Music

Ricky Carden
Lust, Luck, Love

Gadsden native Ricky Carden obviously has some women issues, and he's chronicled it all his debut album, Lust, Luck, Love. Musically, the album sounds great, but the lyrics really bring it down.

Props go to any musician that releases an album without being signed to a label, but Carden's lyrics sound as if they were written by a third-grader who has newly discovered the art of rhyming, and are full of over-used clichés about love. Take the third track, "Diamond," for example: "I've never been one to be that shy, you left me speechless when you walked by, I got lost in your eyes. I lost all track of what, what is day and what is night.""

There are gems, like the line "You might be the death of me, but then again I think you're the breath in me," also from "Diamond," but all in all, the album is repetitive and bland.

The tiresome combination of clichés and rhyme continues throughout most of the 13-song (plus a bonus "hidden" song) album. It's a shame the lyrics don't match the catchiness of the music and beats, because Carden definitely shows some potential in putting music together.

Alice Cooper
Along Came a Spider

Missed Steven lately?

Longtime Alice Cooper fans will recognize the little psycho who had a thing for necrophilia, violence and black widow spiders on Cooper's classic concept album Welcome To My Nightmare (1975). Schizo Steven has popped up on several subsequent albums and slithers back in a big way on Cooper's latest horror show set to music, Along Came a Spider.

Though lacking the musical sophistication of Welcome to My Nightmare or any one song on par with enduring rock staples like "School's Out" or "Poison," the more brutal hard rock of Spider nevertheless contains enough hooks to please the faithful.

Rick Springfield
Venus in Overdrive

Sometimes context matters too much.

Several tracks from Rick Springfield's new Venus in Overdrive could easily find fans in a variety of genres — "Time Stand Still" in pop; "One Passenger," which oddly opens like British Sea Power, in alternative, and the title track in rock — if, they weren't coming from, you know, Mr. Jesse's Girl. Never mind that Springfield left the bubble-gum stuff behind in the early '80s or that the snarling "3 Warning Shots," in which he fantasizes about killing John Lennon's killer, is brainier and more aggressive than any Nickelback single.

As a former pop idol and current soap star, Springfield has his niche and he knows it, but Venus in Overdrive shows that he's not going to stop trying to bust out of it.

Zach Gill
Zach Gill's Stuff

Zach Gill's Stuff kind of defines mellow, dude. Gill's vocals have the same breathy, whispered quality as Jack Johnson's do. (As Johnson's keyboard player, Gill would have plenty of time to soak that in.)

At his best, Gill finds a groove and settles in, as he does in the playful piano-pop "Family" or the sorta-bluesy, Lyle Lovettish gospel of "Handy Man."

Problems start to set in, though, on two fronts. Sometimes, Gill just goes for all-out weird, as he does on the reggaefied ode to messiness, "Don't Touch My Stuff," and the overcaffeinated, Broadway musical misfire, "Bettina." All "Zach Gill's Stuff" really needs is a bit of organization, a bit of tightening here, some straightening there, but maybe that would harsh the mellow.