Mos Def, “The Ecstatic” (Downtown) When the world first heard Mos Def’s 2006 album “True Magic,” an offering executed with such apathy that copies were sold without liner notes or cover art, there was plenty of reason to worry that America’s favorite rapper-actor had lost interest in his recording career.
Those fears can be put to rest thanks to “The Ecstatic.” Mos Def’s latest album should remind fans of the Brooklyn native what made them fall in love with him. His 1999 breakthrough, “Black on Both Sides,” demonstrated his bona fides in social commentary. Fortunately, “Ecstatic” offers a pleasing mix of both ear and mind candy.
Thematically, the album’s touchstone is hope and the African-American community’s struggle to find it. Take “Auditorium”: “You feel it in the streets, people breathe without hope/ They goin’ through the motion, they dimmin down they focus,” Mos Def intones over a Madlib beat.
“The focus gettin’ clear and the light turn sharp/And the eyes go teary, the mind grow weary.”
Joining Madlib on the production side of the album are the Neptunes, Oh No, the late J. Dilla and Mr. Flash, who produced the album’s climactic centerpiece, “Life in Marvelous Times,” which finds a measure of solace amid the record’s bleak pastiche of drug addictions, pandemic flu and violence.
— Alex Baldinger, The Washington Post
Modest Mouse, “No One’s First, and You’re Next” (Epic) The eight songs on Modest Mouse’s first release in two years are not, unfortunately, groundbreaking new material. The EP “No One’s First, and You’re Next” is culled primarily from outtakes from the band’s last two full-length releases, 2007’s “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank” and 2004’s “Good News for People Who Love Bad News,” with the addition of two new tracks.
Yet, it’s still a surprisingly cohesive and well-structured album. It burrows deeper into the maniacally mutated Americana genre the band created with the release of “Good News.” There are gritty country choruses, undulating prog-influenced guitar solos, New Orleans brass, and layers of reverb and distorted instrumentals. While Modest Mouse has lost the quirky song structure and lo-fi ethos that made its earlier albums unique and engaging, “No One’s First” does reinstill the fact that the group is the master of conflicting emotions, dishing out doses of melancholy, joy, inspiration and spontaneity in every song.
— Katherine Silkaitis, The Philadelphia Inquirer
Gabriel Faure’s “Requiem,”
Laurence Equilbey conducting
Accentus and members of L’Orchestre National de France
Those listeners whose ears for the Faure “Requiem” were trained by listening to the renowned Charles Dutoit recording with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra will be shocked by how different a piece this is under French conductor Laurence Equilbey.
Equilbey uncovers so many references outside the work itself that hers becomes the more serious interpretation. She heightens the ways in which the piece seems by turns antique and forward-looking. French chant, plain and one-dimensional, surfaces as a lovely point of great peace in the “Offertorium.” The lush-orchestra Faure sound that was emulated by generations of later composers surfaces beautifully in a fat horn solo, and with rich strings.
— Peter Dobrin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
