Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals: Burn to Shine

Ben Harper has never feared the dangers that come with stylistic risks, having tried his hand at everything from hard-rock muscle-flexing to jam-band noodling, to singer-songwriterly balladeering. He's sung from the perspective of an abused wife and the son of a lesbian, and he's unafraid to be deeply earnest, singing Maya Angelou poetry and heavy-handed odes to Rodney and Martin Luther King. The new Burn To Shine is only his fourth album, but he's already shown an amazing versatility that makes each subsequent release an event. When he's tender, he's almost never cloying, and when he rocks out, the results are invariably more Hendrixian than Kravitzian. That said, Burn To Shine is a bit of a letdown next to 1997's awesome The Will To Live, missing that album's dramatic sucker punches and left-field genre workouts. What remains is a solid, characteristically diverse assortment of fairly straightforward material, with stylistic risks left mostly in the margins: the gentle falsetto in "The Woman In You" giving way to the metal whomp that closes "Less," the horns that liven up the shuffling "Suzie Blue," the prettily piano-tinged love song "Beloved One," the beatboxing on the infectious "Steal My Kisses." Burn To Shine is Harper's first album to explicitly attach "And The Innocent Criminals" to his name, and the move is certainly warranted; he's got some of the best backing players out there. But Harper himself seems content with leading a great rock band rather than transcending his genre altogether. It's an awful lot to ask, and Burn To Shine is strong for what it is, but he usually tries a little harder.