A song with echoes of a 1950s ballad style, updated by way of early, parodistic Frank Zappa and a dash of electronica, examines a sort of Rumsfeldian cynicism, represented by the assertion that our problems are so complex that only experts can deal with them.
(Sisario) NICKELBACK (Thursday) This quartet of Marlboro men from the tiny Canadian prairie town of Hanna, Alberta, had last year's fourth-best-selling album with "All the Right Reasons" (Roadrunner), whose painfully ordinary commercial rock has one big (and superpopular) standout: "Photograph," a post-grunge ballad the way Ray Davies would write one, tangy and reflective.
When, near the close of the first act, he and Penny pay a visit to the top of the unfinished skyscraper where they're meant to dance in the upcoming competition, he sings Dorothy Fields's haunting ballad "The Way You Look Tonight".
Wistful ballads give way to township-jazz stomps like early Abdullah Ibrahim, Latin groovers to Cecil Tayloresque free jazz, rocking rural blues, love songs full of internal conversations.
If the individual features that reappear on a victim's face look menacing, ballads give way to rap and hip-hop, which fill the impeccably clean but foul-smelling lab.
The band's final two albums have never been well regarded, though they are no more inconsistent, in their polished, ballad-heavy way, than the band's sloppy, sprinting earliest efforts.
It's an approach that extends back to Velvet Underground ballads by way of Mazzy Star and the Cowboy Junkies, seeking a simplicity that is both a refuge and a bottoming out of despair, and it can strive for folky simplicity, as Damon and Naomi did, or reach a lapidary complexity, as with the ghostly, complex harmonies of Ida.
Though "Wild Thing" remains the Troggs' best-known song, the band went on to record numerous classics of the era, ranging from rough, crude rock 'n' roll ("I Can't Control Myself," "I Want You") to gentle, beautifully orchestrated ballads ("Any Way That You Want Me" and "Love Is All Around").
Describes one of Cherie's songs, a ballad called "My Way Back Home".
A Nashville songwriter named Julie Miller had written an intoxicating acoustic ballad called By Way of Sorrow.
