Music reviews

This week's new releases from Jay Z to Asher Roth and beyond. We inspect the releases to watch out for Discuss this article

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Asher Roth

1/5
Asleep In The Bread Aisle
On ‘As I Em’, the midpoint on Asher Roth’s debut album, he begs his listeners not to compare him to Eminem. Sure, they’re both blonde white guys, he says, but beyond that the similarities run out. True enough – while Marshall Mathers deftly danced between biography and fiction, Roth mines the small ironies of modern life for his lyrics. And while Eminem was the white-trash kid from Michigan, Roth’s public persona is a laidback suburbanite stoner, more likely to fall asleep watching ThunderCats reruns than chainsaw up his girlfriend.

But there’s a bigger difference between the two and that is, frankly, quality. Roth clocked in two relatively high-profile mixtapes prior to this release (hence the appearances by Cee-Lo and Busta Rhymes on what is technically his first album), which ought to have given him something of a head start. But while Eminem’s sophomore effort, The Slim Shady EP, was filled with verbal dexterity and sharp humour, Roth’s album raises little more than a light smile. There’s no spark here, no surprises waiting for the attentive listener. ‘Bad Day’ sounds like someone at work describing a sitcom that wasn’t funny in the first place, and ‘I Like College’ somehow turns the hedonism of US university culture into a bland paste.

His attempts at sincerity don’t come off much better; ‘Sour Patch Kids’ reaches the philosophical heights of ‘the poor get poorer, the rich just get richer,’ and ‘His Dream’, an ode to Roth’s father, just comes off as mawkish. Fingers crossed for the future, but right now this stoner-boy’s wit is, well, blunt.
James Wilkinson
Available in stores.