Send "John Mayer " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Rollingstone |
 John Mayer — what a curious case. As a pop personality, the guy's a barrel of laughs. He's a tabloid fixture who wears his celebrity with a wink: modeling Borat's onesie swimsuit, starring in goofy YouTube videos, and generally disarming, with wit and self-deprecation, the millions inclined to hate a starlet-shagging guitar virtuoso. But then Mayer steps into a studio, and the fun spigot claps shut. It's as if Mayer, burdened by his status as heir apparent to the Clapton-Sting-Knopfler tradition of classy pop-rock classicism, pulls on a mask: the Furrowed Middlebrow.Video: John Mayer on the "Vulgar Relationship" Behind his New LP There's no doubting the man's chops. Battle Studies is a real study in craftsmanship and understated guitar ninja-dom, and musos will thrill to Mayer's deconstruction of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads." But the solemnity is suffocating. On "Heartbreak Warfare," Mayer delivers U2-style guitar and strained war metaphors: "Clouds of sulfur in the air/Bombs are falling everywhere." That bust-up with Jennifer Aniston was bad, but was it really like the firebombing of Tokyo?...full text |
| Independent |
| Though only moderately appreciated in the UK, in America John Mayer is a kind of all-purpose one-man media industry, combining a highly successful music career with sidelines in design, journalism and clothing, whilst becoming a gossip-column fixture through his relationships with such as Jessica Simpson and, most recently, Jennifer Aniston. It's the collapse of this latter tryst that presumably provided the creative spark behind Battle Studies, which finds a dying relationship anatomised in ultimately tiresome detail in songs like "Heartbreak Warfare", "Perfectly Lonely" and "Friends, Lovers or Nothing". The Clapton-esque blues guitar prowess which has seen Mayer dubbed "Little Slowhand" has mostly been replaced here by a sort of California confessional style which owes much to the likes of Jackson Browne. Songs such as "Half of My Heart" and "Edge of Desire" are couched in a denim-clad AOR soft-rock that could be Bread or Pure Prairie League. It's this bland aspect of Mayer's music which makes his songs easy to project one's feelings onto; but ultimately, I'd take the ZZ Top-style version of Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" over the rest of this album any day....full text |
| Latimes |
| On the high-contrast black-and-white cover photo of John Mayer's latest studio album, the singer, songwriter and guitarist's hands are pulling at the collar of a thick winter coat. It seems as though he's trying to brace against the onset of frosty conditions; the overall effect is fairly Morrissey-esque. That's no coincidence -- in themes and tone, Mayer shows a lot in common with the great romantic fatalist of '80s Brit pop: He's "Perfectly Lonely" in the song with that title, and he opens the collection with "Heartbreak Warfare," about the ways we hurt the ones we ostensibly love. Musically he's exploring the moody territory of acts such as Coldplay and Snow Patrol; at the same time, he displays his debt to guitar heroes including David Gilmour, Eric Clapton and George Harrison. For the most part, he expresses himself more eloquently through his guitar than his lyrics in the 10 of 11 songs he wrote. (Intriguingly, his version of Robert Johnson's blues classic "Crossroads" puts Clapton's signature blues-rock riff through effects processing that leaves it sounding like a keyboard.)...full text |
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