Toño Rosario, Rooney, Pharoahe Monch, The Chemical Brothers and Spoon.

the music press

tue 7/17/2007

A collage of Toño Rosario, Rooney, Pharoahe Monch, The Chemical Brothers and

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Merengue master Toño Rosario is back with ¡A Tu Gusto!, a "versatile" album with vocals that "hold as much boldness as sly mischief,” according to Billboard.com. Terra.com says Rosario “injects new energy” into his merengue mix.
L.A. power-poppers Rooney release their second major label effort, Calling The World. Entertainment Weekly thinks "Calling" contains the right amount of cheese: “sometimes your musical diet can use a little extra dairy.” Emo website Absolutepunk.net calls Rooney the second coming: “Rooney have put together 12 down-to-earth yet undeniably catchy cuts that send the hips shaking and the hearts breaking.”
Nearly 10 years after releasing his debut, MC, producer and occasional Diddy ghostwriter Pharoahe Monch finally releases Desire, the long-awaited follow up to Internal Affairs. The Village Voice welcomes Monch’s ability to “slice seemingly superfluous syllables … displaying an insatiable appetite for wordplay.” Popmatters is equally impressed, declaring the New York native “an artist of the highest order, a pioneer.”
British electronica duo The Chemical Brothers deliver their sixth studio album We Are The Night. “Long freed from the constraints of dance scene fashion, [The Chemical Brothers] now gambol in the same playful, psychedelic realm as The Flaming Lips or Super Furry Animals,” opines the U.K.'s Uncut Magazine. Across the pond, Spin.com laments that the duo "smear[s] psychedelic synth cheese and stereophonic airplane noises over chewy grooves that veer closer and closer to straight disco.”
Austin alterna-rock darlings Spoon appear to have hit their artistic peak with Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. The Onion’s AV Club gives it a B+ for the “handful of songs as good as any in the Spoon catalog—which, slipshod presentation aside, makes them as good as any indie-rock being made today.” Music Ohm gives them four out of five stars, as many songs in the new album “reach back in time and take their cues from the likes of The Kinks and The Beatles.”