Its songs still ride on ebullient choruses, but the caffeine-high beats and shiny production have been tempered to make room for band interplay and slightly more pensive songwriting.
Pensive, slightly creepy, full of space and tension.
Rather, Mr. Lowman comes off as pensive, slightly skeptical, a little removed.
For now, though, this is a slightly downbeat Mancini, pensive even.
It's produced largely by No I.D., who first made his mark on pensive, slightly raw 1990s albums by Common (when he was still Common Sense) and Salaam Remi, who helped shape the sound of the Fugees and, more recently, the classic hip-hop-influenced retro-soul of Amy Winehouse.
Called "The Age of Bronze," it is by Rodin and happens to be the oldest piece in the collection, a life-size, perfectly formed male nude in a pose that is both pensive and slightly pained.
In person, Davis is pensive and slightly shy, and worries a lot about how she's going to be perceived.
Mr. Donovan's small, pensive mouth and slightly irritable demeanor make David earthy.
Viewers may examine the specificity with which Lachaise modeled his subjects: the weathered visage of John Marin, the modernist painter; the meditative air and etched skin of Edward Nagle, Ms. Nagle's son by her first husband; the pensive look and slightly parted lips of Edward M. M. Warburg, a philanthropist who was one of Lachaise's patrons.
Other characters -- including the imaginative but slightly ditzy Businka and Kubik, the pensive inventor -- manage to come straight from the long tradition of Russian folk tales while seeming distantly related to their American counterparts.
