Minnie Driver
Playing the role of a sleepy-voiced Appalachian chanteuse, Minnie Driver achieves a quiet success with Everything I’ve Got In My Pocket.
Unlike the typical product of Hollywood’s celebrity culture, Driver wrote all of the album’s lyrics and chose to showcase them in the decidedly stripped-down acoustic and earthy genre of alt-country. Behind atmospheric guitars and a group that consists of members of The Wallflowers and Pete Yorn’s band, Driver conjures up memories of a younger Lucinda Williams or a current Gillian Welch.
Driver focuses on detail and seeks to create a certain type of mood. Her first single “Invisible Girl” begins with a meticulous observation: “Panda eyes and your sister’s dress that you took and you tore / And you know that you got a long walk home.” The song itself is a perfect example of Driver’s strengths. With her slight country twang and phrasing that elegantly trips over some words and combines others, she beautifully murmurs the lyrics in front of a musical landscape that could be from any American outback.
On the album, none of the songs deal with fame, success or anything remotely celeb-oriented. It’s as if Driver has stepped into the life of one of her characters and gives one of her most flawless performances to date. The only misstep is Driver’s cover of the Springsteen classic “Hungry Heart,” where her singing sounds stilted and passive. It’s a rare low point on an album that points to Driver’s future success as a songwriter and a musician.
Robert Downey, Jr.
There’s nothing really wrong with Robert Downey, Jr.’s debut album, The Futurist. He can sing. The production is nearly flawless. His voice is bolstered here and there by a light groove. It’s actually an impeccably good-sounding release except that Downey fails to offer anything distinctive.
The disc could have been produced by a standard adult contemporary star like Phil Collins or Michael Bolton. There’s nothing remarkable about Downey’s singing except on Yes’s “Your Move” and Charlie Chaplin’s “Smile.” The title track never really explains what Downey means by the word “futurist” and instead relies on a weak chorus of “They’ll take the walk / We’ll sage the world / Sounds like October / A Futurist nose / Our furious, curious, fantasist code.”
Other songs, like “Broken,” fare better. The song contains a neat riff where the instrumental background rises in volume and comes to the forefront of the track and Downey showcases some rock ‘n roll sensibility.
However, the moment is only thirty seconds long and the rest of the album dissipates into elevator Muzak—perfectly attuned tunes that are neither offensive nor attractive to the ear.
Lindsay Lohan
Overexposure queen Lindsay Lohan started gracing magazine pages without much of a resume. She had done one or two films but hardly anything else. Not since J. Lo has someone achieved celebrity by doing so little, and, like J. Lo, she decided to launch a music career. Her first single, “Rumors” asserted that people were talking endlessly about her and precipitated her debut album Speak, where she sounds like Vanessa Carlton, Amy Lee and Kylie Minogue with way too many problems and paparazzi.
Her influences are all over the map, with one song, “Disconnected,” sounding like an Avrilized version of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android.” None of the imitations come off as genuine or even good, as her voice often sounds sharp and off-pitch. Whether it’s because of possible digital manipulation or the use of two different singers, the vocals on “Rumors” do not sound as if they were sung by the same person as the rest of the album.
In fact, there hasn’t been such shoddy packaging and production since Kelly Osbourne’s critically bulldozed debut. The album’s lyrics are sexual but trite, the production trips from neo disco to Pink rock and, perhaps most unfortunately, the requisite star power is decidedly missing.
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