ClubHooligan.com - Burning it up at both ends

Web posted August 2, 2007

New releases by Common, Against Me! worth a listen

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Common "Finding Forever" ★★★

Hanging with Kanye West has been very good for Common. The Chicago-born Lonnie Lynn had been making thoughtful conscious-rap albums for more than a dozen years before his fellow Windy City resident produced 2005's tightly constructed "Be." "Finding Forever" isn't quite so pithy, but it once again finds Common's non-flashy but nimble rhymes juiced up with a shot of welcome pop-wise pizzazz. West smartly brought in Brit songstress Lily Allen to give "Drivin' Me Wild" a dose of trans-Atlantic synergy, and he turns up on "Southside" to join his elder in bragging on his hometown (and himself). And there are all sorts of other well-employed cameos on "Finding Forever." DJ Premier slices up "The Game" with exclamatory old-school scratching, and long-gone-missing soul brothers D'Angelo and Bilal provide silky vocal counterpoint on "So Far to Go" and "Black Maybe," respectively, which are both marked by the probing, introspective intelligence that the rapper formerly known as Common Sense is known for.

Against Me! "New Wave" ★★★

"We can control the medium. We can control the context of presentation." So begins Against Me!'s fourth album, "New Wave," the major-label debut for these punk rockers. A large part of the message of these McLuhanesque lines come from Tom Gabel's full-throated growl: He's a hard-core shouter, a rabble-rouser, a battered optimist. "New Wave's" chugging anthems owe more to punk's first wave than early '80s new wave, but they're not nostalgic; instead, they are insightfully self-reflexive.

The 34-minute album loses momentum toward the end, after a duet with Tegan Quin (of Tegan & Sara), but maybe that's appropriate for an often-thrilling record about frustrated desires.