POP/ROCK: Susan Boyle, "Someone to Watch Over Me" (Syco)
Like Boyle's first two albums, "I Dreamed a Dream" and "The Gift," this is a solemn, inspirational collection in which she suggests a shy lonely church mouse seeking spiritual refuge. Its staid piano-and-strings arrangements are heavily draped around Boyle's sweet voice, which treats every number as a stolid hymn without psychological subtext.
Cut by cut, "Someone to Watch Over Me" is not as strong as its forerunners. Her flashiest vocal trick -- an out-of-the-blue octave leap upward -- lent an eerie power to her version of the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses," the outstanding cut on her first album. Here she does the same thing, although much less effectively, on "Unchained Melody." There isn't an ounce of swing in Boyle's earnest delivery, and percussion is minimal except on numbers whose crashing drums evoke the ceremonial pomp of Vera Lynn's World War II hits.
Boyle drastically slows down Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence," Tears for Fears' "Mad World" and Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now." The grandest production belongs to the anthem "You Have to Be There," a desperate cry for salvation from a lost soul "drifting on a dark and stormy sea" composed by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus of Abba for the Swedish historical musical "Kristina." Another churning ballad, "Return," written by her producer, Steve Mac, and Wayne Hector, pleads for a dead loved one to come back from the great beyond. "Lilac Wine," the album's most glaring mismatch of singer to material, is an alcoholic paean to lubricated self-pity that Boyle's sober, plodding rendition treats as a song about transubstantiation. But the lyrics of this besotted lament resist her best efforts to dry out a torch song whose narrator seems headed straight for a blackout.
- STEPHEN HOLDEN, NEW YORK TIMES
POP/ROCK: Lou Reed & Metallica, "Lulu" (Warner Bros.)
Reed aficionados loathe the fact that punk's godfather would dare pair with pedestrian metal dudes. Metallica fans are wildly disgusted that the thrash gods welcomed this grating, tuneless infidel into their temple. Good. Repulsion is a fine place to start when it comes to their "Lulu" collaboration.
Based on playwright Frank Wedekind's violent tale of an alluring lass using sexual wiles to rise through German society only to fall into poverty, prostitution and worse, Reed's lurid lyrics are aptly incendiary and corrosive. While there are a few awkwardly pretentious rants (i.e., "Mistress Dread"), the self-hating poetics of "Dragon," the wrenched ardor of "Pumping Blood" and the recoiling humor of "Brandenburg Gate" are particularly and vividly pernicious. Throughout these frank moments, guitarist Reed and his partners in grime make ghoulish avant-metal of the first degree, brooding, pile-driving noise without melody. The effect is not unlike Metallica's earliest mournful bangers, only with Reed's monotone barking up front. The careening wall of woe (94-plus minutes) has its breaks, in the moody acoustic guitars of "Little Dog," the Velvet Underground-like chug of "Iced Honey" and the quietly tremulous build toward raging fury on "Cheat on Me."
Bracing stuff, not for the faint of heart.
