Album reviews: The-Dream’s ‘Love King’

The-Dream

“Love King”

Def Jam

Three stars (out of four)

In the world of The-Dream, there is only room for the sentiment expressed on the signage of so many airport-adjacent bars: girls, girls, girls. Like many of his contemporary R&B peers, ambiguity is an afterthought. And “Love King,” the lead single of his third album, may as well serve as a manifesto, with its boasting about scoring girls in the club, the church, the trap, his label, his bank — and in New York, L.A., Miami, Chicago, Toronto and Paris.

After all, Terius Nash’s biggest hits, Beyonce’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and Rihanna’s “Umbrella,” were written for the fairer sex. And throughout his solo career, he’s ignored everything but carnal concerns, studiously aping his models Prince and R Kelly, while embellishing his lover-man lust with ornate, Timbaland-influenced productions.

Although his previous efforts amply showcased his admirable melodic gifts and sturdy but soaring falsetto, he projected a facelessness that demarcated him from his idols. “Love King” again finds him covering well-trodden ground, but this time he manages to put a fresher spin on tired tropes — conspiring with T.I. on “Make Up Bag” to list the $5,000 purses a man can purchase to redeem his misbehavior. On “Florida University,” he lambastes a spurned lover calling him out on Twitter.

Behind the boards, he wisely expands his palette, incorporating chopped-and-screwed vocals and arena-ready synths cribbed from Kanye West.

Ultimately, while occasionally repetitive, “Love King” proves that The-Dream’s claim to the throne isn’t unfounded, even if it’s unclear whether he’s left the bedroom in the last five years.

— Jeff Weiss

Alejandro Escovedo

“Street Songs of Love”

Concord Music

Three stars (out of four)

Talk about late bloomers. Alejandro Escovedo is a much-admired Texas-based rocker who has been around since the late ‘70s. But only in the last two years has he seen a significant uptick in his mainstream recognition, thanks to a number of high-profile endorsements, most notably the embrace of Bruce Springsteen and his management team.

The marketing buzz has been accompanied by two of the most straightforward and instantly accessible albums of Escovedo’s long career, “Real Animal” in 2008 and, on Tuesday, “Street Songs of Love.”

Escovedo started out in the ‘70s as a would-be filmmaker who found himself in one of America’s first punk bands, the San Francisco-based Nuns, opening act for the Sex Pistols’ legendary concert at Winterland in 1978. From there he went on to co-found two great but ill-fated ‘80s bands, Rank and File and the True Believers, then settled into the Austin, Texas, singer-songwriter scene, where he’s been a fixture for two decades.

Along the way he’s accumulated numerous high-profile fans — John Cale, Ian Hunter, Springsteen — fond of the way he blends his literate, lacerating lyrics into a stew of garage rock, folk, glam, punk and even avant-classical (Escovedo’s had a few excellent string sections in his past).

Then came “Real Animal,” the feistiest rock album of his solo career, produced by Tony Visconti, who has worked with David Bowie and T. Rex.

If “Real Animal” put Escovedo back in close touch with his hardest-edged ‘70s influences (Iggy Pop, Johnny Thunders, Lou Reed), “Street Songs of Love” is even more stripped down and hard-hitting.

Recorded with Escovedo’s four-piece road band, the album is heavy on big guitars and big choruses. His lyrics strive for grand, universal statements about the most universal, if also most elusive, emotion. They teeter between flashes of the poetic and the generic, sometimes within the same song. These songs don’t call for insight; they demand boldness.

What makes it work is the sheer exuberance of the performances, the roar coming from the speakers. This is an album about the heart, but it hits below the belt — it wants to make you move. Escovedo and the band throw themselves into the melodies, and Visconti nails the details: the hand claps in “This Bed Is Getting Crowded,” the visceral impact of the booming backbeats and subterranean bass on “Tender Heart,” the way Escovedo shouts, “C’mon, fool me!” before the guitar solo in “Silver Cloud.”

After all the bravado, the instrumental “Fort Worth Blue” brings it all home with a lovely, melancholy shimmer. Coming after understated cameos by Springsteen and Hunter, “Fort Worth Blue” puts the focus back where it should be: on a road-tested band that kicks out the jams and then closes down the bar.

— Greg Kot

Wolf Parade

“Expo 86”

Sub Pop

Two and a half stars (out of four)

On its third full-length, this Canadian indie-rock outfit appears no less interested in noise and disjunction than it’s ever been: “Palm Road” bristles with fuzzy guitars, “In the Direction of the Moon” sports a squelchy vintage-synth riff, and “What Did My Lover Say? (It Always Had to Go This Way)” lurches from verse to chorus with a herky-jerky irregularity that keeps you unsure of what’s coming next.

Yet perhaps in spite of themselves, the members of Wolf Parade — who also put in time with a handful of other bands, including Handsome Furs and Sunset Rubdown — are also improving as songwriters, crafting shapelier melodies and figuring out how to use rhythm to drive toward an emotional climax.

In fact, the best tracks on “Expo 86” offer a kind of art-damaged version of the Bruce Springsteen worship that’s swept indie rock lately; “Little Golden Age” has one of those “whoa-oh-oh” vocal lines that somehow feels both mournful and triumphant at the same time. Elsewhere, a lovely, Beatlesque chord change crops up in “Two Men in New Tuxedos.”

Unlike the Beatles or Bruce, these guys don’t seem to have much to say. (“I don’t know how to stop it at all,” Dan Boeckner sings in “Pobody’s Nerfect,” and he might be referring to the word soup in which this album floats.) Still, energy versus resistance can make for a pretty compelling narrative itself.

— Mikael Wood