Joan Osborne
By J.R. Jones
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The fact that they can still get booked at a large venue on the strength of chart action five years ago only goes to show how long the marketing cycle for pop acts has grown in the last 30 years, since the LP became the norm. Five years after her 1967 breakthrough, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You, Osborne’s hero Aretha Franklin had released another 11 albums of pop, soul, jazz, and gospel. A decade later, two of Frischmann’s biggest influences, Wire and the Buzzcocks, had each released three studio albums in their first five years. Nowadays major-label megastars like Madonna and U2 put out an album only every three years or so. One couldn’t help but wonder if Osborne’s 11 new tracks and Elastica’s 13 would amount to five years’ worth of brilliance, and by that measure both albums are yawning disappointments. But The Menace is by far the more interesting, pushing Elastica into moodier art-punk territory and presenting its usual sandblaster choruses through a scrim of chanting and electronic noise. Righteous Love labors to strike the same balance between smart pop and blues moaning that pushed Relish up the charts, but its songs are more workmanlike than inspired.
The new album’s nine originals seem like committee work as well, with Osborne collaborating with as many as four people at a time, including Erik Della Penna and Jack Petruzzelli from her touring band. (As one might expect, the songs concocted with them are more groove-oriented than anything on Relish). “Running Out of Time,” written with Los Lobos’ Louie Perez, pumps along on a funky wah-wah riff, and the title track, written with Virgin Records singer-songwriter Joseph Arthur, is one of the album’s best and nerviest, a waltz-time ballad with a portentous buildup to a shamelessly melodramatic chorus. The slinky soul tune “Safety in Numbers,” with its irresistible falsetto oohs, deserves to be a hit (and may be, after Interscope releases a video featuring the babes from Sex and the City). But from there the record devolves into pleasant but forgettable MOR pop, the lyrics occasionally banal (“You made my heart beat like God made the thunder / I was struck down by your angel face”) or opaque (“The obliteration of your isolation / The complete explosion of your fondest notion / This disintegration is your elevation / It’s a grand illusion”). The closer, a cover of Bob Dylan’s sweet, simple “Make You Feel My Love,” only magnifies the song-factory process that generated the rest of the material.
