Ben Harper

Taking a page from the Foo Fighters playbook, King of Jam and Surf Ben Harper believes he is writing music so polarized that it requires physical separation; despite a total running time of around an hour, Both Sides of the Gun is split onto two discs -- one "hard" and one "soft."

Harper especially seems to be having fun during the "noisy" disc, which ranges from vintage Stones to smoky be-bop. While he's singled out the blues-biting "Get It Like You Like It" as a Stones "parody," the rollicking "Engraved Invitation" bears just as many fingerprints, particularly on the Richards-y lead riff and the rowdy group singalong in the chorus. The party kicks off with the Eastern-tinged, hand percussion-propelled "Better Way," a sunny anthem that would be just as at home blaring out of a freshman's dorm speakers as providing an entrance for the keynote speaker at the next Democratic National Convention. The rambling psychedelic barnburner "Serve Your Soul" seems tailormade for Bonnaroo, with Harper uncorking some face-melting riffs that would turn the heads of any Phish fan or Deadhead.

Behind the good time vibes, though, Harper is plenty pissed -- and even though his ode to the downtrodden and forgotten of New Orleans (the angrily funky "Black Rain") doesn't beg for repeat listens, passion is always better than its substitute.

The softer album is more flawed -- or at least more forgettable. It's a perfectly pleasant choice for baristas looking to program their coffeehouse stereos, but the songs will have a very hard time making the cut for listeners with crowded and competitive iPods. Harper does this sort of stuff well enough, but it's done better by Amos Lee, among others. The soft disc presents two styles; the first is simple and stripped-down, with Harper singing in a fragile falsetto over prettily plucked acoustic guitars ("More Than Sorry"). The other -- less enjoyable -- features busy, cinematic arrangements ("Waiting For You," "Happy Everafter In Your Eyes"). This speaks to a greater problem with Harper's work in general; he's very well respected by fans and peers, his songs are almost always solid and unobjectionable, but he is also -- elephant in the room here -- often pretty boring. Both Sides of the Gun, unfortunately, includes that side, too. - Adam McKibbin, The Red Alert

After seven albums and 12 years in the game, it can stop being said that Ben Harper is hard to categorize, because at this point, the fact that he always incorporates diverse elements -- from folk to hard rock to funk -- into his music and makes something very much his own is a given. He's practically created a genre. So maybe that's why it's so surprising that Both Sides of the Gun, a two-disc album, has little of that very thing that makes him so unique. Instead, he chooses to show off the range of his musical interests, and ends up with something closer to a compilation than a Ben Harper album. The softer, acoustically based disc is full of pretty love songs and sweetly strummed guitars, and though Harper has done this before and kept his own style intact (in "Two Hands of a Prayer" and "When She Believes," for example), here he comes off sounding a bit boring. He hasn't forgotten himself completely: both "Never Leave Lonely Alone" and "Crying Won't Help You Now" are good songs, sounding strongly of him while also experimenting with other styles (Latin/French and gospel, respectively), but almost all the other tracks could have been pulled off any run-of-the-mill singer/songwriter album from the past ten years. Things improve slightly on the other, louder, disc ("Please Don't Talk About Murder While I'm Eating" is all electric blues, complete with a distorted slide guitar solo, and "Serve Your Soul" is the most Harper-ish of everything, blending folk guitar, pure rock, raw blues, and socially conscious lyrics into one eight-minute masterpiece), but there's still that sampler-record feeling there. "Engraved Invitation" and "Get It Like You Like It" are heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones, "Both Sides of the Gun" alludes to Curtis Mayfield and James Brown, and "Better Way" is practically a tribute (at least musically) to Prince's "7." Harper has always borrowed from other artists, but he's also always added enough of himself to make it not quite so...blatant. It's not that he isn't able to perform such a diverse selection: there are plenty of excellent cuts and most of the album is quite good. Harper is a fantastically talented musician, and he has really developed his voice since Diamonds on the Inside and is unafraid to do things with it, going from a croon to a scream and always sounding great. But why he's copying other people's styles instead of building on his own is both odd and disappointing, because he's always been able to experiment before while also preserving his individuality. If in Both Sides of the Gun Harper is trying to show his audience what a wide variety of music he can cover, he certainly accomplishes that. But if he's trying to create an album that is really about him, he doesn't quite deliver. Ben Harper is in there, don't worry, but he can be a little hard to find. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide