Albums we missed this summer

By Jordan Sargent and Patrick Daugherty

Published Aug. 21, 2007

Good girl goes bad well

Even your grandmother knows "Umbrella" by now, and that's not an accident. Good Girl Gone Bad, Rihanna's third album, is a stark and calculated transformation, both in music and image. Gone is the suffocating dancehall that made her anonymous on her own songs. Also gone is the frail teen indistinguishable from the girls in Nina Sky or 5,000 failed American Idol contestants.

With "Umbrella" as the catalyst, Rihanna is now an A-list female pop star, a magnetic, powerful, inescapable force. Is that the major-label machine at its finest? Maybe. But no pop singer except Beyonce could have pulled off "Umbrella" and kept it as resonant and as sweeping as it is.

One hit — even one as good as "Umbrella" — makes no promises about the quality of the album, though, and in that regard Good Girl Gone Bad is even more astounding than its massive lead single.

Over the album's 46 minutes, the 19-year-old Barbadian goes to great lengths to prove she actually has turned over to the dark side. "Breakin' Dishes" takes the album's title to its most logical extreme (those dishes are being broken over your head) and "Lemme Get That" takes the gold digging from "My Humps" and turns it into a good song (all it took was Timbaland.)

It isn't all bitchiness, though. The breathless "Sell Me Candy" and Ne-Yo duet "Hate That I Love You" are mushy love songs and the album's closing two tracks let doubt finally creep in.

The album ultimately (and only) succeeds because Rihanna possesses the slinkiness to own all the sounds on Good Girl Gone Bad: the glitchy electro, Timbo's strutting Middle-Eastern thump, the coffee house acoustic duets.

The Rihanna of yesteryear (and most other pop stars) would have been swallowed up by the genre-hopscotch, but this album is unmistakably her album. Good girl's grown up.

Offbeat Reilly turns out a winner

Poor old little Ike Reilly and his Assassination. Long championed by the chosen few, he has still yet to, and probably never will, break through to the increasingly blurrier "mainstream."

His lyrics are blunt, his instruments are savage, and his stories and characters are, for lack of a better word, unusual.

With his band's latest album, We Belong to the Staggering Evening, he's coming closer than ever to if not stardom at least recognition.

He's been written up in Blender and SPIN, and featured on NPR and in the The New York Times, but the album still hasn't even sniffed radio or the Billboard 200.

Odds are that Reilly doesn't mind the obscurity. As he says on the album's closer, "I look good in the faded light/ Honey that's where I shine."

It's obvious that he's got more important things to concentrate on. "Cocaine, OxyContin, mushrooms, marijuana, vodka" are his main concerns in "Valentine's Day in Juarez," while Serbian lesbians and wisecracking Irishmen, not unlike himself, populate lead single "When Irish Eyes Are Burning." Elsewhere there's the usual disenfranchised working men ("Fish Plant Uprising"), soldiers in lost wars ("Broken Parakeet Blues") and his own inept, lazy self ("The Nighttime is a Liar").

These are all Reilly's usual themes, and like always, all are razor sharp and hilarious in his typical offbeat manner.

The bright lights might never shine down on Reilly, but he'll always have a friend in the scheming shysters of the world and a home in the dingy alleys.

Spoon finally goes mainstream

Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon's sixth album and first Billboard Top 10 entry, will go down in Spoon's history as the album that finally got the lionized Austin band a little bit of that Shins money.

The mainstream failures of previous efforts weren't for lack of effort, though. The band did release their second album, "A Series of Sneaks," on major label Elektra in 1998, but that relationship would only prove to enhance the band's reputation as one that deserved to make Billboard waves but never could.

"Ga," then, isn't a triumphant victory over bad luck (or taste) as much as it is the final punch that crumbled the brick wall. Nor, as the consensus will report, is it their best album. Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is a different Spoon record, though one where the notoriously taut band loosens its ties a bit.

It starts, engine already in fifth gear, with the spiky "My Mathematical Mind" redux "Don't Make Me a Target," a song that sees the band unleashing a torrid minute-plus guitar outro that stings just as hard as singer Britt Daniel's Bush-baiting imagery.

"You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb" and "The Underdog, " both augmented with horn sections, are two of the album's finest songs: the latter a boisterous revolt, the former a wringing lament.

All told, "Ga" is an above-average, if not spectacular, combustible rock album, and one that's a worthy feather in Spoon's increasingly impressive cap. Consistent is as consistent does.

An Icky Thump, a bold triumph

First, a disclaimer: I love Jack White. I love The White Stripes. Get Behind Me Satan is one of the finest collections of music ever put to tape.

So this past summer I harbored impossibly high expectations for the follow-up to what I am certain will one day go down as one of the greatest albums of all time.

First single and title track, "Icky Thump," was a typically explosive Stripes guitar track.

It climbed to the band's loftiest chart heights yet, but offered no real clue to the directions the album would take listeners.

But the answer is emphatic: more guitar, more weirdness, and in the end, more brilliance.

White might have married, moved and had a kid (now two) since 2005, but he is uneasier than ever on Icky Thump.

After being largely abandoned on Satan, White's guitars explode out of the speakers like a ball of fire on nearly every one of the album's tracks, with the lone exception being the silly, but endearing, bagpipe exercise "Prickly Thorn, But Sweetly Worn." Paranoia envelops his consciousness and enemies lurk at the album's every turn.

When he's not being tempted by red-headed women ("Icky Thump," and "300 M.P.H. Torrential Outpour Blues") or 16-year-old women ("A Martyr For My Love For You"), he's being bothered by hipsters ("Bone Broke") or petty former lovers (the acoustic rave-up "Effect and Cause"). The man ain't mellow.

When he does keep the bile down, he's living in his typical Stripes fantasyland, gathering tossed-out trinkets ("Rag and Bone") and praying to obscure saints ("St. Andrew (This Battle is in the Air)"). It's all gripping.

The White Stripes pride themselves on being the most odd and accomplished band in rock, and right now they are almost comically ahead of their peers.

The White Stripes 6, everyone else, 0.