New CDs: Ben Harper, Prince

Ben Harper Both Sides of the Gun (Virgin)

Since he strummed onto the scene from Southern California in 1994 with Welcome to the Cruel World, Ben Harper has lived on what can only be called, twelve years and seven albums later, Planet Ben. For his millions of fans here and around the world, Harper is a natural-born superstar who has operated in the pop universe his way. He does his work. He records his music, tours constantly -- since '97, with his formidably simpatico band the Innocent Criminals -- and opens for and collaborates with other artists (Beth Orton, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band) as varied as his own musical tastes.

At thirty-six, Harper has long been accorded rock-icon status among pro surfers -- the Hawaiian ex-surfer and filmmaker Jack Johnson got his musical start performing a few years ago at Harper concerts. But ordinary fans find Harper's tattooed charisma and personal style (a mix of blue-collar appeal and designer chic) plenty classic as well, even with scant video-channel appearances. Harper is big among jam-banders, but he and the Criminals are more compositionally adventurous and experimental-minded than most jam bands. It's hard to imagine many of his Bonnaroo peers winning a Grammy for Best Traditional Soul Gospel Album with a collaboration with the Blind Boys of Alabama, as Harper did in 2005. But Harper is not a gospel artist, either. He is, for all his flash, just Ben, a gifted singer, songwriter and guitarist bent on seeking transcendence in everyday places.

On his albums with the Innocent Criminals, Harper has alternated songs based in different styles, from Led Zeppelin-esque rock to trad-gospel to various strains of blues and R&B and folk pop. On his new album, Both Sides of the Gun, Harper goes about all of this in a more organized fashion. The eighteen songs of Gun come on two discs, although they could have fit on one -- the idea was to break the album into halves rather than make an epic double album. The first contains rock-based uptempos, the second features ballads whose arrangements often employ symphonic strings. At the same time, Gun is intentionally less polished than 2003's Diamonds on the Inside -- more instrumentally jumpy and sonically visceral.

The first disc unleashes the public Ben. "Better Way," a bracing rocklike tune with Harper's loquacious Weissenborn guitar and David Lindley's resonating tambura, sets the tone. Harper, hardly worrying about sustaining the even timbre of his smooth soul tenor, eventually screams lines such as "Take your face out of your hands/And clear your eyes/You have a right to your dreams/And don't be denied." A sense of unease permeates Gun: "Living these days is making me nervous," he sings on the funk-driven title song. As a social commentator, Harper is smart enough not to overreach: The best description of his more conscious songs would be loose but pointed.

On the fantastic "Engraved Invitation," Harper makes his peace with late-Sixties Rolling Stones music, if not with the dangerous challenges of the world right now. "Some days," he sings, "I'm the Lord's servant/Some days I'm Satan's pawn." But that doesn't stop Harper from doing other songs, such as "Black Rain" and "Gather 'Round the Stone," critical of the Katrina tragedy and teenage decisions about military enlistment. "I'm not a desperate man," Harper sings to white-knuckled strings and threatened dance rhythms on "Black Rain," "but these are desperate times at hand."

Disc Two reveals Harper's idea of private life, and with that come tensions of a different sort. This sequence opens with "Morning Yearning," full of moody a.m. impressions both reassuring and scary; here, Harper augments his drums, percussion, piano and vibes with an elegant string quartet. Standouts in this half include "Waiting for You," which has the deliberate melodic and linguistic urgency of Big Star's Third, and the dejected "Pictures in a Frame," which anatomizes romantic trouble with some of the horrible conclusions of the Cure's "Pictures of You." The disc coheres persuasively, nine songs that gently penetrate emotional places that Harper has dealt with for years, but never with such consistent focus. On Both Sides of the Gun, things can be heartening. Things can also be bloody hell on the nerves.

The rap on Ben Harper's music up to this point has been that it's been too derivative. This could be the album where he finally transcends that: "Engraved Invitation," for example, uses "Jumpin' Jack Flash" as a starting point, but it isn't a replica of the Stones; it's Harper using raunch as a starting place for his own more spiritual trip. It's the kind of liftoff from rooted points of departure he's always made. But on Both Sides of the Gun it takes you higher. (JAMES HUNTER)

Prince 3121 (Universal)

The raddest song on the second consecutive album to reassert Prince's funk bona fides is arresting in part because it's so unassuming. Spare bass and drums, then an acoustic-sounding guitar, catchier synth and a conversational vocal with a devilishly hooky street-chant shape -- not futuristic, but definitely not trad. The rad part is a lyric that explicitly invites us to "get saved." Christ is never mentioned, but Prince's talk of "new exaltation" and "streets of gold" can't be rationalized away as sex talk. More than any Kirk Franklin or Stevie Wonder number, "The Word" makes religiosity sound hip.

Doing his best to reassure fans who think their souls are fine, thank you, Prince doesn't abjure sex talk on 3121. But the famed Lothario turns down the ID-needing "Lolita": "What do you want?" "Whatever you want," she saucily replies. "Then come on, let's dance." She's shocked: "Dance???" The greasy organ R&B of "Satisfied" "ain't talking about nothing physical." And "Incense and Candles" turns on an unusual entreaty: "I know you want to take off all your clothes/But please don't do it."

As Prince well knows, however, these songs are erotic regardless -- more recognizably than those on 2004's Musicology, where he turned down yet another hottie in "What Do U Want Me 2 Do?" That's because lyrics always come second for the most gifted popular musician of our era -- amid the keepers are bad poetry you ignore on tracks you can't get enough of. As on Musicology, the beats get pretty wicked here -- wildly canted, eccentric, exciting. But while 3121 is no funkier than Musicology, it does emphasize speedier tempos and, two nods to Zapp aside, more conventional sonics. Guitars and synths tend toward the middle registers: "Fury" is a slightly grander rewrite of the indelible "U Got the Look." This is all reassuringly normal for fans put off by the artist's recent forays into jazz and such. Anyway, Prince leaves no doubt that he's still interested in sex. He can resist temptation, if that's what gets him through the night. We don't have to. And we can still dance together. Right? (ROBERT CHRISTGAU)

Editors The Back Room (The Fader/Kitchenware)

Editors are four likely lads from Birmingham, England, who've become darlings of the British rock press thanks to a seductive, thoroughly English sound and a wardrobe that evokes Robert Smith shopping at the Gap. Their debut, The Back Room, drags Joy Division into a posh bed of dueling guitars and streamlined atmospherics, with songs that touch on death, disease and doomed love. If you like one Editors song, there's a good chance you'll like them all. But because these swirls of desperation are as much about aura as fully formed tunes, their payoff is negligible.

Editors singer Tom Smith is blessed with that peculiarly British ability to sound simultaneously suave and pained, as if admiring his reflection in a shit-house mirror. When Smith vagues out, so does The Back Room: On "Open Your Arms," Smith stretches his wavery baritone into near oblivion over a slate-gray patter that sounds like Vicodin-numbed Death Cab for Cutie; with "Lights," Smith gazes into the void with a desperation that's damn near cloying. On the album's best songs, the give-and-take between Smith's gossamer croon and his band's tensile shimmer can be seductive. "Bullets" sports a brittle, noise-flecked groove that blossoms into a resplendent spattering of spidery guitars; "All Sparks" delivers a chorus worthy of top-shelf Coldplay. "If fortune favors the brave, then I'm as poor as they come," Smith sings early on. There's the rub: On The Back Room, Smith gets lost in his own gloom-addled mind while attempting to turn despair into gleaming euphoria, and ends up only halfway toward the light. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)

My Chemical Romance Life on the Murder Scene (Warner Bros.)

Just because the gothed-out jersey boys in My Chemical Romance can now fill arenas doesn't mean their hearts aren't still in the mildewed basements where they got their start playing DIY hardcore shows. As this live set shows, My Chem remain a punk band, and their flashes of reckless, claws-bared greatness tend to happen outside the studio, in front of the fans. Life on the Murder Scene, which also includes two DVDs collecting video diaries and performance footage, captures more than a few of those flashes, whether it's the way they barrel through "Give 'Em Hell, Kid" at breakneck speed without once checking the rearview mirror, or the way singer Gerard Way ad-libs, Gordon Gano-style, "I hope you know this is gonna go down on your permanent rrrrrreeeeeeeeeeecord" during "You Know What They Do to Guys Like Us in Prison." Way's voice is in top form, even when he's shrieking (because, seriously, even shrieking can be out of tune), and Life on the Murder Scene pulls all the right guns from My Chem's arsenal of songs. As live albums go, this one is A-O-fucking-K. (JENNY ELISCU)

Richard Ashcroft Keys to the World (Virgin)

Nineties Brit-rock icon finds life after the Verve to be a bittersweet symphony once the stoned-soul shaman in a Jesus Christ pose at the forefront of Brit pop's Nineties assault on America, Richard Ashcroft now merely seems the man who made the U.S. safe for Coldplay. He joined Chris Martin and Co. at Live 8 to play "Bittersweet Symphony," the big hit from his former band the Verve, but the vitality of that classic no longer illuminates his midtempo, string-swaddled songs. Aside from the rousing opening rocker, "Why Not Nothing?," where Ashcroft takes down hawkish governments claiming to have God on their side ("You can't deny it/It's abuse of the cross"), his concepts are not strong, and his lyrics -- often merely functional in the past -- have never been worse. These deficiencies reach a nadir on "Words Just Get in the Way," a bland ballad where Ashcroft brays the title ad nauseam on a long, slow fade. In trying to wrest profundity from simplicity, Keys to the World is only profoundly disappointing. (PETER RELIC)

Murs Murray's Revenge (Record Collection)

When he's on, Los Angeles MC Murs vibes Nas with less self-mythologizing and an extra dose of common sense. With his DJ buddy 9th Wonder in tow, Murs' sixth album sets his quick-tongued command over soul-flecked funk, dropping brassy statements of purpose ("Murray's Law"), self-aware paeans to "dark-skinned white girls" ("D.S.W.G.") and bits of uplift. Check the portrait of ghetto pride on "LA": "Come to the hood where we do the most good/Where Magic Johnson be ownin' everything, like he should." (CHRISTIAN HOARD)

The Sounds Dying to Say This to You (Scratchie/New Line)

These Swedes mix Blondie-style cool with a streamlined punk rush and the throaty wail of frontwoman Maja Ivarsson. On their second album, cuts like "Ego" and "24 Hours" offer heartfelt romance and arena-ready choruses, but Dying to Say This to You often sounds like stale glam-pop fandom. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)

Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders Taylor Hawkins and the Coattail Riders (Thrive)

The debut from this trio fronted by the Foo Fighters' drummer mixes palatable post-grunge darkness with controlled punk splatter and an array of subtle electronic embellishments. Hawkins' throaty singing is steady if nondescript, but barnburners like "It's OK Now" are lacking in both personality and hooks. (CHRISTIAN HOARD)