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By GINA VIVINETTO, ALAN RITTNER, ROBERT FRIEDMAN and BRIAN ORLOFF
© St. Petersburg Times, published January 14, 2001
PRU, PRU (CAPITOL) R&B singer Pru grew up in Houston with a free-spirited mom who sometimes took her kid to the night club where she tended bar, allowing li'l Pru to sing between acts. Her singing was further honed at a performing arts high school and, later, at Texas Southern University.
Pru's self-titled debut shows that all the attention paid off. Not only can Pru sing like an R&B angel, Little Miss Creative co-wrote and co-produced almost every song.
And, the songs are pretty good. Like her contemporaries Angie Stone and Jill Scott, Pru is an artist who understands her roots, paying homage to Smokey Robinson's Tracks of My Tears on the first single, Candles. Later, she offers a funky, Latin-tinged hip hop cover of Sade's Smooth Operator. Why? Who knows, but it sounds nice. Like Sade, Pru sings simply, avoiding embarrassing vocal acrobats and bombast.
A few minor quibbles: 183 Miles, with its countdown of a chorus, is a fun jaunt, but you start feeling those miles after four minutes and counting. Pru's production, also, is too fussy and slick for my taste; I like my R&B served with a bit more grit. But this stuff will sound lovely on the radio, better than your average FM faux soul.
I hear Pru's live show is something else, and, good news for Tampa Bay: Pru performs at Club 901 during Super Bowl weekend. GRADE: B.
- GINA VIVINETTO, Times pop music critic
WU-TANG CLAN: THE W (LOUD) Count out the RZA at your peril. Yeah, Wu-Tang's last was pretty flabby, and the solo projects probably peaked with Ghostface Killah's and Raekwon's debuts. So, maybe RZA has become more influence than innovator. But that sure doesn't explain Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, where by bearing down on songwriting (atmosphere he can do in his sleep) he produced a soundtrack that topped anything Isaac Hayes or Marvin Gaye ever came up with.
And it doesn't explain this, the full Clan's third album. If it can't touch the first for sheer immediacy, it's still proof of the group's indomitability.
RZA's sound is like no one else's: stark, spacy, the sound of weed-fueled bull sessions around the TV, of the projects as graveyards, of sleeping with both eyes open because you're never sure when a bullet might crash through your wall. It's as inventive as the Bomb Squad's, but where Public Enemy's albums were like a squadron of fighter jets strafing the corridors of D.C., Wu-Tang's are far more subtle and intimate.
Listen to the way a snatch of Stax-style soul horns resolves the haunted-sewer sonics of Careful (Click Click), gun blasts careen through the Junior Reid sample of One Blood Under W, and the drum track of Redbull stutters periodically like heart arrhythmia. Add the blood-soaked Hollow Bones, which with its gruff sampled moan looped over a blues-guitar strum -- not even the drum track is touched up -- makes the leap into fable.
It's one of the group's strengths that it's not just street. It's also funny, and it's here that the incarcerated Ol' Dirty Bastard is missed. He makes one (live) appearance, sounding as if he were recorded on a two-track, on Conditioner, and it's touching and amusing but undermined somewhat by Snoop Dogg, an empty technician who's becoming the rap equivalent of Lenny Kravitz or Christina Aguilera.
As always there's the frustration of a group with nine prodigious MCs; you sometimes feel as if you're just getting to know one when another grabs the baton. Still, each one makes himself felt, notably Ghostface, who sounds on the verge of breaking down on I Can't Go to Sleep. That song is a stroke, a rebuke to complacent self-pity, with Ghostface and RZA blubbering through a catalog of assassinations and other assorted evils only to be ordered to "stop your crying, be a man" by none other than Isaac Hayes. GRADE: A-.
- ALAN RITTNER, Times staff writer
MEAT PUPPETS, GOLDEN LIES (BREAKING RECORDS) The DIY ethic of alt-rock generally disdains virtuosity, so this generation's would-be Claptons and Hendrixes tend to avoid calling attention to themselves.
Instead, they are more likely to inoculate their instrumental heroics against runaway pretensions by masking them beneath deadpan vocals, a la Dinosaur Jr.'s J Mascis or Built to Spill's Doug Martsch.
It is a style virtually invented 20 years ago by the Meat Puppets' Curt and Cris Kirkwood. On albums such as Up on the Sun and Forbidden Places, the Kirkwood brothers honed an organic guitar/bass interplay that made them come across as the slightly deranged cousins of the bearded guys in ZZ Top. As Curt droned vocals about monsters, elves and extraterrestrials, the brothers churned out strangely compelling riffs that got catchier with repeated listening.
But the formula has been broken on Golden Lies. After years of drug problems, Cris has disappeared. Curt has surrounded himself with compatible talent, including ex-Bob Mould bassist Andrew Duplantis and Doug Sahm's drummer son, Shandon. But the results only occasionally add up.
Things start promisingly. The first three full songs -- Armed and Stupid, I Quit and Lamp -- capture the Puppets' traditional spirit of New West slacker psychedelia. But then the new Puppets start making questionable forays into sound effects, loops and ersatz rap, and too many of the later songs are straightforward and pedestrian.
The new lineup has talent, so the next effort may produce something more consistently faithful to the memory of the irreplaceable sound the Kirkwood brothers originated. GRADE: B
- ROBERT FRIEDMAN, Times staff writer
VARIOUS ARTISTS, BADLANDS: A TRIBUTE TO BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN'S NEBRASKA (SUB POP) I'm a wee bit skeptical of tribute albums. In the past there have been some real stinkers. Like, for instance, Madonna covered by '80s hair band Flock of Seagulls or worse (shudder), a 25th anniversary celebration of Abba tunes done by various Euro-pop artists. Judging by past decisions, record company execs haven't been known to make the brightest choices regarding the ultimate tribute album. That said, Badlands: A Tribute to Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska certainly does not fall into the aforementioned category. Whether this is attributed to the sheer power of Springsteen's emotive songs or the five-star roster of artists performing them, the album's mood echoes its 1982 predecessor with chilling accuracy.
Sparsely recorded by Springsteen with four tracks in his bedroom, Nebraska was releasedto much acclaim and high sales. The album's dejected songs read like short stories, each capturing with bleak musicianship the tragic aspects in the lives of their pathetic characters. For example, Chrissie Hynde's version of the title track recalls a grisly murder with ethereal, folky sensibility. Other tracks continue the sentiment associated with the shady underbelly of American society, most notably folkie Dar Williams' rendition of Highway Patrolman.
Ben Harper infuses Springsteen's My Father's House with soul. The duet between husband and wife Michael Penn and Aimee Mann, Reason to Believe, provides the somber album with a speck of hope, as well as one of the only tracks with a semi-existent chorus. In addition to the ten tracks which make up Nebraska, listeners are treated to three bonus tracks written and recorded by Springsteen during his Nebraska sessions. Especially stunning is Johnny Cash's version of I'm on Fire. GRADE: A-
- BRIAN ORLOFF, Times correspondent