Listen to an audio version of the review here. This week, most music reviewers have only been thinking of one thing: Bruce Springsteen. It seems as if most major magazines and websites have become temporary shrines to the God of the Common Man. While Bruce’s new album is quite good, I wanted to take this opportunity to mention an album that may have been overlooked this week: it’s called “Songs of Mass Destruction,” and it’s by Annie Lennox.
Whereas Springsteen has remained relatively consistent over the span of his career, Annie Lennox has remained consistenly...well, strange. From her first hits with Eurythmics, her partnership with Dave Stewart, to her four solo albums, released amazingly over a period of 15 years, Lennox has worn a lot of hats on that spikey bleached hair of hers: she’s been a soul singer, an electronica maven, a ballad crooner, and even a match for Aretha Franklin.
Lennox’s solo albums have been, generally, well executed and well received. With the exception of her cover album, “Medusa,” both of her previous solo albums, 1992’s “Diva” and 2003’s “Bare,” were produced by Steve Lipson. Lipson, an producer whose work is clearly in the “electro-pop” realm (think Pet Shop Boys and Frankie Goes to Hollywood), made sure that Lennox’s melodic and lyrical songs were couched in layers of beeps and bloops. These were songs made both for ripping it up on the dance floor and driving home in the dark.
While “Songs of Mass Destruction” pays tribute to Lennox’s past, it is a better album in almost every way than any of her previous works. First of all, someone at Arista decided to hire Glen Ballard to produce and Tom Lord-Alge to mix. This was a stroke of brilliance. Ballard, a hitmaker for Alanis Morissette, Dave Matthews, and Michael Jackson, knew enough to make these songs about Annie’s voice, adding just enough instrumentation to wrap everything up neatly. Lord-Alge, one of the most brilliant minds in sound working today, took the tapes and exceeded everyone’s expectations.
The album starts off softly, with a beautiful piano ballad called “Dark Road.” There are almost too many lyrics, which makes the song as unsettling as it is lovely. For me, though, things really kick into high gear with the second track, “Love Is Blind.” The bastard child of Lennox’s work with Stewart and Lipson, this call-and-response song is punctuated by bass drums on the quarter notes and a rolling piano riff.
My two favorite tracks are sandwiched next to each other. “Ghosts In My Machine” begins with a heavily quantized series of piano chords, obviously meant to poke fun at Lennox’s early-90s dance-hall days. But then, the song explodes into a wave of synths, vocals, and keyboard flourishes. And just listen to the compression on those drums!
On first listen, the next track, “Womankind,” sounded a little too preachy to me. But, on repeated listenings, it actually stands out as the strangest -- and strongest -- song on the album. Between Lennox’s sampled trills, Ballard’s surprising production, and Nadirah X’s rap, “Womankind” recalls everything that worked about Eurthymics.
The ballads, especially “Lost,” benefit from the exceptional production; they are far from boring. Lennox’s voice has never sounded better or more like it’s coming from 10 different women. That’s why the “big-name track,” “Sing,” a call to end HIV/AIDS transmission in Africa, is such a disappointment. The song features a cadre of the best female artists in the world — Angelique Kidjo, Beth Orton, Bonnie Raitt, Joss Stone, Madonna, and many others — but the song is just too pedestrian to satisfy me.
But that’s only one exception on an album that proves that Annie Lennox, at age 53, is one of the best, and that “Songs of Mass Destruction” is, very simply, a must-have. |