SHAKIRA DISAPPOINTS AGAIN

The new Shakira album, Sale el Sol, arrived in today's mail, and having nothing better to do, I listened to it. It's being marketed as her return to her Latin roots after last year's Euro-style dance-club disc She Wolf, which didn't do nearly as well as expected. Most of the songs on this one are sung in Spanish, but if you think that's gonna inspire Shakira to greater heights of vocal passion than she's mustered in the past half-dozen years or so, forget it.

The opening title track is limp rock, with a fuzzy electric guitar riff (by who knows who—the producers and guest vocalists are all credited, but none of the instrumentalists are, demonstrating convincingly that this is a pop album and not a rock record). The second track, "Loca," is electronic merengue, but it feels like it's playing at half-speed. Up next is an even more watery acoustic-guitar-and-piano ballad, "Ante de las Seis," and that's followed by another electronic, beat-driven number, "Gordita."

This is the first remotely interesting song on the album, because it features a guest spot by Residente de Calle 13, and he's jabbing at Shakira, speaking for (I'd bet) a sizable portion of Latin rock fans when he says that he liked her better before she moved to Miami and dyed her hair:

Shaki tú estás bien bonita aunque también me gustaba cuando estabas más gordita
Con el pelito negrito y la cara redondita
Así medio roquerita

Shakira tries to keep up, turning the song into a half-dirty (for pop) duo, but it's got nothing on Residente's back-and-forth with Mala Rodríguez on "Mala Suerta con el 13," from Calle 13's own Residente o Visitante CD. And the album's momentum sags a bit after that.

"Addicted to You" is an English-language song that seems about 90 seconds long; "Lo Que Más" is another boring ballad; and "Mariposas" is a Spanish-language take on the girl-and-her-piano almost-rock songs VH1 plays all morning.

"Rabiosa" is one of three songs that appear in two versions on Sale el Sol. This first one is another electro-merengue track, like "Loca" featuring El Cata, but this one's slightly faster and it could have been pretty good if Shakira's attempts at sexy moaning didn't sound like she was waking up from a siesta.

"Devocíon" is a postpunk track driven by throbbing bass and atmospheric keyboards straight from the Cure's Disintegration, and her vocals are probably the best on the whole record. This is the best song on the whole disc; for pure passion, I'd put it right up there with "Timor," the last track on Oral Fixation, Vol. 2, and the last track of hers that really surprised me (in a good way).

"Islands" is in English, all distorted keyboards and New Wave pulse; it's not bad, but I can't see it being a hit, 'cause it doesn't have much of a chorus.

"Tu Boca," which frankly I was expecting to be another drippy ballad, is actually another postpunk rocker, with tons of bass and a melody that reminds me of Natalia Lafourcade's second album (credited to her band Natalia y la Forquetina), Casa. Shakira even heads into Natalia's upper-register vocal territory on a few lines. This song and "Devocíon" are the two keepers.

The last song on the album proper is "Waka Waka (Esto Es Africa)," and I have nothing to say about that.

The bonus tracks are a remix of "Loca" featuring formerly-overrated, now-forgotten UK "grime" rapper Dizzee Rascal; a remix of "Rabiosa" featuring Pitbull; and an English-language version of "Waka Waka." None of them are particularly good. I used to like Pitbull a lot, but he'll appear on just any damn thing these days, and he always sounds the same. He hasn't been at full strength since his second album, El Mariel.

This is a short album (without the three bonus tracks, it'd be less than 40 minutes long) and not a particularly good one. Two genuine keepers ("Devocíon," "Tu Boca") and one mildly diverting novelty ("Gordita") out of 15 is not nearly enough to make Sale el Sol worth your money.

THE CURE: SECRETLY METAL?

[Cross-posted here.]

Are the Cure secretly a metal band? Obviously, the short answer to that is No. But have the Cure been a major, and possibly not-so-secret influence on much of contemporary metal? It'd be pretty hard to dispute that, I think. Try imagining Deftones without the Cure—they wouldn't exist. Hell, they covered "If Only Tonight We Could Sleep" on their B-Sides & Rarities compilation. (I once tried to set up a conversation between Cure frontman Robert Smith and Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno for a magazine feature, but Smith wouldn't participate.) Other groups, from Linkin Park to Katatonia, plus a zillion Goth-metal and "prom dress metal" acts, may or may not have explicitly nodded to the Cure, but I can definitely hear some of their ideas present.

The Cure, for their part, have occasionally gotten heavy. Their 2000 album Bloodflowers was pretty doomy, and their 2004 self-titled album was produced by Ross Robinson, who's most famous for working with Korn, Slipknot and other nü-metal acts. I saw them live in June 2000, touring in support of Bloodflowers, and the show was actually a whole lot heavier than I expected it to be. Many of the songs were morose, roaring dirges that, looking back now, sound not that far from some of what Celtic Frost/Triptykon leader Tom G. Warrior's been up to in recent years, and Robert Smith proved to be a shockingly capable guitarist, tearing into some almost Hendrix-esque solos. It was much more of a rock show than I expected it to be. (To get some idea, check out the Trilogy DVD, on which the band plays three of their albums—1982's Pornography, 1989's Disintegration and Bloodflowers—in their entirety.)

Disintegration was reissued this week as a super-deluxe three-CD set. The first disc is the album, naturally; the second disc is all demos and rehearsal tracks, some featuring only Robert Smith's voice and guitar, some featuring the band working out instrumental tracks. The third disc is an expanded version of a 1991 promo-only live album, Entreat, which featured versions of eight or nine Disintegration tracks in its original incarnation, but has now been expanded into a full 12-track live recreation of the record. The original album is brilliant, a churning, late-evening record full of songs that gradually cohere into a greater whole—it really deserves (and demands) to be heard from beginning to end, and while "Love Song" was pulled out as a single and did fairly well at the time, there aren't any true standout tracks. Each piece is a movement in a suite, and the cumulative effect is psychedelic and disorienting, like spinning in circles in a dark room full of unseen objects that bruise, but don't cut, when you bounce off them. If you like Gothic metal, you're probably already listening to the Cure, and Disintegration in particular, on a semi-regular basis. But if you're not, it's about time you got with the program.