CD reviews: Nicki Minaj, Demolition String Band and more

The mercurial Nicki Minaj seems to have lost her way on her new album.

Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded
Nicki Minaj (Universal)

Any pop star can cut a mediocre, unmemorable set. To make a genuinely bad album on a major-label budget takes some skill and invention.

A major-label pop star and thats what Nicki Minaj has become, no matter how strenuously she denies it can afford the most expensive beats and backing musicians. To take prime hooks and choruses and make an unholy mess of them is hard to do. It requires shuffling the deck so thoroughly that you cant make a decent hand out of what youre dealt, no matter how many good cards youve got.

Pink Friday: Roman Reloaded is an awful album, but it only could have been created by an artist of considerable talent. All the elements that have made Minaj a star are here: her fine rapping and acceptable singing, her ear for catchy refrains, her funny voices, her feistiness, her imagination and her commendable willingness to make a fool out of herself in the name of entertainment. Every song contains a couplet, a stanza or a brief bridge that reminds listeners of the mercurial figure who raised expectations on the 2009 Beam Me Up Scotty mixtape that remains Minajs high-water mark. But those moments are framed so badly by cruise-control sex rhymes, trendy Euro-electro hijinks, impersonal, freeze-dried synthesizer riffs and unwelcome guest appearances that Roman cannot gather any momentum. A saboteur could not have undermined Minajs artistic intentions any more effectively.

It is ironic that Minaj, who announced herself to the world as a Day-Glo madwoman unchained, is so willing to subordinate herself to her producers demands. The second half of Roman Reloaded is thick with glossy dance-pop, much of which feels as i! f it wer e written for and rejected by Rihanna. Spaceships, Pound the Alarm, Marilyn Monroe and other tracks shoot for the top of the charts at all costs and leave Minaj, whose placeholder voice will never be confused with that of Lady Gaga, sounding like a bystander on her own work. Occasionally shell surface from the mix and get off a bizarre rhymed couplet just to let you know shes still there. But then another wave of synthesizer smacks her, and shes swamped again.

Just as problematic is the front half, where Minaj sticks to the rapping she often does well. The Roman of the title is allegedly a hip-hop alter ego: an insane gay man with a hectoring mom (Minaj also plays the mother). Yet Minaj fails to bring Roman alive with any detail, depth or humor and when she raps as herself, she is so obsessed with putting down her competitors that she cant be bothered to say anything interesting. The album bottoms out with Sex in the Lounge, a glib and frequently disgusting collaboration with Lil Wayne that plays as a parody of Drake.

Mind you, Minajs not going anywhere: This album will spin off hits all summer. But the old dream of her as the wacky, nonconformist savior of the poker-faced and homogenized pop market is dying an ugly death.

Tris McCall

The fall of Roman

Gracious Days
Demolition String Band (Varese Fontana)

There are many country-folk revivalists in New Jersey, but few as reliably entertaining as Hobokens Demolition String Band. Singers Elena Skye and Boo Reiners and their accompanists are traditionalists, and their appreciation of old-time bluegrass is absolutely sincere theres nothing staid about their delivery, which has the swing of Ricky Skaggs and the comfort of Jerry Garcias Old and in the Way. These city slickers sing and play like a congenial aunt and uncle in a West Virginia mining town. Theyre also terrific guitarists, and the album is framed by instrumentals: Different versions of Skyes weeping Jethros Lullabye open and close the set, and Reiners Booj! o Breakd own burns like a shot of bourbon. As usual, the pair has come up with inspired covers: Their take on the Ramones Questioningly refashions the ballad as a backwoods ramble, and Alibis honors the memory and roughneck approach of Blaze Foley. As you might expect from an album so resolutely Appalachian, the financial crisis casts a shadow over the songs; outstanding originals Misfortune and Under the Weather sound more desperate than the Woody Guthrie cover (Hard Aint it Hard).

Tris McCall

Gone
Vacationer (Downtown)

Kenny Vasoli used to be the singer and principal songwriter for the Starting Line, a Philadelphia band that was in the upper tier of the power-pop bands banging around the Warped Tour circuit. After that well ran dry, he tried his hand at experimental alt-rock with his Person L project. When Person L did not set the scene on fire, a Starting Line reunion seemed like the only way to go. Instead, Vasoli has rechristened himself Vacationer and immersed himself in trip-hop, Pet Sounds, the High Llamas, 60s soundtrack music and Vampire Weekends preppy take on Afropop. Gone, the first Vacationer album, is a dream-trip to the tropics with just a bit of an uneasy chill hidden in the trade winds. Muffled funk beats, samples with sudden endings, sugar-sprinkle organ, reverbed backing harmonies, thick dub bass and Vasolis relaxed if slightly paranoid vocal performances which may shock those who remember how he used to scream with his old band add to the atmosphere of a journey abroad that has slid into wistfulness and decadence. Highlights include the gauzy Having it All and the brisk Summer End, which translates the Starting Lines urgent cold-weather power-pop into a California dialect.

Tris McCall

The Soviet Experience: Volume II
Pacifica Quartet (Cedille)

In its second release of music by Shostakovich and his contemporaries, the Pacifica Quartet gives vibrant performances. Performing the main composers first four string quartets and Prokofievs Quartet No.! 2 on tw o CDs, the group shows clear, well-coordinated intent, with equal and impressive strength from each player.

With seamless ensemble, the quartet plunges into vigorous, dense passages. The instruments are carefully balanced but theres still grit to the playing. They vividly portray the range of moods that Shostakovichs tangy harmonies and folk influences convey: placid, playful, panicky, mournful and mysterious. They are especially winning in the defiant, persevering Fourth Quartet finale. The musicians also show admirable technique and unfettered musicality in the solo laments that Shostakovich lays over sympathetic sighing accompaniment. The tone can grow shrill at the upper extreme of the strings range, but always seems appropriate to the music.

The Prokofiev links smoothly to the lighter side of the Shostakovich quartets and shares their vitality and unexpected barbs, but doesnt quite match their imagination.

Ronni Reich