CD reviews: B.B. King delivers, but The Game and Solange fall short

"LAX"

The Game

Sometimes it seems that the best way to evaluate the Los Angeles rapper The Game is by the names he drops. He is the most reference-thick artist in any medium since the Bret Easton Ellis of "American Psycho" — whom he's been influenced by, whom he's beefing with, what he owns, where he's been. Over two strong albums he has been a charismatic and sometimes mischievous rapper, but the question remains: Is The Game more than the sum of his proper nouns?

On "LAX," his third album, for the first time he's a joyless name-checker. Almost everything here, from the boasting ("Money") to the baiting ("LAX Files," "Cali Sunshine"), is pro forma. Worse, The Game, never a fluid rapper, sounds positively lumpy, as if he were delivering verses while running up a steep flight of stairs, or as if the last few years of pugnacity have finally left him winded.

Worse still, gone are the clever hooks of his debut album (written largely, it should be said, by 50 Cent) and the brute textures of his follow-up. Here the production is ponderous; The Game has somehow coaxed a dull beat even from Kanye West, who produced "Angel," a limp G-funk tribute.

Crucial to the Game's biography is the time he spent recuperating from a 2001 shooting. It was then that he began his immersion in hip-hop, listening to the genre's classic albums. It might explain his decision to record the bizarre "Never Can Say Goodbye," which he raps from the perspective of three long-gone greats: Tupac Shakur, the Notorious B.I.G. and Eazy-E. But sacrilege aside, the Game sounds his most vibrant here, matching their vocal rhythms and tics. He sounds as if he's having more fun playing them than, everywhere else here, playing himself.

Jon Caramanica, New York Times News Service

"ONE KIND FAVOR"

B.B. King

The bluesman B.B. King's latest album, "One Kind Favor," is part throwback, part twist. At 82, King is considering his past; the album release anticipates the Sept. 10 opening of the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, Miss., where he grew up. The songs on "One Kind Favor" were current when King's career got under way in the 1940s and '50s, among them "Sitting on Top of the World" and lesser-known gems like "Get These Blues Off Me" from T-Bone Walker. The performance, recorded live in the studio, might almost be a late set at a very attentive club.

Clearly spotlighted up front, never having to strain, is King, addressing the blues eternals of love, hard times and death — sometimes all three, as in Howlin' Wolf's "How Many More Years."

"One Kind Favor" was produced by T Bone Burnett, who has been cultivating the death-haunted sides of rockers like John Mellencamp and Robert Plant. King isn't gloomy about mortality. His voice reveals sorrow, then fights it off with raspy shouts, while his guitar is his modest but indomitable ally, with its finely focused tone and terse, targeted phrases.

The pianist is Dr. John, who — bolstered by Jim Keltner on drums — regularly rolls King's Mississippi-Memphis blues toward New Orleans, especially with the second-line beat of "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." Blues scholars could parse King's deliberate homages to and divergences from models like Walker, Big Bill Broonzy and Blind Lemon Jefferson. The album's pristinely remodeled ambience is no more a purely vintage style than the stereo (rather than mono) recording is. But the ache, the anger, the elegance and the edge of King's blues are undiminished and authentic.

Jon Pareles, New York Times News Service

"SOL-ANGEL AND THE HADLEY ST. DREAMS"

Solange

In the booklet for her second album, "Sol-AngeL and the Hadley St. Dreams," the R&B singer Solange poses in front of two large posters on which sentences are written multiple times, schoolchild-punishment-style: "I will not get pregnant at 17," "I will not have a famous family."

Well, what's done is done, but Solange is not quite the petulant rebel she would like to be painted as. While she may have missed some of the memos received and followed to the letter by her much more famous sister, Beyoncé, she appears to have intercepted some of the ones meant for Amy Winehouse, whose shadow looms large here.

Even just a couple of years ago, major labels were not exactly clamoring to sign retro-soul singers, even one who shares DNA with the most dynamic R&B performer of the decade (to say nothing of one whose 2003 debut release, "Solo Star," was characterless pop R&B).

But Solange is no Winehouse, even if she has corralled a host of top producers — the Neptunes ("I Decided," Parts 1 and 2), Soulshock and Karlin (the excellent "Sandcastle Disco") and Mark Ronson ("6 O'Clock Blues"), the architect of Winehouse's sound — all in the service of creating a Motownesque fantasy world in which Solange can distinguish herself from the family brand.

This is a peppy album, rich with thumping horns, crisp percussion and light piano melodies. As homage, it's impressive. But Solange can't quite keep up. Her voice lacks texture and depth, making her frustrations almost indistinguishable from her celebrations. Being different, it turns out, is not quite enough.

Jon Caramanica, New York Times News Service