POP/ROCK
Timbaland, "Shock Value II" (Interscope)
Since the mid-1990s, rappers and R&B singers (Missy Elliott, Brandy, Jay-Z) who wanted a strange, splintered, mysteriously catchy track have turned to producer Timbaland. By the mid-2000s, pop singers (Justin Timberlake, Nelly Furtado, Madonna) were also latching onto him. On his own as an artist, Timbaland set out to conquer a pop mainstream different from the one he had so thoroughly tweaked: a simpler-minded one. His 2007 collection of collaborations, "Shock Value," juxtaposed rappers and R&B singers with his newer pop and rock allies. It included the hit "Give It to Me," featuring Timberlake and Furtado, and they're back, to lesser effect, on "Shock Value II."
Timberlake unamusingly compares romance to fast food in "Carry Out," while Furtado strives for seduction in "Morning After Dark." Through the album, Timbaland himself -- he's the least gifted vocalist he has produced -- generally delivers a song's first verses before letting the guests take over. It's a pop-radio list. Rock collaborators include Chad Kroeger of Nickelback and Chris Daughtry, each moaning a morose power ballad, while the Fray whines nautical clichés in "Undertow." Miley Cyrus sings a four-chord kiddie new-wave track, "We Belong to the Music," while Katy Perry strives to sound smitten on "If We Ever Meet Again." Drake raps and sing-songs through "Say Something." The productions flaunt Timbaland trademarks: vocal sounds imitating turntable scratching, quick keyboard arabesques, grunts as percussion. But now he fills in the spaces that made his old tracks so startling.
The album's least banal songs are grounded in hip-hop and R&B. "Ease Off the Liquor" is an electro-driven club encounter. In "Meet in the Middle," Timbaland and Brandy (who sings and raps, with a bite, under the name Bran' Nu) portray a bitterly squabbling married couple. For a few moments Timbaland ignores the Top 10 and accepts that he's an adult.
JON PARELES, NEW YORK TIMES
Animal Collective, "Fall Be Kind" (Domino)
On this five-song EP mostly culled from outtakes from the critically acclaimed "Merriweather Post Pavilion," the trio continues its delicate balance between creepy-crawly sweetness and bubbling, dark psychedelia. There's not a cut here that will make anyone think differently about the Brooklyn outfit, but it's a worthy addition to the catalog.
"Fall Be Kind" coalesces around the band's sonic staples, leaning particularly toward Panda Bear's dreamy aesthetic: anchoring polyrhythms, nether-worldly textures and amber-warm vocals with a few new tricks thrown in, such as the near-syrupy strings that begin "Graze." "What Would I Want? Sky," which uses the first-ever licensed Grateful Dead sample as a recurring motif, shows off the band's talents at creating near-mystical transitions. While Animal Collective's strengths are not usually to be found in its words, the lyrics do lend a welcome humanizing quality to the sometimes-alien ruptures that characterize the band's sound.
