Singled Out

The albums behind the hits of summer

It's typical to measure the health of pop music by what gets played on the radio -- the heavy-rotation hits that can define entire seasons, even years, from "Dancing in the Streets" to "Smells like Teen Spirit." So to close out the summer we asked our critics to give a listen to some of the season's biggest hits -- the singles and the albums behind them.

The overall diagnosis? We be illin'. Believe us, we didn't plan it this way. Thinking back on the past few years, we expected to find some pleasant surprises on the charts. Instead, we found ourselves trying to remember the last time that so much of what's so popular was so far from what we like.

This summer was a big one for breakthroughs. For newcomers Fiona Apple, Meredith Brooks, Matchbox 20, and Third Eye Blind. For veterans like former Fresh Prince Will Smith (on the Men in Black soundtrack). And for those in-between artists like the Wallflowers, Sarah McLachlan, and Collective Soul, who reached new levels of popularity.

Our ad-hoc panel of experts did find things to like. But mostly the summer songs suggested the kind of hit list you draw up for a hit man. Of course, it's by no means comprehensive. As we go to press, both OMC and Sugar Ray are crossover smashes. The hits, as they say . . . well, you know what they say.

Fiona Apple

Tidal (Work Group/Sony)
featuring "Criminal"

Fiona Apple's Tidal asks the question why on earth is it considered cool to sing as if you just didn't give a fuck? Apple can barely reach the end of a phrase without sounding as if she were ready to fall asleep. What's more, her disc's languid sound -- lanky piano lines, pastel guitars, drum heads just barely kissed with brushes -- works like a double dose of Sominex. Tidal is all soft shades of mauve and putty -- pretty if you like that sort of thing, only slightly preferable to having your fingernails pulled out with pliers if you don't.

Yet for all her easy dreaminess, there's something disturbing and calculating about Apple. Her voice shifts mechanically between being throaty and floaty, as if it were controlled by secret levers. "Sullen Girl" ("He took my pearl/And left an empty shell of me"), with its unearthly wash of keyboards and pedal steel guitar, is a victimology tract loosed upon the world on a ditzy butterfly wing. And when Apple tries her hand at a modestly perky Caribbean-flavored ditty, you realize it's long past time to bail out of the banana boat. Daylight come and we wanna go home -- please!

-- Stephanie Zacharek

Meredith Brooks

Blurring the Edges (Capitol)
featuring "Bitch"

In the late '70s, we called them vanilla-musk girls -- girls with lanky hair and disarming smiles, who strummed guitars and sang, badly, though nobody ever seemed to know the difference. They'd claim their dream wedding was to be married in a field while wearing a circlet of flowers -- but you knew the minute they had that rock on their third finger, they'd be first in line to register at Tiffany's.

For all her alleged edginess, Meredith Brooks is a vanilla-musk girl if there ever was one. She wants you to believe she's sure of her destiny, assertive, sexually confident -- all good things -- but she's really a scam artist. On "Bitch" she paints herself as a goddess of extreme desirability, even though her self-serving litany is so annoying that no sane, self-respecting being, man or woman, could stand to be around her for more than 10 minutes.

At least "Bitch" has a hook. The rest of Blurring the Edges is a sludgy mess of tough-gal balladry, rockin'-out chunky rhythms à la Sheryl Crow, and plasticky, pseudo-bluesy guitars. Add a few down-home metaphors ("Feel like I'm a spinnin' ball in a lottery cage") and plenty of mannered, senseless phrasing (she hacks syllables apart as if she were cracking an egg) and you've got yourself a certified recycled archetype. Vanilla musk or no, you can smell her coming a mile away.

-- Stephanie Zacharek

Collective Soul

Disciplined Breakdown (Atlantic)
featuring "Listen"

This Georgia band make music for soft-rock fans in denial. Sure, Collective Soul have all the markings of something tougher: distorted guitars, driving snare drums, a sometimes raw-throated singer. The problem is that every heavy wager -- like the intro to this album's huge first single, "Precious Declaration," which teams the snare lick from "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band" with a guitar riff permutated from Aerosmith's "Walk This Way" -- is backed by an acoustic texture, a drop in the dynamics of the mix, or some wimpy-toned six-string.

Three albums into their career, Collective Soul's lite sound and simple June/moon rhyme schemes make for songs that are toothless yet listenable. Ed Roland cites the Beatles as his biggest influence. But the Beatles relied on crafty arrangements, fresh sounds, and dramatic hooks to make their tunes memorable. In today's industry-driven radio environment, Collective Soul need only the crutch of marketing and infinite spins from programmers looking for the next Hootie & the Blowfish.

-- Ted Drozdowski

K's Choice

Paradise in Me (Sony/550)
featuring "Not an Addict"

Assuming English isn't singer Sarah Bettens's first language, or that of her brother, guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Gert, we'll accept grade-school prose like "I ask you please, but all you do is make me sneeze/Mr. Freeze" ("Mr. Freeze"). And maybe this Antwerp outfit's darkly dramatic hit, "Not an Addict," comes across as more anti-heroin in the original Flemish -- in English, Sarah's smoldering delivery sure makes lines like "The deeper you stick it in your vein/The deeper the thoughts, there's no more pain" sound like an endorsement. (It's worth noting that Paradise in Me came out on Double T in Belgium back in 1995, so "Not an Addict" actually predated the Cranberries' "Free To Decide," a hit from last summer it resembles in its strident tone and unimaginative subject matter.)

That said, the rest of Paradise in Me turns out to be a lot more interesting than I would have predicted. There's nothing as immediately catchy (or annoying) and anthemic as "Not an Addict," but there are moments -- like the rousing anti-winter power ballad, which opens with Sarah singing "I'm about to tell you about a man I've known since I've been able to open up a refrigerator" -- when the Bettenses and their polished, guitar-powered outfit get alterna-angst so wrong it's better than Ween.

-- Matt Ashare

R. Kelly

Batman & Robin (Warner Bros.)
featuring "Gotham City"

The movie Batman & Robin isn't really about plot, and the soundtrack isn't really about tunes; they're both about conveying a nebulous post-industrial, vaguely goth-related vibe. The megahit soundtrack combines songs from the movie with others merely "inspired" by it. Apparently this includes R.E.M.'s "Revolution," which was played in concert two years before the film's release. R.E.M. didn't think it was good enough for a regular album, and they were right; still, it's still nice to find something here with a sense of humor.

The set's two hits are Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's "Look into My Eyes" (which sounds like INXS) and R. Kelly's "Gotham City" (an inferior clone of Seal's "Kiss from a Rose," from the last Batfilm). The two Smashing Pumpkins tracks, with titles too long and silly to recount, are unbelievably pretentious even for them; the band twist their rock-guitar sound into a metallic techno mix (original idea, right?). Me'Shell Ndegéocello manages to technofy the Coasters' "Poison Ivy" without a hint of irony; the Goo Goo Dolls seem determined to follow Soul Asylum into the land where once-wonderful bands take themselves way too seriously. And this soundtrack sustains the same foreboding mood for 67 minutes. Rev up the Batmobile and let's get outta here.

-- Brett Milano

Sarah McLachlan

Surfacing (Arista)
featuring "Building a Mystery"

Welcome to the PG-13 version of PJ Harvey's To Bring You My Love. The romantic obsession is here, and so are the cool production effects and arrangements: freaky guitar and keyboard noises placed just right in the mix. "Black & White" even has a hip-hoppy bass-drum lilt. But Polly goes for blues and cabaret goth, whereas Sarah likes her folkie malaise Carole King-Tapestry style. Her smooth vocals are faultless, and at its best the album is a warm sound bath.

If only the ballad tempos didn't keep setting the words up for a fall. I could describe them the way Gordon Lish described a character in one of his novels: "She looked like someone you didn't look at." I listen to lines like "I don't know how to let you go," but I don't hear them. And a sunshiny strings-and-oboes deal like "Full of Grace" sets my teeth on edge every time. But that's only one man's opinion. Let's just say I like my pretty music a little uglier than this.

-- Jon Garelick

Matchbox 20

Yourself or Someone like You (Atlantic)
featuring "Push"

"I wonder what it's like to be the head honcho?" wonders Matchbox 20 frontguy Rob Thomas on the innocuous opening cut of the Orlando band's Atlantic debut. "I'd shout out an order, `I think we're out of this, man, get me some.' "

That's the first of dozens of banalities boldly presented, and without a hint of irony, as hard-won nuggets of wisdom on Yourself or Someone like You. The disc features the propulsive hit "Push," a mean-spirited anthem that, despite the band's denials, seems to advocate the O.J. method of keeping one's girlfriend in line. But the most displeasing aspect of the song, and the rest of the album, has less to do with what Thomas has to say than the way he says it -- his vocal style brings to mind a high-pressure fusion of the least appealing aspects of this decade's three great earnest over-emoters (Eddie Vedder, Adam Duritz, and Edward Kowalczyk). It's a voice unnaturally tense and knotted, like a steroid-fed muscle, stamped with surly disaffection that runs about as deep as a temporary tattoo. The rest of Matchbox 20 specialize in driving alterna-rock guitars straight down the middle of the mild highway paved by Collective Soul, which is getting to be a woefully over-trafficked narrow strip of road.

-- Matt Ashare

Robyn

Robyn Is Here (RCA)
featuring "Do You Know (What It Takes)"

By now we should be used to, even touched by, white pop singers who want to sound black. Still, there's something weird about hearing fly-girl phrasing from a Swedish chick. Listening to the debut from Robyn, I wondered how she'd feel if she saw young black girls walking around, saying, "Oh yah, yoo betcha by gollee."

Robyn Is Here is dance pop as self-empowerment session. It's all Be proud, be strong, show me respect, I'm woman enough to say that; I want you, don't play with my heart, get your two-timin' dog self out of my life, listen up, together we can make a brighter day, I am strong, I am invincible, "it's a Robynthing" (I swear she actually says that). The grooves put around Robyn's tiny, whiny voice are competent and listenable, but so undistinguished they're also forgettable. And the second-hand soulisms are as studied and phony as the parentheses in the single, "Do You Know (What It Takes)."

Maybe, though, this could be a Swedish trend. Perhaps Ingmar Bergman would be willing to come out of retirement and direct Robyn's next video. Or star her in an epic about a young woman making her way in the pop world. How 'bout we call it "Amos and Alexander"?

-- Charles Taylor

Duncan Sheik

Duncan Sheik (Atlantic)
featuring "Barely Breathing"

With a sound tailor-made for adult contemporary radio and a name that sounds like a Scottish condom, Duncan Sheik might seem like the latest aid for cozy candlelit evenings to ooze out of the radio. For about half of his homonymous debut, though, including the hit single "Barely Breathing," he delivers sensitive-guy pop ballads that sound pretty good (and even better if you've got something like driving or paying the bills to distract you).

His shtick is the nice guy who's unlucky in love (check out the CD booklet shot of Dunc sitting forlorn and photogenic in a cream-colored suit on a freshly made bed -- all dressed up and nowhere to go). And on "Barely Breathing" it works in spades. There's a nice propulsion to the song that keeps it from getting hung up on its wounded pride. The spare, echoey production and the occasional and understated use of strings create a romantic mood (though as make-out music this can't hold a candle to Lisa Stansfield's new one) before the album bogs down in one too many tasteful tunes of breathy heartache. This is a performer who might benefit from going a little over the top.

-- Charles Taylor

Will Smith

Men in Black (Columbia)
featuring "Men in Black"

Subtitled "How To Disarm Paranoia for Fun and Profit" (well, it ought to be), the Men in Black soundtrack doesn't deviate from the cardinal rules for marketing tie-ins to runaway blockbusters: go for dullest-common-denominator appeal, and avoid anything that might remotely offend anyone. Enter the crown (not so fresh) prince of such endeavors -- Will Smith, a guy who's made a career out of selling disposable novelty rap tunes (and an equally digestible warm-&-fuzzy-black-man persona) to white audiences. If you get past his cornball rubber-soul remake of Patrice Rushen's "Forget Me Nots," you'll be rewarded with another recognizable funk remake, this time by Snoop Doggy Dogg, who takes the easy way out with Kool & the Gang's "Get Down on It."

Even the curses on Nas's "Escobar '97" have been dubbed out -- maybe those mind-erasing flashlights double as a censor's penknife. Alterna-hip-hoppers De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, and the Roots (with soul-brother-of-the-hour D'Angelo) make predictable appearances to help bridge the crossover gap. Which means it's unlikely you'll still be awake by the time Branford Marsalis's Buckshot LeFonque show up for "Some Cow Fonque," in which Son House gets abducted by the Famous Flames and is returned to Sanford and Son's junk shop unharmed.

-- Carly Carioli

Third Eye Blind

Third Eye Blind (Elektra)
featuring "Semi-Charmed Life"

What's to say about a band so innocuous they probably won't make it onto a Rhino's Dim Stars of the '90s compilation? Even Third Eye Blind's record company had trouble describing their wallpaper blend of chime-and-rhyme pop and arena rock. Here's the first line of the press bio: "From the first explosive I-got-you-in my sights delivery of charismatic frontman Stephan Jenkins, to the rolling rhythm section of bassist Arion Salazar and drummer Brad Hargreaves, to the signature guitar work of Kevin Cadogan, you realize Third Eye Blind is working from an inner zip code of evaporating bliss." Let's mark that bullshit "return to sender" and try this: sophomoric poetry set to a plodding beat and overloud rhythm guitar. Period.

Occasionally Jenkins will drill a hook into your head with repetition, like the title/catch phrase of "Losing a Whole Year." But most often what he's singing about on the rockers is lost in a mix that places his vocals too close to the guitars. Most of the quiet tunes, like "The Background," are what used to be called power ballads back when groups like the Scorpions played them. If you haven't figured out that the big single, "Semi-Charmed Life," is about speed addiction, that's because the lyrics are an incoherent jumble of images. But when the narrative works and finds music to match, as it does on the languorous and beautiful "Motor-cycle Drive By," you can believe Third Eye Blind might be more enduring than their zip code.

-- Ted Drozdowski

The Wallflowers

Bringing Down the Horse (Interscope)
featuring "The Difference"

What's wrong with this picture? All the good stuff is here: folk-rocky song styles, a pleasantly retro mix of organ and a variety of guitars (pedal steel, acoustic slide, full-on electric rock), and an appealing, husky-voiced lead singer. Jakob Dylan's voice and his band's sound conjure a whole range of pleasant associations: the Band, Springsteen, even Zevon (in Dylan's throaty burr on "Invisible City"). And you might hear a touch of Bill Janovitz and Buffalo Tom on "The Difference."

But the Wallflowers are never as interesting as all the things they remind me of. Maybe it's because their music and lyrics stamp them as such nice, sensitive '90s guys. There's not an image or a sound that goes beyond the familiar. And in his imagination Dylan's as polite as anybody could wish to be in real life. "I ain't even gonna touch her at all, man, I'm only gonna lay awake and watch her sleep," he sings on "God Don't Make Lonely Girls." If your idea of a rock musician is someone you wouldn't mind introducing to your little sister, then Jakob Dylan's your man.

-- Jon Garelick