The Big Revival
Kenny Chesney
Kenny Chesney took a year off before recording The Big Revival, and it shows. Cohesive in scope, The Big Revival suggests the veteran country star is determined to extend his two-decade string of top 10 hits — something he has achieved with first single, American Kids.
Chesney has continually tinkered with his sound, growing more introspective while remaining the king of the arena sing-along. Chesney’s forte is that even his rockers offer snapshots of the lives of his fans, as he does here on Beer Can Chicken, which he co-wrote. A rocker like Drink It Up avoids clichés by injecting some real-life gravitas.
Working with longtime co-producer Buddy Cannon, Chesney slips some modern Nashville rhythms and loops into songs like Til It’s Gone and Rock Bottom, yet holds on to the classic-rock guitar sound he loves. But the album’s most powerful moment is the closer If This Bus Could Talk, which traces Chesney’s story from a nervous greenhorn opening for Patty Loveless in 1993 through the twists and turns of a long career.
Today’s country arena rockers may model themselves on Chesney’s good-time style, but The Big Revival proves they still have a thing or two to learn from him.
— Michael McCall
Associated Press
Rose Gold
Walter Mosley
Walter Mosley evokes the curious turns of the Patty Hearst kidnapping saga and the fractured culture of that era in Rose Gold, his latest Easy Rawlins crime thriller.
Rawlins, a black private investigator, follows leads from poor, simmering L.A. streets to secluded beachside mansions and laid-back hippie encampments. His search recalls a time when an heiress like Hearst could be abducted by a band of oddball militants calling themselves the Symbionese Liberation Army.
The heiress whom Rawlins is hired to find is Rosemary Goldsmith, daughter of a wealthy, secretive armaments magnate. The cell that holds her is Scorched Earth, whom authorities view as a crime-prone revolutionary band created by a black former boxer.
There are many twists in Rawlins’ hunt, and more than one mystery to be solved by the much-in-demand private detective. Rose Gold, the 13th entry in the Easy Rawlins series, is the second book finding him back in action after Blonde Faith, which ended with him driving a car off a Pacific cliff.
Fans of Mosley’s private investigator were grateful Rawlins survived, and for good reason: Mosley’s writing gifts go well beyond the gumshoe genre. He weaves in a tense racial element, and raises the level of his achievement.
Rawlins may bump into police corruption, and, like other private eyes, his life is not without fine broads and bad apples. But Mosley’s characters invariably fill out a spectrum of skin shades and display a wide variety of human scruples. Sorting them out is not always easy.
— Kendal Weaver
Associated Press
X
Chris Brown
Five years after Chris Brown’s assault on his then-girlfriend, Rihanna, the R&B star continues to exercise some dubious judgment about the words he uses in his music. “I’ll calculate a home invasion,” he sings in Add Me In, a track from his new album; later, Brown promises to show a woman “what it means to be a victim of love.”
Listening to these tunes (and many others on X), you wonder whether Brown, recently released from jail after serving part of a one-year sentence for violating his probation, might’ve escaped a real awareness of his public persona. But then how to account for the ominous title track, in which he broods over his reputation before growling, “I swear to God I’m moving on”?
What makes the clumsy way Brown handles language even more befuddling is how exacting he remains as a singer and record maker. X contains some of his sharpest work, including Add Me In, a chewy soul-funk tune in which he accents his creamy vocals with percussive gasps a la Michael Jackson.
And Loyal is the latest in a series of Brown singles that pair his coarsest thoughts — in this case, about women he views as gold diggers — with his sleekest beats. It’s nasty enough to make you think Brown has happily taken up the role of R&B’s archvillain — at least until the tender electro-soul cut New Flame.
“I just wanna be the one to do you right,” Brown pleads, and he almost sounds like he knows what that means.
— Mikael Wood
Los Angeles Times