In his second album, Lovely Things (Sheer Sound), Ernie Smith fuses contemporary jazz and R&B with skill and beauty. Whoever said the two could never coexist was certainly wrong.
Smith features rising kwaito star Mapaputsi on the title track, Lovely Things, and this leaves him free to pay detailed attention to what he does best — playing the guitar. It also has Marcus Wyatt on trumpet. Good ensemble work ensures that the number is not dominated by Mapaputsi’s rap.
Smith does a good vocal attempt, with an appropriate R&B message on Love Don’t Hurt Me Again. Another track, Odette’s Song, is slow and easy with poignant lyrics.
While Smith is known as a jazz musician, in essence Lovely Things is brimming with R&B. In reproducing the well-worn genre it is world-class. Eleven of the album’s tracks are original, testimony to Smith’s talent, and the 12th is a cover, a remastering of Lionel Ritchie’s Get Off the Wall, intelligently mixed with Get Down on It by Kool and the Gang.
The album is quite brilliant, but slightly disappointing in the fact that most of the songs’ lyrics depict Smith as the broken-hearted lover. The music is greatly enhanced by the talents of trumpeter Wyatt, drummer Vusi Khumalo and bassists Fana Zulu and Concord Nzimande.
Filter: The Amalgamut (Reprise)
Ex-Nine Inch Nails man Richard Patrick and company move another step away from techno-rock, heading steadily into straightforward hard-rock territory. Opening with high-energy crashing guitars of You Walk Away and American Cliché, the album wavers (in a somewhat unbalanced way) between these solidly constructed all-rage-and-guitar tracks and a few melodic hard-edged pop-rock songs. It ends with the unusual Roger Waters-like, eight-minute chill-rock track The 4th, mostly instrumental with tribal-sounding vocals. A well-crafted effort, but not ground-breaking. — Riaan Wolmarans
Henry Ate: 96-02 The Singles (EMI)
I’ve never really been a fan of Karma-Ann Swanepoel and her band Henry Ate’s brand of easy-listening, wispy, reflections-on-life folk-pop, but they certainly deserve applause for sticking to their guns and building up a solid fanbase over the past six years. Catchy songwriting on hits such as Henry, Hey Mister, Just and Tuesday Afternoon and a myriad concert appearances brought them chart and sales success, and these are all here, along with four new songs — Outside, Life, Hey Boy and Finally — in the usual vein. — Riaan Wolmarans
The Vines: Highly Evolved (EMI)
Aussie band The Vines bound on to the scene with simple but powerful rock heavy with influences: the ballads sound like The Beatles, the heavy rock tracks like Nirvana and tracks like Outtathaway hark back to the days of the Troggs and Beastie Boys. ”I’m feeling happy / So highly evolved,”goes the title track. It’s happy, yes, but the evolution is not all that apparent. — Riaan Wolmarans