svca » Tue Jun 16, 2015 9:11 am wrote:New York Times may be positive, but it's certainly backhanded....
There was nothing wrong withTrespassing and there was certainly nothing wrong with FYE.
I don't understand why it's required that an entire album has to be the same music, the same style in order to be successful. One of the things I love about Adam is that he can do a multitude of styes, makes the album less boring.
I think I'm out of step with the music business lol. And I hate that "formulaic" is what gives Adam good reviews.
By all means, lets not step out of the box radio puts all their artists in.
![argh ::argh::](./images/smilies/035_argh.gif)
Oh, don't get me wrong: I still feel that the
New York Times hasn't given Adam his due, and I completely disagreed with all of their previous reviews. Both Jons there (Pareles and Caramanica) have been inexplicably harsh on him. But this one---although backhanded in its compliments, as you say---is at least a step in the right direction.
One thing that truly surprised me about the latest review is that Caramanica didn't attack the album for its lyrics. I was expecting the NYT to be savage on that aspect, especially after reading this otherwise positive review from
Digital Spy, which attacked the album's supposedly "lousy lyrics":
http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/music/revie ... 6W7eK3MBqZ
Here and there on the album, I feel, a few of the lyrics could have been tweaked, but it's a very minor issue---ridiculously minor, really, in the grand scheme of things. It's a shame that Digital Spy seems to have downgraded its score to 3/5 purely on lyrical grounds, as the rest of their review reads like a clear four stars.
Digital Spy also counts towards the Metacritic score for the album. So far (like the
Rolling Stone 3-star review) its score hasn't been added to the tally---and I hope it doesn't pull it down too much, as the average Metacritic score is currently better than
FYE's 71/100:
http://www.metacritic.com/music/the-ori ... am-lambert
Yay!!!
Couldn't agree more with your criticism of reviewers who expect every track to be stylistically similar, with no genre hopping. Obviously, these people wouldn't have appreciated Elvis's best albums either!