1-Star album reviews for 2010...so far...

Spring is here - as you can tell by the lovely weather peppering the country. So it's time to reflect, time to look at the turkeys I've been served - no thanks given from me to them in return. Here now are the albums that have received the lowball 1-star rating* from me this year - so far - there are still nearly four months to go of course...

BON JOVI
The Circle

You can almost feel Jon Bon Jovi racing to the chorus on every song on The Circle; in that sense the album's title is strangely prescient as it is exactly this style of songwriting - exacerbating that early tendency for a one-size-fits-every-song-chorus - that has marked the compositions of Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora for the last two decades. The band hasn't written anything resembling a decent song since the title track to 1992's Keep the Faith. That's an appalling strike rate and it's frankly unforgivable that enough sub-Springsteen dolts exist to cheer these ponies round and round the track. In recent years the blue-collar ethos has been in overdrive with ventures towards the country market. There are songs on The Circle that have Sambora trying to repeat the talk-box hook of Livin' on a Prayer. There are songs that sound like U2 - are we supposed to trust Jon more than Bono because he's still in blue denim? - and there are hackneyed phrases about not being able to turn back on the highway of life. Bon Jovi needs to stop making records. Please, let this one be the band's last.

TAMI NEILSON
The Kitchen Table Sessions: Volume 1

Tami Neilson's previous album, Red Dirt Angel, gave me a huge laugh when she sang "I'll give you all my cuddles and kisses/I'll call you Mr if you call me Mrs". It was - I was sure - a joke. But no, Neilson was serious. And this lyric had been passed through any self-editing process and allowed to stand on the record. She had also attempted a rather poor Amy Winehouse impersonation on the Stars in Their Eyes TV show. No, seriously. Here now we have The Kitchen Table Sessions and there's the very real threat from the title's Volume 1 announcement that more hackneyed countrypolitan folk could be with us very soon. Neilson is Canadian but based in Auckland and here - singing around the table at the family home on a return trip last year - she ruins Dave Dobbyn's Slice of Heaven by trying to give it a bluegrass makeover. There's a hidden bonus track where Neilson country-croons through Scribe's Not Many. No, seriously. And I see she's being mentioned as a great Kiwi country hope. Are we that desperate to create a country genre here? Neilson has no talent and we're being sold a lie because she's from Canada. I don't understand the need for this.

JACKIE BRISTOW
Freedom

Bristow is forever chasing the dream - and clearly is working hard. The inside cover to Freedom tells us that she is now in Austin, Texas. She moved there in 2008 to "follow my musical journey and dream". Presumably that dream and journey involves writing hackneyed country-pop twaddle that feels completely uninspired and is without much thought. Seems a strange dream to have - but it's certainly the path that Bristow is following. If we rewind the clock over a decade (back to 1995) she was escaping New Zealand to Australia to chase the dream and to follow the journey. And in Sydney she released a couple of albums that were not very inspiring and said very little. New Zealand is paid tribute with the closing song here, Aotearoa. They lyrics talk about being barefoot on the beach, just a Pakeha girl, drinking beer - from there we are told it's the land of the long white cloud and this Pakeha girl sings us a verse in Te Reo. It is the worst kind of song - you have to assume it is a joke even though you know that there's no way it is.

DAI HENWOOD
Dai Another Day

The ubiquity of Dai Henwood on TV3 means that many people will be interested in this: a CD/DVD combo. Please, don't be. It is a terrible piece of product and I assume there will be many complaints to Consumer Affairs. Dai Another Day is guilty of false advertising...it's being billed as a comedy album. I've no doubt that Henwood is probably a nice guy, makes his mates laugh at the pub and there are some people that find his short-man jokes and annoyingly self-referential shtick ("I'm just a Kiwi trying to have a good time" he says over and over) funny. Well, that's fair enough. Some people in this country like Midnight Youth too. But I'm just telling you - as a fact - that this CD is not funny. And that the only thing vaguely humorous about this comedy album is that one of the major labels in our country deems it worthwhile to sign Henwood and to promote his wares rather than give a Kiwi band with decent songs a chance (there must be one out there, right?) Henwood uses the word "intense" about as logically as most people seem to use the word literally these days. The fact this CD/DVD exists is (literally) very sad.

BOX JUICE
One Heart Many Lives

The best way to explain the music of Box Juice is to think of the most obvious touchstones in commercial reggae. And then imagine their worst material. So take Bob Marley's least vital music - his Three Little Birds, for example - and then strip any originality from it and imagine the most basic bar-band vamping and you have some idea of the flavour of Box Juice. It's a bland stew of the very basic reggae tenets - think of Herbs and Katchafire, the two bands that already work on the premise of dumbing down Marley's most obvious work and then forget any of the magic that Herbs and Katchafire have, on occasion, offered. The faux-preaching of Pick Up the Knowledge and Find Your Strength is laughable. And if New Zealand is to ever lift itself up out of the funk created from the plethora of mediocre-at-best BBQ Reggae stylists then we need to start ignoring bands like Box Juice; the band's music is as tasteless as their name and near-comical appropriation of reggae colours.

STEVIE STARR
We Hope in All Things New

Stevie Starr's music has been described as being influenced by Radiohead and Arvo Part. I'm sorry, but that is ridiculous. I have Radiohead and Arvo Part albums in my collection. And a lot of other things. The idea of picking two names with credibility and putting them together to suggest musical bookends - filling the in-between with his own empty songs - is rather tasteless. You don't see me telling people that my writing is influenced by Charles Shaar Murray and Peter Carey. Because why would I say that? But, yes, I've read books by both of them. Big deal. Lots of people have. So that angered me when I first listened to Starr's album - that thought lurked; that idea that he would think he was clever by forcing that comparison. His songs sound like Jeff Buckley and Radiohead leftovers. They don't even sound that good. They sound like an average musician who has been told by everyone close to him that he is a lot more talented than he is. And that has resulted in absurd press-release quotes and clippings calling the songs a blend of classical compositions and sweeping pop. No. He should have called the album We Hype in All Things Now.

DRAGON
Happy I Am

Mark Williams sings the songs now and this reformed version of Dragon is really a chance for Todd Hunter to release inferior songs that trace around the ideas first espoused in the pub-rock paradise of the late 1970s and early 1980s. There is no reason for Dragon to exist in this day and age; not beyond playing the old material. And really, if we're being honest, when do you really expect to hear a Dragon song, outside of an episode of Outrageous Fortune, at a provincial bar you wished you hadn't walked into or when Rain blares out over the speakers at a sports ground as the covers are being prepared to protect the wicket? There is no new reason for the old material, really. And the old reasons do not suit the new material, which also happens to sound thin, pathetically so. Williams does his best, but this is a guy who is more famous for failing regularly than he is for succeeding. A better thing for Marc Hunter's legacy would have been for Todd and the rest of the assembled crew to just call it a day.

DANE RUMBLE
The Experiment

Dane Rumble was involved with the New Zealand hip-hop/pop act The Fast Crew. They were more about pop than hip-hop, singing quickly rather than rapping - and it all felt like a cartoon. Now Rumble is a solo act and is unashamedly pushing the pop music plough - which means people will defend this album as being good pop music, or that terrible anti-statement, "it's good for what it is". Well, it isn't. It's a bunch of really awful songs that feel interchangeable. Perhaps Always Be Here stands out - but maybe that's mostly for the purloined riff from Rick Springfield's Jessie's Girl. The 11 tunes that make up The Experiment sound revoltingly thin. Think of Zed, the feelers, Opshop, Midnight Youth - and add a new name to that list. This will be shoved down people's faces as being great new music from New Zealand. And it's not. It's horrible. And everyone involved should feel very ashamed. They are selling a lie. At one point when Rumble's language gets colourful it seems so wrong. Because prior to that it sounded like The Jonas Brothers or something that might appear on a Disney Channel show. Inside the album you can sign up to win an iPhone.

DIRTY SESH
Sic Love

The two things most people will now know about Kiwi rapper Dirty Sesh are that he had a very graphic video banned - conveniently, given that it announced this nobody to the country right in time for his album - and he is the son of comedian Mike King. Both of those facts have nothing to do with the music on his album, Sic Love. They are irrelevant details. This album, released by a major record company in New Zealand, is basically the new Eminem album. It's a good thing that Marshall Mathers is basically retired because Dirty Sesh has stolen everything he has to offer from the Eminem records he clearly grew up listening to. Bad choice of words there though, suggesting he has grown up - Sic Love is filled with juvenile, exaggerated, unrealistic tales; alternating between inaccurate and implausible, all set to the same generic beats you will have heard on the Smashproof and Young Sid albums. It is sad to think that money goes towards these projects - there is nothing of value on this record at all.

JOHN BUTLER TRIO
April Uprising

If you needed any proof that John Butler's do-gooder-with-dreads shtick has a shelf-life then grab hold of April Uprising; it's been pushed to the front of the shelf, hurriedly, but to tune into any of the overripe 15 tracks is the aural equivalent of unscrewing the lid of a milk bottle and tasting sour cream. It has been all downhill since 2001's Three, an album that did at least have a palpable energy. Sure it was still cod-reggae and overblown roots-rock with Butler summoning his best Eddie Vedder voice from the bowels. But really, it's been diminishing returns since then. It's not exactly challenging, not thought provoking and not an advance on any of the early promise. Sunrise over Sea (2004) was the beginning of the end and since then we've had to endure Grand National (2007). I was pretty sure it could not get worse. And then I heard April Uprising. Butler has followed Ben Harper down a cultural cul-de-sac. Neither of them seems aware that you can actually turn around; they're both down the end, driving into each other, blunting any edge their music ever had.

JACK JOHNSON
To the Sea

Hawaiian surfer-turned-musician Jack Johnson is back with, almost unbelievably, his sixth studio album (if you count the soundtrack he put together for Curious George). Those of you named George or otherwise who are curious to know how many times a person can write the same song and release it, the running count is now 81. Well, that's a little unfair, Johnson does have two kinds of songs he writes - the languidly strummed guy-gets-girl-because-he's-cute-she's-cute-and-he-used-to-surf-and-has-somehow-snuck-filmmaker-on-to-his-CV-too and there is also the slightly-more-upbeat-strummed version of the guy-gets-girl ditty. It's insulting to anyone living outside the twin bubbles of record company marketing department and softened-by-the-foggy-but-all-natural-plant-grown-haze-of-lazy-surf-pop-fans to consider that Johnson has had a 10-year career now, or thereabouts. That's a decade of being Ben Harper Unplugged; a decade of fraudulently skipping by on GQ looks and inoffensive to the point of being offensive bland folk-pop; a decade of making music that girls love because they love the guy who makes it - and guys love because they like the tomboy girls who love the man who makes the music. That's how I see Johnson. You'll tell me that I don't know Jack.

EMINEM
Recovery

Eminem's one masterpiece, The Marshall Mathers LP, is now 10 years old. Its power diminishes with every same-old-shtick-now album that Eminem releases. He should have called it quits after 8 Mile - but was lured back for Encore after the cartoonish Eminem Show. Then the first attempt at retirement saw five years without an official Eminem album. That's right, half a decade passed by and we did not miss him at all. Then last year's Relapse served as nothing more than proof he should have stayed retired. Now we have the delayed sequel to the intended one-two comeback punch: Recovery following Relapse. Eminem sounds pumped - he boasts and toasts for close to 77 minutes doing (apparently) his best to convince both himself and what's left of an audience that he is the real deal: an innovative rapper with something to say. The problem is that's all he has to say: that he is an innovative rapper with something to say. And if you thought I just repeated myself there, you'd better get used to that if you plan on listening to this album. There was no need for this album to happen.

AGAINST ME!
White Crosses

Florida nu-punk band Against Me! has been making music since 1997. It's remarkable to think there is still a market for this kind of sub-Sublime, very off-Offspring style of pop-punk. The band's debut, released in 2002, was called Reinventing Axl Rose. This sentence that you're reading now is really just to give you a chance to stop reading before I go back to talking about what a pointless and redundant band Against Me! really is. Okay, you're still here, well, the band has a song about how they dreamed Bob Dylan was their friend - presumably in the dream they are wise enough to not play Mr Zimmerman any of their music. It just goes on and on with the same two/three chords and the same cartoon vocals and the same songs about nothing at all; about a bunch of guys who are now way too old for their wardrobe of long shorts and dangling key chains. Awful. Just awful. The only redeeming feature about this is that it is actually an American band - and not one of those dreadful Kiwi bands working hard to sound like a terrible American band.

*The Dai Henwood and Dirty Sesh albums actually received 0.5 rather than 1 in the star-rating game.

So - did you have the misfortune to buy any of these albums? Or worse, did you have the stupidity to buy them? But then - this is all just opinion - so maybe you heard/bought some of them and loved them. Fair enough. If so, which ones?

What is the worst new album you've had to hear this year?

What do you think of 2010 as a year for new music so far?

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