"LAX"
The Game
Sometimes it seems that the best way to pass judgment the Los Angeles rapper The Game is by the names he drops. He is the most reference-thick creative person in whatever medium since the Bret Easton Ellis of "American Psycho" � whom he's been influenced by, whom he's beefing with, what he owns, where he's been. Over two impregnable albums he has been a charismatic and sometimes mischievous rapper, but the question corpse: Is The Game more than the sum of his proper nouns?
On "LAX," his third album, for the number one time he's a joyless name-checker. Almost everything here, from the boasting ("Money") to the baiting ("LAX Files," "Cali Sunshine"), is pro forma. Worse, The Game, never a fluid rapper, sounds positively lumpy, as if he were delivering verses while running up a steep flight of steps, or as if the last few years of pugnacity take finally left him winded.
Worse still, gone are the clever meat hooks of his debut album (written for the most part, it should be aforementioned, by 50 Cent) and the fauna textures of his followup. Here the production is ponderous; The Game has somehow coaxed a dull beat even from Kanye West, world Health Organization produced "Angel," a limp G-funk tribute.
Crucial to the Game's life history is the time he spent recuperating from a 2001 shooting. It was then that he began his submersion in hip-hop, listening to the genre's classic albums. It might explain his decision to record the bizarre "Never Can Say Goodbye," which he raps from the perspective of three long-gone greats: Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. and Eazy-E. But blasphemy aside, the Game sounds his about vibrant here, matching their vocal rhythms and tics. He sounds as if he's having more sport playing them than, everywhere else here, playing himself.
Jon Caramanica, New York Times News Service
"ONE KIND FAVOR"
B.B. King
The bluesman B.B. King's latest record album, "One Kind Favor," is part atavism, part twist. At 82, King is considering his past; the album release anticipates the Sept. 10 opening of the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, Miss., where he grew up. The songs on "One Kind Favor" were current when King's vocation got below way in the forties and '50s, among them "Sitting on Top of the World" and lesser-known gems like "Get These Blues Off Me" from T-Bone Walker. The performance, recorded live in the studio, mightiness almost be a late set at a very attentive club.
Clearly spotlighted up front, never having to strain, is King, addressing the megrims eternals of love, arduous times and death � sometimes all three, as in Howlin' Wolf's "How Many More Years."
"One Kind Favor" was produced by T Bone Burnett, wHO has been cultivating the death-haunted sides of rockers like John Mellencamp and Robert Plant. King isn't gloomy about mortality. His voice reveals sorrow, then fights it off with raspy shouts, while his guitar is his small-scale but never-say-die ally, with its delicately focused smell and curt, targeted phrases.
The pianist is Dr. John, who � bolstered by Jim Keltner on drums � regularly rolls King's Mississippi-Memphis megrims toward New Orleans, particularly with the second-line ticktock of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." Blues scholars could parse King's debate homages to and divergences from models like Walker, Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The album's pristinely remodeled atmosphere is no more a purely time of origin style than the stereoscopic picture (rather than mono) recording is. But the suffer, the angriness, the elegance and the edge of King's blues are unrelieved and authentic.
Jon Pareles, New York Times News Service
"SOL-ANGEL AND THE HADLEY ST. DREAMS"
Solange
In the booklet for her s album, "Sol-AngeL and the Hadley St. Dreams," the R&B vocalist Solange poses in front of deuce large posters on which sentences are written multiple times,
