand up to rock stars," he warns in "Stand Up Comedy." "Be careful of small men with big ideas.")
Bono also keeps coming back to the sheer power and pleasure of a long high note and the salvation you can feel in being heard. "I'm running down the road like loose electricity," he jabbers, with some of that nasal acid of the '66 Bob Dylan, through the hard-rock clatter of "Breathe," "while the band in my head plays a striptease."
It is a strange thing to sing on a record that more often reveals itself in tempered gestures, at a measured pace. (The main exception, the outright frivolity of "Get on Your Boots," comes right in the middle, as if the band thought it needed some kind of zany halftime.) Most of the great — and biggest-selling — U2 albums have been confrontational successes: the dramatic entrance on 1980's Boy; the spiritual-pilgrim reach of 1987's The Joshua Tree; the electro-Weimar whirl of Achtung Baby; the return to basics on 2004's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb. Produced by the now-standard trio of Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois and Steve Lillywhite, No Line on the Horizon is closer to the transitional risks — the Irish-gothic spell of 1984's The Unforgettable Fire, the techno-rock jet lag of 1993's Zooropa — but with a consistent persuasion in the guitar hooks, rhythms and vocal lines.
In "No Line on the Horizon," it is the combination of garage-organ drone, fat guitar distortion and Mullen's parade-ground drumming, the last so sharp and hard all the way through that it's difficult to tell how much is him and how much is looping (that is a compliment). The Edge takes one of his few extended guitar solos at the end of "Unknown Caller," a straightforward, elegiac break with a worn, notched edge to his treble tone. "White as Snow" is mostly alpine quiet — guitar, keyboard, Bono and harmonies, like the Doors' "The Crystal Ship" crossed with an Appalachian ballad. "Cedars of Lebanon" ends the album much as "The Wanderer" did on Zooropa, a triumph of bare minimums (this time it's Bono going in circles, through wreckage, instead of Johnny Cash, who sang "The Wanderer") with limpid guitar and electronics suggesting a Jimi Hendrix love song, had he lived into the digital age.
"Fez — Being Born" is the least linear song on this album (no small achievement), a highway ride in flashback images dotted with Bono's wordless yelps and the descending ring of the Edge's guitar. The last lines actually tell you plenty about U2's songwriting priorities: "Head first, then foot/Then heart sets sail." The big irony: Their singer is one of the most insecure frontmen in the business. Bono knows exactly what a lot of you think of his social activism and flamboyant freelance diplomacy. But the flip side of that bravado, in "I'll Go Crazy..." — "The right to appear ridiculous is something I hold dear" — is a running doubt in Bono's lyrics, that he always goes too far ("Stand Up Comedy") and will never be as good as his ideals. The rising-falling effect of the harmony voices around Bono in the long space-walk "Moment of Surrender" is a perfect picture of where he really wants to be, when he gets to the line about "vision over visibility."
And he's sure he'll never get there on his own. "We are people borne of sound/The songs are in our eyes/Gonna wear them like a crown," Bono crows, next to the Edge's fevered-staccato guitar, near the end of "Breathe" — a grateful description of what it's like to be in a great rock & roll band, specifically this one. Bono knows he was born with a voice. He also knows that without Mullen, Clayton and the Edge, he'd be just another big mouth.
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Radiohead:
OK Computer
OK Computer
Allmusic.com Review by Stephen Thomas Erlewine...
Using the textured soundscapes of The Bends as a launching pad, Radiohead delivered another startlingly accomplished set of modern guitar rock with OK Computer. The anthemic guitar heroics present on Pablo Honey and even The Bends are nowhere to be heard here. Radiohead have stripped away many of the obvious elements of guitar rock, creating music that is subtle and textured yet still has the feeling of rock & roll. Even at its most adventurous — such as the complex, multi-segmented "Paranoid Android" — the band is tight, melodic, and muscular, and Thom Yorke's voice effortlessly shifts from a sweet falsetto to vicious snarls. It's a thoroughly astonishing demonstration of musical virtuosity and becomes even more impressive with repeated listens, which reveal subtleties like electronica rhythms, eerie keyboards, odd time signatures, and complex syncopations. Yet all of this would simply be showmanship if the songs weren't strong in themselves, and OK Computer is filled with moody masterpieces, from the shimmering "Subterranean Homesick Alien" and the sighing "Karma Police" to the gothic crawl of "Exit Music (For a Film)." OK Computer is the album that establishes Radiohead as one of the most inventive and rewarding guitar rock bands of the '90s. More...
Untitled Document
Keyshia Cole:
A Different Me
Allmusic.com Review by Andy Kellman...
A Different Me offers more dimensions, from lyrical and production standpoints,
than Keyshia Cole's first two albums. Everything she recorded prior to this came
from some degree of pain. Even though Just Like You's "Heaven Sent" was as beatific
as anything else on the charts throughout 2008, its sentiment came more from a
sense of relief in the wake of relationships gone sour, and "Let It Go" was made
for the club but dealt with "roaming dogs." Overall, this is Cole's most free-spirited
and adventurous album to date, and it is not without its stretches where reach exceeds
grasp, like the jazzed-up, over-busy statement of purpose "Make Me Over" and the
surprisingly saccharine "This Is Us." Yet there's a core of at least seven songs here
that rate as highly as the best from the first two albums, and they're anything but
reheated. "Don't Stop" beams with energy and pure, uncomplicated joy. "Oh-Oh,
Yeah-Yea" is yearningly seductive, from Cole's pleas to its drawn-out tides of strings.
In "Thought You Should Know," she doesn't drop her guard entirely while revealing more
vulnerability than ever. "No Other" is the only track that sounds cut from the same
cloth as Just Like You, and the resemblance is only in sound, with the equally urgent
and sweepingly dramatic "Shoulda Let You Go" a definite reference, but the emotions
between the two are starkly contrasting, with regret exchanged for aching desire. Cole
pushes herself into new territory and becomes a more versatile songwriter and vocalist
in convincing, frequently thrilling, fashion. Here's where the comparisons begin to
fade away. More...
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