Album Review
Natalie Imbruglia
Glorious: The Singles 97-07
(SonyBMG)
Australian pop singer Natalie Imbruglia burst into the music scene in 1997 with the catchy hit song ``Torn.'' Glorious is a compilation of her best hits in the last 10 years. Imbruglia's best songs, ``Big Mistake,'' ``Smoke,'' ``Wishing I Was There,'' are from her debut album ``Left of the Middle. Her subsequent albums ``White Lilies'' and ``Counting Down the Days'' have failed to replicate her earlier success, with songs such as ``Wrong Impression'' and ``Shiver.''
Imbruglia added five new tracks in the album, including the title track ``Glorious.'' She collaborated with her husband Daniel Johns, who is frontman of Australian rock group Silverchair, on ``Be With You,'' ``Against the Wall'' and ``Stuck on the Moon.''
-Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals
``Lifeline"
(Virgin)
Fresh off nine months of touring, Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals spent a week in a Paris studio recording their latest album, ``Lifeline," on a practically prehistoric 16-track recorder.
Harper makes a pointed note of his band's old-school efforts in the album's liner notes, where he declares ``no computers or Pro tools were used anywhere in the process."
It paid off. ``Lifeline," Harper's ninth studio album, is a deeply spirited, heavily soulful, mostly acoustic compilation that avoids modern technology and its trappings.
Harper makes it apparent that digital tweaking is unnecessary when feeling is present on soul-laden tunes such as ``Fool for a Lonesome Train," which conjures up images of Van Morrison. Or ``Needed You Tonight," a song that repeatedly swells and releases, bringing to mind the b-side to ``Abbey Road."
The bare-bones production style of ``Lifeline" is practically experimental by today's standards, and it's a testament to Harper that he and his band could record a stellar album using outdated technology in a fraction the time it took to create most of the albums currently on Billboard's Top 40.
(The Hartford Courant, distributed by the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service)
Nathaniel Mayer
" Why Don't You Give It to Me?"
Alive
When you're 16, the world is treacherous, filled with barbs and banana peels. The opposite sex is an alien race, and your own gender mates are busy racing you toward some understanding of how things work.
Unfortunately, the same holds true when you're 63. Detroit soul veteran Nathaniel Mayer knows this well, and his latest album -- his second since returning to music in 2002 after decades in the wilderness -- deals with angst that never really goes away.
Propping an old-timer in front of a microphone is a gamble, and the results can be either exploitative or life-affirming. Mayer's new material is the latter, thanks in part to his group of musicians and songwriting partners, including members of Motor City garage-soul kings the Dirtbombs and SSM, as well as Black Keys guitarist Dan Auerbach.
Mayer wears his weariness like a faded tuxedo, and on " I'm a Lonely Man" and " Everywhere I Go," he's haunted by beautiful women past and present, respectively. His creaky, James Brown-like wheeze mixes like whiskey and soda with the group's skuzzy playing.
While Mayer's cohorts sometimes bid for the spotlight, stretching out on two of the album's overlong filler tracks, the soul man upstages everyone with " Why Dontcha Show Me?" -- a tune he wrote himself and sings with little more than a piano for company.
-- Kenneth Partridge (LATimes)