Since 2002, Rod Stewart has had three top-10 entries in the Billboard album charts, and he's made it look so easy. I mean that in every sense of the word. His three-album Great American Songbook series showed no evidence of musical or interpretive effort whatsoever, consisting of by-the-number versions of Tin Pan Alley favorites, marked by a strange sense of reverence from the one-time rock 'n' roller.
His new release, billed as a collection of Great Rock Classics of Our Time, is again built around familiar tunes, but this time draws source material from an idiom perhaps more suited to his trademark raspy vocal timbre. On paper, this may sound like a triumphant return to his rock 'n' roll roots, but Still the Same is ultimately marred by the same sorts of problems that made the Great American Songbook albums such critical bloodbaths. Stewart once again remakes without reinterpreting. The unbridled monotony of the aptly titled Still the Same makes it clear Stewart is more interested in milking the cash-cow that his 21st century standards-singer persona has become than presenting anything musically compelling.
If the Great American Songbook albums had a saving grace, it was the source materials. The songs themselves were almost uniformly excellent. In this regard, Still the Same does not live up to its predecessors. Stewart venerates forgettable AOR hits such as the Bob Seger title track and Bread's "Everything I Own" by including them alongside the work of Bob Dylan and Van Morrison. It is similarly unfortunate that, out of the dozens of versions of the rightful classic "Love Hurts" that have been recorded, Stewart chose probably the most cringe-inducing as his aesthetic model. His version is a heavily amped power ballad, firmly in the style of the Scottish band Nazareth's version. This arena-rock reading erases the simple yearning the lyrics suggest -- captured so hauntingly by performers from the Everly Brothers to Roy Orbison to Gram Parsons -- with an over-the-top emotional theatricality that supplies the album with yet another false note.
It is possible to skillfully put together an album of covers, but Still the Same is not up to this task. Albums like Yo La Tengo's brilliant 1990 covers album, Fakebook, and Cat Power's more recent The Covers Record show the inspired results careful song selection and execution can produce. Yo La Tengo's album featured tracks from unknown or underappreciated artists, helping to save such gems as John Cale's post-Velvets solo track "Andalucia" from obscurity. Cat Power acknowledges her lesser-known influences on some tracks, but delivers the album's highlight with her stunningly innovative reading of The Stones' "Satisfaction" as a bluesy piano ballad.
The songs on Still the Same, however, will already be familiar to anyone who has spent more than a few hours listening to classic rock radio. In addition, Stewart's vocal performances as well as the songs' instrumental arrangements leave no individual stamp. Still the Same even recreates detailed nuances of the originally recordings, copying the Beatles-esque back-up vocals of Badfinger's "Day After Day" and the steel guitars of Dylan's "If Not For You."
Everything on Still the Same has been done before--and has been done much better. File this one under "redundant."
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