SERENDIPITY

Music from the Motion Picture
(Columbia/ Sony)

RATING: three and a half


How is it that the sappiest movies often have a canny instinct for hip soundtracks? The Pretty Woman OST was unusually quirky for its time, using tracks from David Bowie, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Jane Wiedlin alongside Roy Orbison and Roxette. More recently, there was One Fine Day, with such sweet retro classics by the Ad Libs, Ella Fitzgerald, and the Shirelles, and Natalie Merchant remaking the title song. My Best Friend’s Wedding had indie folk singer Ani DiFranco covering a Burt Bacharach classic.

This streak of unusually good taste continues with the soundtrack for Serendipity, this season’s big love story. The lineup comes from left field, with the artists summoned for this effort having more cult cred than mainstream success. Instead of going for the more obvious choices (Celine Dion? Vonda Shephard? Ronan Keating?), we have Bap Kennedy, Wood, David Gray, and Nick Drake. Like the film company that produced the movie, Miramax, the lineup isn’t exactly underground, but stays just far enough away from the mainstream to have a fairly high hip factor.

Actually, the Serendipity soundtrack is reminiscent of the surprisingly smart soundtracks for the television shows Felicity and Dawson’s Creek, which introduced their viewers to some very good musicians they’ve never heard of. In fact, Serendipity does have at least one thing in common with those two other OSTs: Heather Nova, who contributed songs to both, reappears on this soundtrack, performing “Like Lovers Do,” a song from her new album. Shawn Colvin also provides a link to the One Fine Day soundtrack, this time with “When You Know.” Even Chantal Kreviazuk, who made her name with a cloying cover of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” for Armageddon, does better here, offering the lighthearted and hopeful “This Year.”

It’s the lesser known artists, however, who provide the highlights. The sensitive, introspective “Never a Day” is a great introduction to the band Wood, while the delightful “Moonlight Kiss” is also the first I’d ever heard of Bap Kennedy. I’d consider the money for the CD well-spent if only for the introduction to these two artists.

There are also some old favorites whose presence on this album prove to be a welcome surprise. David Gray, long a favorite who just seems never to have caught on here, presents the beautiful instrumental “January Rain.” Annie Lennox sets aside the Eurythmics’ originals catalogue, choosing instead to redo Bob Marley’s classic “Waiting in Vain” as a love song. The little-known “Northern Sky” by Nick Drake is also called up for this outing; it’s a beautiful, poetic song that, I hope, will get the exposure it deserves this time around. The collection is rounded off with the jaunty “Cool Yule” performed by Louis Armstrong, a slice of fruitcake that comes just in time for the season.

Serendipity is a very tasteful album, and while the sapfest that is the movie starring John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale has gotten only bad to lukewarm reviews, its soundtrack succeeds in becoming everything the movie aspires to be: uplifting, surprisingly intelligent, and charming.—Kristine Fonacier

THE ID

Macy Gray
(Sony)

RATING: four

There’s something oddly comforting about Macy Gray. It’s a feeling that’s the exact opposite of the uneasiness that I get when I pop in a Fiona Apple CD. Not that I don’t like Fiona Apple, mind—I absolutely love the girl and her music, but there’s always the suspicion of severe mental distress just lurking beneath the surface. You just don’t know when she’s going to explode, like she did at the MTV Awards.

With Macy Gray, at least, you know where you stand. Even when she’s being her quirky, unpredictable self, she doesn’t wig out too much. When she was skewered at last year’s MTV Awards with a raunchy spoof of her video for “I Try,” she was visibly annoyed, but nevertheless poked fun at herself when she got up onstage as a presentor. This self-directed sense of humor is really what keeps her eminently sane, and it’s also what makes her new album, The Id, so damn charming.

From the staccato opening lines of the album—“hot like hot wings in hot chocolate in hell!”—Macy Gray makes it clear that it’s all good, clean, mentally healthy fun. Even when singing about sex, as she does time and time and time again on The Id, Gray just does it with a wink and a smile, stripping the subject of sleaze and facing it with a great deal of humor. “Your mama told you to be discreet/ keep your freak to yourself/ but your mama lied to you all this time,” she sings on “Sexual Revolution,” urging everyone to “express what is taboo in you” and “share your freak with the rest of us.” Fiona Apple would have turned that into an Elektra Complex-complicated nightmare; Missy Elliott is likely to overstate the sex. In Macy Gray’s hands, it might not be a forceful declaration of sexual independence, but it sure is a lot of fun. By the time the chorus comes around, the song’s mock-serious intro has dissolved into funky disco beats that buoys the chorus of cries declaring, “this is my sexual revolution!”

“Gimme All Your Lovin’ or I Will Kill You” is the title to one of the other tracks, but there is no Eminem-style violence to be found here, just a couple of well-timed punchlines: “ I couldn’t get the man to fall in love with me/ turns out he likes the girls with long and wavy hair/ and mine was short and…” (pause) “kinky.” The other titles give away the mood of the songs: “My Nutmeg Phantasy,” “Boo,” “Freak Like Me.” There are a couple of almost-serious takes, but by and large the music is loose and funky, even more so than on her first album, On How Life Is. Guest appearances also spice up the track list: Slick Rick on “Hey Young World Part 2”; Erykah Baduh on “Sweet Baby”; Angie Stone and Moe Def on “My Nutmeg Phantasy.”

For an album that pays homage to the id—defined by Sigmund Freud as “the part of the psyche that is the source of instinctual impulses and demands for satisfaction,” and by Macy Gray as “what you do before you think…the real you…unedited”—it’s nowhere near as uncontrollably freaky as its title might suggest. Humorous, loose, funky, and lighthearted, you’ll wish you had more of The Id in your psyche.—Kristine Fonacier

SONGS IN RED AND GRAY

Suzanne Vega
(Universal)


RATING: three and a half

I thought I knew Suzanne Vega. After falling in love with the smash hit “Tom’s Diner” on her breakthrough Solitude Standing, I worked backwards through her catalogue, and discovered what her relatively small but loyal following already knew: that here was a singularly literate songwriter who had a great knack for telling complete stories in the space of a song. Her songs were intelligent and evocative, but they weren’t exactly radio friendly, and so her releases have mostly been overlooked by the general public. Though a fan, I knew better than to expect anything other than artsy, left-of-center pieces that were poetic at their best, and pale at their worst.

And then came 1992’s 99.9F. Longtime listeners were stunned by this outing, which presented an all-new Suzanne Vega, trading in her folk-tinged signature sound for a newer, weirder, dancier, more electronic style. But that wasn’t the end of it. Just when I thought I’d pegged (and liked) Vega’s new direction, she released Nine Objects of Desire in 1996, revealing yet another total turn-around. Ditching the electronica of the previous release, Nine Objects was a heady album whose seductiveness and sexiness was all old-fashioned.

It’s been a long time since then, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Vega used that ample time to plot another makeover. Six years later and Vega astonishes again with Songs in Red and Gray. But the surprise this time is that she doesn’t surprise.

The 13 songs in the album recall the Vega of old, the one who was a gifted songwriter but wasn’t armed with great studio chops. Songs of Red and Gray is stripped down to the essentials, without the flashy technopop of 99.9F or the caramel romance of Nine Objects of Desire. The good news is that Vega remains the storyteller that she always was. And most of the stories she tells this time around seem to be about emancipation. “(I’ll Never Be) Your Maggie May” is a declaration of romantic independence, where “a woman leaves a man/ and so a world turns on its end.” That sounds brave, but it’s not without its price; there’s also a lot of pain and regret, especially when she’s singing about a marriage in trouble. “Soap and water/ take the day from my hand/ scrub the salt from my stinging skin/ slip me loose of this wedding band,” goes a typically melancholy line from “Soap and Water.” In “Widow’s Walk,” she imagines herself a sailor’s wife, singing, “That line is the horizon/ We watch the wind and set the sail/ But save ourselves when all omens/ point to fail.”

Although Vega has always been good about imagining personas to inhabit—whether it’s an abused child (“Luka”), a pensive woman (“Tom’s Diner”), or a hustler on the make (“No Cheap Thrill”)—it’s hard not to infer autobiographical notes from this. Her husband (now ex-) Mitchell Froom is noticeably absent from the album’s credits for the first time since he produced 99.9F and Nine Objects of Desire. Whether or not the couple’s breakup contributed to the emotions driving Songs from Red and Gray, it’s a little disappointing to find Vega’s music losing the luster of her past two albums. Was that really all Mitchell Froom’s doing?

Well, not all of it, clearly. Suzanne Vega was already an accomplished musician before Mitchell Froom’s name ever appeared on her album notes, and if she returns to old form, it can’t be all bad. It’s still a great pleasure to be audience to Vega’s delicate voice and her poetic lyrics, and once in a while there are also catchy, almost radio-friendly tunes. Songs like “It Makes Me Wonder” and “Penitent,” like most of the songs on the album, are so whole and so distinctively Vega’s that you won’t feel anything missing.

It’s when she—or new producer Rupert Hine, at least—tries to fill in the holes that things go awry. “Solitaire” attempts to go over old ground, and instead it sounds like a very bad outtake from 99F. Thankfully, it’s the only one of its kind on the album.

Overall, Songs in Red and Gray is still ahead of many other releases for its revisitation of old-fashioned songwriting values. If nothing else, the sparse production on this album serves to prove that, if you take away everything else, good, solid songwriting will remain.—Kristine Fonacier

BLACK MANTRA

Wolfgang
(Sony)

RATING: three and a half

Wolfgang are rock stars. Old-fashioned, true blue, moody-mysterious-sexy, iconic rock stars. Go to any gig, and see how their fans stick around after a show to harvest autographs; walk around the malls with them, and count how many awestruck kids gawp, and how many others pretend that they don’t want to stare. Sure, Martin Nievera or Regine Velasquez may be used to that kind of attention, but they’re pop celebrities. You have to respect Wolfgang for being able to elicit the same kind of attention as rock musicians working in a pop-fixated industry.

You also have to respect Wolfgang for studying the classics rigorously and paying homage to their musical forebears when, clearly, current trends have deemed the genre unprofitable. That takes balls—or, at the very least, a firm sense of identity.

Nothing shows this more than Black Mantra, the latest album from Wolfgang. The 11 new songs on the album are all purebred rock, without the merest whisper of either rap or electronica coming to sully its bloodline. It may be hybrid theorists like Linkin Park or Limp Bizkit who rule the rock charts all over the world, but Wolfgang refuse to be trendy, standing by their chosen genre like steadfast soldiers.

Black Mantra is far from Wolfgang’s darkest work, despite what the pre-release buzz said about the album. But it does show the band with a new energy and a revitalized sense of purpose that shows very clearly in the music. It’s the same energy that made the band such a standout in their early days, and the same energy that seems to have fizzled out somewhere along the way.

The album kicks off with the “Judas Noose,” a manifesto that echoes the band’s newfound political passions (and only the first of its kind on the album). The lyrics are strongly worded, addressing a “traitor, betrayer,” and jeering at his inevitable downfall: “Swing left and right/ Come take your place on the Judas noose/ We guarantee that everything will fit you just fine.” It’s a strong opener, full of noise and fury that shows especially on Manuel Legarda’s guitars.

Betrayal seems to be a running theme in the album, whether it be emotional and personal (“Bow Unto Thee,” “Shoulders of Cain,” “Bleed One Way”), or in a larger arena—betrayed by crooked politicians (“Judas Noose,” “Undertow,” “Revolution Now”), fake prophets (“Heaven Spent,” “Trenta”), drugs (“Meckam”), or by life in general (“No Falter”). Only one track is different—the serene “Idlip,” a grand but restrained song about death.

No one will disagree that the band has steadily improved over the years. The band members have gotten better at their respective instruments, and while this is not dramatically demonstrated in Black Mantra, it has been an evenly paced process over the years. At the very least, it shows that they’re damn serious about this whole band thing, and are prepared to see it through. Better yet, their songwriting has also improved, and the clear-headedness of this effort is testament to that.

There is still room for improvement here and there. Basti Artadi, whose development as a vocalist is probably the most dramatic improvement of all, now needs to find a truer connection to the songs. Often his singing (in the studio, at least) doesn’t deliver the emotional core that the songs need. It’s a different story during their better live performances, so clearly he is capable. He just needs to learn how to do that in the studio, too. (Listeners will therefore be thankful for the Live Bootleg bonus disc, the “official bootleg” of nine covers from various gigs. I was a little turned off by the concept’s blatant imitation of Pearl Jam, but I withdraw my objections after hearing the recording.)

I’d like to think that it’s sincerity that makes all the difference in Black Mantra—they were deeply affected by this year’s EDSA 2 rallies, and each of the band members were active in one way or the other during that time. Or maybe it’s just that they’re flying high from the success of their Acoustica concert and their first-ever US tour. Or maybe they’re just growing older, and growing gracefully into their roles as the Philippines' foremost rock stars.—Kristine Fonacier