Songs that don't Hoobastink

A hypnotic new single from Timbaland, and a reason not to be sick of another strumming singer-songwriter. Plus: Free downloads from a fascinating minimalist.

By Thomas Bartlett

June 2, 2004 | I can't let a new album by Gomez pass without mention. Like a lot of other people, I loved the debut, "Bring It On," but I thought their third record, "In Our Gun," was even better. So I had high hopes for their latest, "Split the Difference," particularly when I heard that Tchad Blake had signed on as producer. The pairing seemed especially appropriate because Blake had been a member of the sadly disbanded Latin Playboys, one of the great unsung bands of the '90s, and a clear influence on Gomez's cornucopia-of-sounds hi-fi production, lo-fi soul blues-rock.

But, although I've been listening to it a fair amount recently, it's an oddly unexceptional album, unfailingly proficient and consistently uninspired. Blake (who, with Mitchell Froom, was half of the greatest non-hip-hop production team of the recent past) remains the best engineer in the business, but as a producer he doesn't seem to have much to offer here. The Junior Kimbrough cover, "Meet Me in the City," and "There It Was" are both worth hearing, but I don't feel quite wholehearted enough about them to include them in this column.

As I write this, I'm watching "Video Clash," the MTV show where viewers vote to decide which video will play next. My momentary pleasure at seeing Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out" disappeared when it seemed that horrid Jessica Simpson's horrid cover of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away" was going to beat out Beyoncé's "Naughty Girl." But Beyoncé made a last-minute comeback, restoring my wellness -- although her jerks and jiggles, which I'm sure are meant to look like shivers of unbridled sexual energy, look more absurd and epileptic every time I watch this video. My wellness was then brutally destroyed by Britney's insipid, meandering "Everytime." How she could follow up the brilliance of "Toxic" with bilge like this is beyond me. Things looked up briefly a few minutes ago with Twista's "Overnight Celebrity," but then devolved completely, with the back-to-back awfulness of Ashlee Simpson and Hoobastank.

The bleeding continued over on MTV2, where I found a string of videos (Linkin Park, New Found Glory, Hoobastank again) that work much better with the sound turned off. Just when I was about to give up and flip to the oasis of kitsch that is VH1 Classic, I hit a sweet spot, a nifty hat trick of Modest Mouse, Kanye West and, again, Franz Ferdinand, ending my evening of video watching where it began -- and making me realize what an immense gulf there is between the few good videos in rotation on MTV and the crappy majority.

"Static on the Radio," Jim White, from "Drill a Hole in that Substrate and Tell Me What You See"
Jim White is often described as a "Southern gothic" songwriter. The designation is accurate enough, but still somewhat misleading -- to me, "Southern gothic" has come to suggest a set of clichés established long ago in describing Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, et al., and there's something so deeply, effortlessly, authentically strange about White that the term doesn't do him justice. His poetic, fully realized aesthetic, a blend of religious imagery, metaphysics, rural folksiness and surrealist humor, has resulted in many great songs but, so far, no consistently great albums. His new "Drill a Hole in That Substrate and Tell Me What You See," despite the presence of producer Joe Henry and guest appearances by great artists like Bill Frisell and Marc Anthony Thompson (Chocolate Genius), is a disappointment: White's writing has a tendency to unfold a little aimlessly, and by the second listen, I was already losing interest in most of the songs, which share a certain toothlessness. But the first track, "Static on the Radio," is near perfect. The most acute pleasure of this song is the interplay between White's voice-inside-your-head whisper and Aimee Mann's voice, which is like no other -- cold and calculating, with a too perfectly controlled vibrato but, paradoxically, extraordinarily intimate and, for me, comforting. (iTunes)

Next page: Timbaland returns -- with a hit and a miss