LOVE IT: Hanson - Shout It Out.

Hanson is one of those boy bands you can’t believe you were so in love with once upon a time. But once you turn the radio past 94.9FM and a snippet of “MMMbop” squeezes its way back into your heart, you forget all your inhibitions and crank up that jam. Mentally, you’re mentally back in middle school, each lyric rolling miraculously off your tongue and making your morning commute bouncy and carefree.


With their eighth album, Shout It Out, the band of brothers has brought me back to that mental place with another batch of perfectly-packaged power pop cookies. It’s eerie that they don’t seem to have aged much, in looks or vocal ranges, since their breakthrough in 1996. Their music has always been about life and love through the eyes of someone much too young to be world-weary (what 10-year-old seriously knows anything about relationships, or cares enough to break the cootie shield?), but now it seems they have finally matured.

Issac, Taylor, and Zac are all grown up, inching towards their 30s, raising broods big enough to build their own commune, and somehow they have enough excess energy to run their own small record label, write, record, and tour endlessly with big smiles on their purdy boyish faces. This energy is boundless on Shout It Out. With nary a ballad amongst its 12 tracks, it oozes with peppy charm that teeters dangerously on the edge of syrupy preciousness, and after a while it leaves an over-processed taste in your mouth. Richard Simmons will be reaching and lifting to these, no doubt about it. Yet after clapping along to the adorably cheesy video for “Thinking ‘Bout Somethin” (see it below — and what’s Weird Al doing there?), I can’t help but enjoy it — at least in small increments. The guys seem to know it’s hokey but make no apologies and are having a blast.

Shout It Out will likely be shelved after a few weeks on your iPod rotation, but there isn’t much more refreshing to hear than three brothers still flawlessly whippin’ out their instruments to do what they love together. (released June 8 on their label, 3CG Records).

LEAVE IT: Rooney - Eureka.

If it had been another band, I would not have been as disappointed. But it was Rooney, and because I expected an explosion of greatness, I was let down big time. Rooney’s third album, Eureka – recorded and self-released independently by the band after breaking from Geffen — is moderately adequate radio pop/rock. Maybe if the guys didn’t focus on being bitter and juvenile, their tunes would be enjoyable. As it is, however, their usually carefully crafted orchestrations just come off as sounding paint-by-numbers.


No song on Eureka is memorable. I listened to it twice yesterday, and today I cannot recall a single melody. The songs are lacking essential lifeblood - this from a band who seamlessly meshed 60s, 70s, and 80s madness with such feeling on two stellar previous albums. The band says this is the proudest they’ve ever been of their music; some critics call Eureka their best yet. I just don’t hear that.

Many songs, including “Holdin’ On,” “All Or Nothing,” and “I Can’t Get Enough” are straight up boring. “Not In My House” is bombarding and creepy. “The Hunch” laughably recalls the theme song to “Duck Tales,” but the punchy horns are peppy enough to make it the album’s highlight.

Where is Rooney’s trademark affinity for skull-rippingly excellent pop hooks? Robert (brother of actor/musician Jason) Schwartzman and Co. have lost their oomph. They mindlessly adhere to the verse-chorus-verse method of songwriting, trading their let’s-enjoy-life-no-matter-what philosophy for flat rhymes that spew at The Man and the music machine. It doesn’t have to be all sunny skies, but if clear weather is what it takes for Rooney to make good music, perhaps they should have cooled off a while longer, instead of giving fans an explosion of mediocrity.

I was going to see them at Crowbar on July 9, but I’ve changed my mind. I don’t think I can take seeing cardboard cut-outs of a band I love.

LOVE IT: Delta Spirit - History From Below.

I saw Delta Spirit live three years ago and was literally struck dumb by their set. The group’s collective energy, multi-instrument switcheroos, and heartfelt sentiment was heart-warming and entrancing.


Such is the energy and emotion captured in the group’s second album, History From Below. In the three years since their self-released debut, the incredible this-is-all-you-will-listen-to-for-three-weeks Ode to Sunshine, Delta Spirit has moved into a real studio and given us 11 of the most captivating songs you will ever hear, and while the band sounds more polished, they haven’t lost the essence of what makes them so good.

The album opener, “911,” bounces around a relevant tale of economic caution while “Bushwick Blues” plows out of the speakers with pulsating rhythms and a message of human vulnerability. “Salt in the Wound” is one of those mind-reelingly personal songs that arouses intense emotion and knee-jerk replays. Listen to this one with headphones in a quiet space.

Delta Spirit is comprised of old souls who know just what to say in their major-key melodies and hopeful anthems to encourage and comfort the human race, or simply to help a person through theinevitability of heartbreak. “Ransom Man,” “St. Francis,” and “Ballad of Vitaly” quietly trudge through bravery, uncertainty, self-realization and unfair loss, but are so beautifully hopeful that I want to reach in and give singer Matt Vasquez a hug. He shouts and murmurs the lyrics like any man in crisis — rousing and intimate, he gets angry and frustrated and torn down by life, but pulls in the listener like a friend.

History From Below shines a light on the human condition, but offers a melancholy hope, as if to say, “Yep, life blows and storms are ahead, but we have life jackets.” (Out June 8 on Rounder Records)

LOVE IT: Eli "Paperboy" Reed - Come and Get It.

Stir Marvin Gaye with two cups of Otis Redding, two teaspoons of Little Richard, a dash of vanilla, and all of the excess energy you have left in your pantry. Bake for one hour and out pops Eli “Paperboy” Reed, the pompadour-sporting Jewish kid from Massachusetts who, surprisingly, rocks and jives on a level almost up there with the original masters of Motown. It blows my mind that his major label debut, Come and Get It (Capitol), wasn’t originally released in the ’60s.


From the moment “Explosion” came blasting from my car speakers, I knew I was in for an exciting throwback to the time of jive and soul and bands with horn sections and a frontman sporting shlicked back hair and delivering falsetto screams in an awesome nod to all those men who really knew how to trap emotions in a vocal. The song is a bit erratic but definitely gets you pumped for the ensuing, better organized Motown-tinged rhythms and melodies.

With his backing band, True Loves (precious, right?), Reed delivers soul and groove enough to knock you off your feet – or onto them. These tunes are made for a dance floor, and I couldn’t help but tap along to the beat with every part of my body that wasn’t occupied by keeping my car on the road.

Each song offers a different color of the Motown spectrum, and though the album’s pace could be smoother — the latter half suddenly halts into a string of slow blues after a fervor of upbeat wailers — Come and Get It will be a delight to those of us who miss, as Reed describes it, “an explosion of rhythm and blues.” It’s no Marvin or Otis, but it’s a pretty dang decent substitute for the real thing.