POP/ROCK: Bono and the Edge, "Music From Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark" (Interscope)
This album is not unlike 1995's "Passengers," an ethereal side project featuring U2, Brian Eno and Luciano Pavarotti. It was a curiosity, a U2 footnote with slick moments. Same goes for this Broadway experiment, which the boys (minus drummer Larry Mullen Jr. and bassist Adam Clayton) share with the principals in the cast, including Reeve Carney (Peter Parker), Jennifer Damiano (love interest M.J.), and Patrick Page (the Green Goblin).
The album opens with one of those tingly guitar teases from the Edge, an auspicious start indeed. That turns into an overture jacked by plunging strings and percussive menace, a merging of matinee goofery and U2's talent for summoning chills.
There's classic Bono wordplay to be found on the album's highlight, the stormy "Boy Falls From the Sky," which Carney delivers with growl, not unlike the Irish frontman he obviously emulates. Bono and the Edge make appearances on four of the 14 tracks, including first single "Rise Above," a churning rumination on being lonely in a city of ambition.
The U2ers disappear for a while as does the music's ability to inspire but the guys return for militaristic disco oddity "A Freak Like Me Needs Company," a self-effacing gem that the Goblin's Page delivers with Buster Poindexter camp. The song works as a slam on overindulgence not just the musical's, but Bono & Co.'s glammier moments, 1997's "Discotheque" included.
The album ends with a massive whiff, the titular "Turn Off the Dark," a spacey, wind-chimey patience-tester that sounds like Spinal Tap covering the Moody Blues. OK, gentlemen, your sojourn into Broadway was a noble effort. Now, where's that new U2 album?
- SEAN DALY, ST. PETERSBURG TIMES
Cults, "Cults" (In the Name of)
The Brooklyn duo of Madeline Follin and Brian O'Blivion first got attention with a three-song EP early in 2010. So it's taken an eternity in Internet time for the band's self-titled debut, which is the first release on Lily Allen's label. So what's the buzz about?
For starters, it was the single "Go Outside," which cleverly boosted the intriguing factor of a super-catchy, Supremes-flavored, girl-group throwback song by dressing it up with the sampled voice of People's Temple doomsday cult leader Jim Jones. The rest of "Cults" isn't quite so entrancing, but it's easy to be smitten with Follin's lovelorn teenage-dreamer vocals as she and O'Blivion update '60s pop truisms that are still pretty difficult to resist, nearly half a century later.
