http://www.popmatters.com/pm/music/reviews...arpet-massacre/и ещё:
From The TimesNovember 9, 2007
Duran Duran: Red Carpet Massacre
Pete Paphides
Towering over the newly redeveloped city centre of Birmingham is a huge, concrete, cylindrical structure called the Rotunda. Though conceived as a futuristic monument to a brave new world in the 1960s, it swiftly became associated with the decade in which it appeared – attracting constant derision. And yet, somehow, while Birmingham was razed and rebuilt around it, the Rotunda survived. No matter that it looks just as incongruous now as it did on the day it was built – people grew rather fond of it. Now it looks as if it’ll be there forever.
Coming from Birmingham, Duran Duran will be aware of the parallels. For this, their 12th album, Simon Le Bon inquires (on Box Full o’Honey): “Are you laughing at me now?” Right at this precise second? Well no, but by God there have been some moments: Le Bon congratulating himself in front of a worldwide audience at Live Earth for not flying in on a private jet; the artistic hara-kiri of their infamous 1995 covers album Thank You. Still, buoyed by the band’s alliances with their cool new chums Timbaland and Justin Timberlake, it says a lot that Le Bon feels bold enough to ask the question.
It turns out that, back in 1993, the airbrushed desolation of Ordinary World made a fan of the young Timberlake – so much so that when his Sexyback tour arrived in the UK last year he called Le Bon to suggest that they write a new song in a similar vein. Of course, he could have called to suggest that the two collaborate on a version of Star Trekkin’ using mostly bagpipes – the answer would have still been yes. But sure enough the new single, Falling Down, is a great song, very much in the Ordinary World mould.
Elsewhere though, Timberlake’s involvement is a double-edged sword. His prominent presence in the sparse art-funk of Nite-Runner makes a Duran sans Le Bon seem imaginable for the first time. And that’s not altogether a good thing. Those fans didn’t slavishly keep the faith for 26 years by wondering how much better their songs would be had someone else sung them.
You’ve always known what you’re getting into with Duran Duran.
But now, suddenly, amid the sleek, machine-pop environs assembled by Timbaland, as co-producer, and his protégé Nate Hills, Le Bon sometimes sounds like a stranger at his own party. Surely a little Auto-Tune – the voice-altering software also known as the Sixth Spice Girl – or a little vocoder would have further enhanced the dystopian underpass ambience of Skin Divers? If you can somehow set aside Le Bon’s porcine honk, the songs are often not at all bad. Indeed, the urgent pop noir of The Valley is so fantastic that not even John Taylor’s slap-happy one-man tribute to the incidental music on Seinfeld can ruin things.
As always, there are some people who would sooner die than admit that Duran Duran have an ounce of aesthetic savvy about them. It’s too conveniently forgotten that before Le Bon joined them they started out as rouged-up, Chic-loving, Roxy-smitten art-school punks. Released a couple of years ago, Only After Dark, the excellent mix CD curated by Nick Rhodes and John Taylor, suggested that those sensibilities remain intact.
How to access them though? One of the best songs on Red Carpet Massacre is called Tricked Out. That it’s an instrumental somehow serves to underscore the point.
(RCA)