Album Reviews

Hudson Entertainment, a premier provider of entertainment content, announced today that it has signed a licensing and distribution agreement with Napster to further extend its digital music offerings.

The new deal with Napster will allow Hudson Entertainment’s music division to offer full-length music tracks from top independent music labels and artists through Napster’s on-demand music subscription service, which boasts more than 760,000 subscribers. Hudson Entertainment’s extensive catalog offers over 10,000 tracks from well known and up-and-coming artists across all music genres including Kirsten Proffit, Gene and Jezebel, Omar Torrez, Del Bombers, Cloud Eleven, Alan Smithee, Punsapaya, Alan Reid, The J Band, Paperback Hero, Denny Earnest, Lastonedone, Caution Cat, Conrizzle, and more.

This new partnership follows on the heels of Hudson’s recent announcement of a similar deal with eMusic, further strengthening its position as one of the largest digital music distributors in the US.

Madonna. Hard Candy. 2008.

Madonna attempts to reaffirm her position as the queen of pop and re-invention with her 11th studio album, “Hard Candy,” a tedious collection of dance-club anthems and repetitious hip-hop mixes.

The biggest disappointment with “Hard Candy” isn’t that it sounds bland when compared to everything in the current pop-dance genre; it’s that it makes dance-floor tracks sound like more work than fun. Derivative lyrics paired with overly produced club beats do not make for anything especially artistic or extraordinary. After a while, these songs just feel like a lot of fluff and filler. It’s painful to hear Madonna, who has always set trends and shocked listeners, struggle so much with finding a solid, or even interesting, direction. Even with the support of mega stars like The Neptunes, Kanye West, Justin Timberlake, Timbaland and Pharrell Williams, she seems to fall flat.
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Bob Dylan. Under The Red Sky. 1990.

‘Under The Red Sky’ got a stormy reception upon release and endured it for a good decade or more. Well, this album is lyrically unambitious, musically fairly simple and the production and mixing bordering on synthetic. Still, Dylan is joined here by Don Was, George Harrison, David Crosby, Slash, Bruce Hornsby and the legendary Al Kooper. So, ‘Under The Red Sky’ musically is pretty solid and often actually impressive, particularly Bruce Hornsby, I have to say. Dylan’s vocals are slightly thin, but his voice holds up pretty well, lending the songs that edge, a sense of foreboding. This is quite in contrast with many of the actual lyrics, seemingly preoccupied with childhood nursery rhymes. To accompany these lyrics, the music is often relaxed, laid back. That’s not to say this is an album of ballads, yet even the rockers sound slightly constrained within the Don Was production. It seems that ‘Under The Red Sky’ is content to be what it is without having to live upto any kind of reputation. That may seem a strange thing to say about a Dylan album, yet doesn’t Dylan invite us to listen without predjudice? There’s not so much difference between ‘Cats In The Well’ and several songs from ‘Modern Times’ or ‘Love And Theft’. The big difference is the actual sound acheived in the studio. There’s a nice accordian mixed in here, but sonically, ‘Under The Red Sky’ as a whole sounds rather anemic. It just doesn’t impress on that level. Perhaps ‘Under The Red Sky’ is Dylan writing pop songs of a kind, dumbing down, trying to find space artistically?
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