“The Element of Freedom,” (J) Alicia Keys
Through most of “The Element of Freedom,” Alicia Keys sings processionals. They’re slow, clean songs with semi-classical acoustic piano, soft-pop chord changes and simple, prominent hip-hop beats. They’ve nearly got a social purpose: They underline acts of inspired dignity, or informed desire, or virtuous defiance.
Even when she’s singing about losing it over a guy, as she does eight or nine times on the record, it comes across as the weakness of the mighty.
Keys has enough presence of mind to reflect that love is a calculated risk, and can, given the right circumstances, produce greatness squared. (She’s found a way to sing about loneliness without demeaning herself: “These king-sized sheets,” she sings in “This Bed,” “need more than just a queen.”)
Keys started out more or less within the notion of neo-soul, but has moved on. This steadily anthemic music harks back less to the 1970s — soul’s golden age — than to the late ’80s.
The self-possessed swoons line up into something like a concept album. But all that queenliness, and the sameness of the tempo, start to wear you down. It’s not until the 10th track, “Put It in a Love Song,” that the record starts to bristle with a less regal impulse: flirting.
Swizz Beatz comes in as the producer and Beyonce as guest singer, and the two women knuckle down extracting promises (“Whoo!”) from a guy to bare his heart in a song (“Oh-oh-oh!”) or at least a text message. It’s got a quantitatively different energy, air-lifted from somewhere else — the thumping, step-dancing atmosphere of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies,” basically.Ben Ratliff, The New York Times
“Buffet Hotel” (Mailboat) Jimmy Buffett
For almost four decades Jimmy Buffett has been writing the soundtrack to a life of weekend jaunts, to cleanse the mind from the drudgery of the working life — and post-retirement vacations with nothing more pressing than the hours and which pair of sunglasses to wear while killing them. There are consequences only for not giving yourself over to leisure.
Certainly relaxation is a key theme of Buffett’s songs, and that is evident in the words and in the only half-cocked attention paid to writing them. There are a handful of elegantly constructed numbers on “Buffet Hotel,” (named after a real hotel in Mali, hence the spelling), Buffett’s 28th studio album, and the first following a brief, successful two-album major-label dance. But mostly the ones with elegance are those others wrote (“Life Short Call Now,” by Bruce Cockburn) or the ones Buffett had help with (“Surfing in a Hurricane,” written with Will Kimbrough).
In his younger days Buffett’s brand of country-rock was soft, and it has only loosened from there. His voice is perversely inflexible, forever lilting upward and at this point perhaps best suited to children’s music. The end of the album takes a sharp turn toward buzz-kill, though. “A Lot to Drink About” is Buffett’s Michael Moore moment, an indictment of the system that creates the leisure class that embraces him so assiduously. Jon Caramanica, The New York Times
