Friendly Fire : Sean Lennon : Review : Rolling Stone

Into the Sun, Sean Lennon's 1998 debut, was the casually jazzy album of a young New York celebrity with the talents and the means to explore any sort of music that piqued his wide-ranging twenty-two-year-old curiosities. Then he split with his longtime girlfriend after she cheated on him with his best friend; a year and a half later, Lennon's best friend died in a motorcycle accident, without Lennon reconciling with him. These events have yielded an album of angry, guilty, sad - and often stunningly pretty - songs. Relying on a four-piece rock band instead of parts he overdubbed himself, Lennon maintains an ornamented, deliberate style as persuasively as his debut album jumped around. Songs like "Dead Meat" are strong meshes of smooth lyrics and melody that are based in the great tradition of Beatlesque pop tunes. Even more pronounced than the influence of Lennon's dad's band is the shadow of Fiona Apple: Like her music, Lennon's songs, with their rocked-up theater and easy cerebral nature, make complex emotions sing.