Send "The Bad Plus " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Boston |
 The irreverent jazz trio known as the Bad Plus has made its name covering rock songs such as "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Iron Man," even while the band's bread and butter has been off-kilter original compositions. For its fifth studio album, "For All I Care," the Bad Plus has upped the ante by adding a vocalist and doing all covers. Call it the Bad Plus plus one.Bringing in an unknown vocalist, Minneapolis alt-rocker Wendy Lewis, may sound like a risk, but it works exceedingly well. Lewis has a pleasant alto, and she turns the Flaming Lips' "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," the Bee Gees' "How Deep Is Your Love," and Yes's "Long Distance Runaround" into gorgeous acoustic ballads. Rather than sing the melody on Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb," she harmonizes every inch of the verses, and this version of "Radio Cure" - which begins with Lewis's voice, unaccompanied, and then a few plucks of the upright bass - is more beautiful and more affecting than Wilco's original....full text |
| Thephoenix |
| On each of their previous albums, the Bad Plus let it be known — via covers of tunes from Blondie to Black Sabbath, Rush to Bacharach/David — that they owed as much to classic rock and pop as to prog jazz. So it's no real shocker that the piano trio would release an album offering no original material, or that the track list would be an eclectic one, skittering from Heart (a faithfully reproduced "Barracuda") to the Bee Gees (a soothingly spacy "How Deep Is Your Love"), with a little Stravinsky, Babbitt, and Ligeti thrown in. For All I Care adds vocalist Wendy Lewis to the line-up of pianist Ethan Iverson, bassist Reid Anderson, and drummer David King, and though it inches the Bad Plus closer to the pop mainstream, it never loses the particular rhythmic and harmonic quirks that have defined them so far. At the CD's best — the Flaming Lips' "Feeling Yourself Disintegrate," Wilco's "Radio Cure," Roger Miller's "Lock, Stock and Teardrops," even Yes's "Long Distance Runaround" — time is stretched like taffy, splinters of sound jab and dart and disappear, and all four participants flirt with detachment and dissonance even while holding tight to the center. But elsewhere, Lewis can seem like the fourth wheel she is....full text |
| Rollingstone |
| Groups like the Bad Plus have made jazz covers cool again — maybe because one senses a true love for rock, not just its crossover potential. On their sixth CD, the inventive Minneapolis trio court disaster by adding a vocalist. Thankfully, she's Wendy Lewis, an indie-rock vet who floats Kurt Cobain's numbed equivocations over a capsizing groove here on "Lithium" and even nails that bone-chilling scream. It's one of the few credible Nirvana covers ever. The crew also finds Wilco's "Radio Cure" and mad rhythms in a piece by classical composer Milton Babbitt — it's about as badass as highbrow gets....full text |
The Bad Plus lyrics
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