Have you ever heard Tina Turner sing a bad version of a good song? Her complete emotional commitment to every note — have you ever heard her half-step? — requires that her material match her intensity. That, unfortunately, is far from the case on Twenty Four Seven. At sixty, Turner still sounds incredible; she's lost remarkably little of her range and none of her power. She sweeps through the eleven generic tracks on this album with the force of a tornado whipping through a trailer park. The cornball synthetic arrangements — some misguided attempt to be contemporary? — only make matters worse. Some of the problems with Twenty Four Seven, however, are Turner's own. Since her dramatic and much-deserved comeback with Private Dancer in 1984, she has increasingly leaned toward gleamingly clean productions and middling pop fare. She seems embarrassed by the gritty R&B that made her reputation — perhaps because much of it was recorded with her famously estranged ex-husband, the legendary Ike Turner. That aesthetic choice hasn't hurt her career, but it has damaged her art. Twenty Four Seven is the theme-park version of this masterful performer — evocative of the real thing but ultimately harmless, which is about the last thing Tina Turner should be.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”