and it is chosen as their AMG Album Pick


Review by Matt Collar

Anybody who was initially confused by singer-songwriter John Mayer's foray into blues with 2005's Try! John Mayer Trio Live In Concert could only have been further confounded upon listening to the album and coming to the realization that it was actually good. And not just kinda good, especially for guy who had been largely labeled as a Dave Matthews clone, but really, truthfully, organically good as a blues album in its own right. However, for longtime fans who had been keeping tabs on Mayer, the turn might not have been so unexpected. Soon after the release of his 2003 sophomore album, the laid-back, assuredly melodic Heavier Things, Mayer began appearing on albums by such iconic blues and jazz artists as Buddy Guy, B.B. King and Herbie Hancock. And not just singing, but playing guitar next to musicians legendary on the instrument. In short, he was seeking out these artists in an attempt to delve into the roots of the blues, a music he obviously has a deep affection for.

However, rather than his blues trio being a one-off side project completely disconnected to his past work, it is clear now that it was the next step in his musical development. And truthfully, while Try! certainly showcases Mayer's deft improvisational blues chops, it's more of a blues/soul album in the tradition of such electric-blues legends as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan and features songs by Mayer that perfectly marry his melodic songcraft and his blues-slinger inclinations. In fact, what seemed at the time as a nod to his largely female fanbase by including "Daughters" and "Something's Missing" off Heavier Things, was actually a hint that he was bridging his sound for his listeners, showing them where he was going.

That said, nothing he did up until the excellent, expansive Try! could have prepared you for the monumental creative leap forward that is Mayer's 2006 studio effort Continuum. Working with his blues trio rhythm section of bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Steve Jordan as well as guest spots by trumpeter Roy Hargrove and guitarist Ben Harper, Mayer brings all of his recent musical explorations and increasing talents as a singer-songwriter to bear on Continuum. Produced solely by Mayer and Jordan, the album is a devastatingly accomplished, fully-realized effort that in every way exceeds expectations and positions Mayer as one of the most relevant artists of his generation.

Adding weight to the notion that Mayer's blues trio was more than just a creative indulgence, he has carried over two tracks from the live album in "Vultures" and the deeply metaphorical soul ballad "Gravity". These are gutwrenchingly poignant songs that give voice to a generation of kids raised on TRL teen stars and CNN sound-bytes who've found themselves all grown up and fighting a war of "beliefs". Grappling with a handful of topics some social and political, romantic and sexual, pointedly personal and yet always universal in scope, Mayer earns here a legitimate comparison to Marvin Gaye's What's Going On?. Nobody, not one of Mayer's contemporaries has come up with anything resembling a worthwhile anti-war anthem that is as good and speaks for their generation as much as his "Waiting For The World To Change" -- and he goes and hangs the whole album on it as the first single.

It's a bold statement of purpose that is carried throughout the album, not just in sentiment, but also tone. Continuum is a gorgeously produced, brilliantly stripped-to-basics album that incorporates blues, soft-funk, R&B, folk and pop in a sound that is totally owned by Mayer. It's no stretch when trying to describe the sound of Continuum to color it in the light of work by such legends as Sting, Eric Clapton, Sade, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Steve Winwood. In fact, the sustained adult-contemporary tone of the album which could easily have become turgid, boring or dated never does and brings to mind such classic late '80s albums as Sting's Nothing Like The Sun, Clapton's Journeyman and Vaughan's In Step.

At every turn, Continuum finds Mayer to be a mature, thoughtful and gifted musician who fully grasps his place not just in the record industry, but in life.

I'm so gonna buy this CD-I like him .

Glad this thing is gettin some good reviews.. it deserves it...


no doubt, one of the best things to come out this year, and for that matter.. the last few years.

I loathe Your Body is a Wonderland and Daughters.... but this review sounds interesting. I may have to check it out.

This review is spot on.

This is a landmark album for one of the best musicians and songwriters around.

NorthernLad said:

I like Daughters

the message is a good one.

Is this out this week?

Rhondab said:

it is a good message, but the song makes me gag... i think it was just overplayed, that's probably the problem.

Yeah, but so did Paris Hilton's new one!

I just read the review below from Entwrtainment Weekly...it's not a BAD review, but not as glowing as the one above...

http://www.ew.com/ew/arti...0_,00.html

WONDER BLAND Continuum, the new album from Mayer is perfect. Perhaps too perfect


Say this for John Mayer: He's a master of restraint. The 28-year-old singer-songwriter — guitar wizard is a scientifically perfect Adult Alternative star — handsome, amiable, with a gift for supple, radio-friendly pop-rock melodies and the kind of crisp, unfussy arrangements that make a brunchtime mimosa go down nice and smooth. It's not easy to be as reined in as Mayer; many musicians with his all-star-level guitar skills will go reeling off into jam-band indulgence at the least opportunity, but Mayer always plays understated, lacing his catchy songs with crystalline blues licks and subtle jazz-style filigree. It's all very well-intentioned and refined — but are those qualities we really want from a pop star in 2006?

His self-produced third album, Continuum, is a John Mayer record par excellence: taut, melodic, well sung, impeccably played...and deadly dull. The touchstones are Sting, along with latter-day Eric Clapton and the '70s blue-eyed soul of the Doobie Brothers and Boz Scaggs. Sometimes the songs work. ''Belief'' is an exquisite ballad powered by a murmuring six-note guitar figure. And surprising, jazz-inflected chord changes bring freshness to genre exercises like the soul ballad ''Gravity.'' Mayer made his name with love songs like ''Your Body Is a Wonderland,'' but on Continuum his concerns are more global. Several songs allude to the war in Iraq; ''Waiting on the World to Change,'' with a melody lifted straight out of Curtis Mayfield's classic civil rights rallying cry, ''People Get Ready,'' carries an incisive protest message, defending his generation against the charge of political apathy, and railing against the Bush administration and the corporate media. ''When they own the information/They can bend it all they want,'' he sings.

But Mayer can be insipid. In the folksy nocturne ''The Heart of Life,'' Mayer intones as if he's delivering profound insights, but his words land with a thud: ''I know the heart of life is good.'' The tunes are shapely throughout Continuum, and the musicianship is elegant and virtuosic — but in song after song, the music's low-key loveliness dissipates into a sleep-inducing soft-rock haze. Mayer's talent is beyond dispute. If only he weren't so damn classy.

Grade: B-

GangstaFam said:

yes, 12th!

VinnyM27 said:

yeah but they made a deal with her.. they were gonna just give her "half a star" but agreed to give her four more if she leaked some porno of her getting ass raped

so there u have it

nurse said:

ditto.

I just went ahead and pre-ordered the iTunes version.. I wanted that extra track "Can't Take That Plane"

I wanted it on CD (the real deal).. but I coudn't pass up an extra track

It's a great CD. His 1st was excellent, his last one was ok. This one is back to form.

Im still in the middle on John Mayer, i liked him early on before he caught on, when his real first album of demos was out, but then he became this Mtv Trl/magazines guy, and it seemed it mattered more what he was wearing than the music, so i kind of passed on his last few efforts. I have been interested in hearing his turn to blues but hopefully its not some slick sounding santana/rob thomas kind of blues.

lastdecember said:

I think you saw a good example of a record company marketing an artist.. They saw a specific demographic he could pertain/accessible to.. so they used it up..

I think now its a different story. heard he fought a little bit to get this out the way it did.

good for this man.. i respect him a lot after this

Sdldawn said:

I'll probably give it a shot, everything coming out right now is just too Pop/RB, between all the Beyonces, Nellys and Justins and Fergies, i think my ears are begging for something fresh and NOT produced, hopefully John's effort will be the start, cause Im sure Eltons new one is going to be that Breath of Fresh air that i need after one of the worst years in Music.

RollingStone Review (4 out of 5 Stars)

"Who did you think I was?" John Mayer asked on the opening track of Try!, the live album he released last year as one-third of the John Mayer Trio. He's answered the question eloquently on Continuum, a smart, breezy album that deftly fuses his love for old-school blues and R&B with his natural gift for sharp melodies and well-constructed songs.

With this album, the twenty-eight-year-old Mayer displays a new command of all his musical sources. The Memphis-soul touches that seemed like a genre exercise on Heavier Things' "Come Back to Bed," from 2003, achieve full flower here. The role of blue-eyed-soul singer suits Mayer - his falsetto choruses on "Vultures" are sexy and assured. His breathy vocals are firmly at the album's center, and the R&B tradition he's mining lends weight to his pop flourishes. As for the vulnerability and openheartedness soul music encourages, well, that's part of what all those young female fans loved about Mayer in the first place.

Last time around, Mayer submerged himself in a trio with older, established players like bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Steve Jordan, and indulged the guitar-hero fantasies he'd nurtured during his teen years spent listening to Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. It was a way of shedding the heartthrob mantle that hits like "Your Body Is a Wonderland" and "Daughters" had put on his shoulders. Room for Squares, his 2001 debut, had sold more than 4 million copies, and Heavier Things, its 2003 follow-up, had sold 2 million, but Mayer saw his success as a life sentence to pop idoldom. He desperately wanted out.

Palladino and Jordan (who co-produced Continuum with Mayer) are on hand, but this is decidedly not a JMT record. Other notable musicians turn up - including guitarists Ben Harper, Charlie Hunter and James Valentine (from Maroon 5), jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove and bassist Willie Weeks. The power-trio flexing is gone, and that's to the good. As a guitarist, Mayer is more adept at the terse, lyrical, cleanly articulated solos he takes on songs like "In Repair" and "Gravity" (which, along with "Vultures," also appeared on Try!) than the breakneck improvising he flashed with JMT.

None of Continuum's twelve tracks accelerates above midtempo, and the predominant tone is modest and reflective, though the album occasionally refers to big issues. "Waiting on the World to Change," the opening track and first single, is a moving apologia for Gen Y's seeming apathy: "It's not that we don't care/We just know that the fight ain't fair," he sings after airing some anti-war sentiments and a sharp media critique ("When you trust your television/What you get is what you got/'Cause when they own the information/They can bend it all they want"). The song's sly echoes of Curtis Mayfield and Marvin Gaye evoke a previous era's war and protests. The cool social observation of "Belief" - as well as its delicate opening guitar figure and the chanted harmonies of its bridge - recall Sting, another of Mayer's idols.

Damaged relationships litter Continuum. "I Don't Trust Myself (With Loving You)," "Slow Dancing in a Burning Room," "The Heart of Life," "Dreaming With a Broken Heart" and "I'm Gonna Find Another You" all depict lovers who betray each other and, occasionally, themselves. Ever self-conscious - even obsessive - about his place in the world, Mayer takes his own emotional temperature on "Stop This Train": "So scared of getting older," he sings, "I'm only good at being young."

Forget "Who did you think I was" - Mayer's detractors will likely be thinking, "Who do you think you are?" when they hear his (capable) cover of Hendrix's "Bold As Love." No matter. Mayer is right not to worry about pleasing or offending them. Continuum is just the current stage in Mayer's trip, but he has taken a big step toward finding himself. As he sings on "In Repair," "I'm never really ready . . . /I'm not together, but I'm getting there."

Well im going to get it along with Lionels new one, though i have heard awful reviews of Lionels new one and the first single is pretty bad. Hopefully he is out of that Trl mold and the songs dont lean towards a "james blunt" type of sound, but going from the review it sounds that he has gone back to his sound before the record company got him. So this and in a few days Eltons next great statement, im guessing Elton will be my favorite cd of 2006, unless a-ha gets the new one out before the year ends, but so far it looks like they will just get a single out before the end of the year
[Edited 9/12/06 21:12pm]

I like this kid alot. He's only going to improve on his craft as he ages.

this album is such quality....


its been a while since i've enjoyed a cd this much.

I dont know im not groovin on it. Nothing is getting my attention yet. But maybe its a grower.

It's a bit mellow'er than I initially thought it was gonna be.. but this cat wrote a 5 star song on every track. I even dig the jimi tribute/cover

Continuum is the real deal. I've been playing it quite a bit since I bought it on Wed. Before then I heard a radio link when John played the entire album on an LA station, so I've been listening the songs for a few weeks now. He's on the next phase, so for those who are stuck on the past releases prior to Try! it's ok to leave those behind and open your ears to this one. The first three songs: Waiting for the World to Change, I Don't Trust Myself(With Loving You), and Belief sets the pace and locks you in. I'm not a music review writer, all I can say is that this release will stand the test five, ten, even twenty years from now compared to whatever is considered the latest and greatest in music.

This album is just so well written...Belief is on par with anything written in the past 10 years..this it what music should sound like

popgodazipa said:

Yep. I'm still kindof in shock that this guy hit an album this hard....


possibly one of my favorite albums.. in the last four or five years..

This came from Sputnikmusic

4.5
superb
by StreetlightRock (10 Reviews)

2006-09-12 | 33 comments | 684 views
Other Reviews: liljigga (5),

11 of 11 thought this review was well written


John Mayer is the best damn guitarist in mainstream music today.

Forget Dave Matthews, forget Ben Harper, forget all of those down to earth looking fellows that stand there looking cool with their acoustic guitars slung around their shoulders, singing and strumming their dry chords, hearts on sleeves and gentle smiles. If there’s that one song, the one that plays in your head as you stroll down your moonlit seaside on the after after-dinner date with that girl of your dreams, holding hands, with the glint of flirtatious laughter in the eyes of lovers, so often captured in the magic of cinema, it was John Mayer that wrote it. He captures too, the moment of being pushed in that open sea by that very girl, then coming out again, only to have a feeling of knowing that in the end, it’s gonna be… all good. It’s a feeling that so many, so very many have tried to achieve, and only so very few have ever actually pulled off – it’s finesse, subtlety and a breath of chillax all rolled into a single album.

It wasn’t always like this. Mayer’s first album, Room for Squares, was a much rawer but more restrained gift to music. It was this ball of bumbling energy trapped in the smooth flowing, pretty boy aesthetic of Mayer, reaching out to see what exactly he would find. While it’s sights were never fixed, what it did find was a throve of screaming girls in love with the beauty of simple and sentimental music and guys trying to tell those girls what a boring voice he had and how much of a crap guitarist he was - until of course, they tried playing Neon, and promptly shat themselves. The brilliant Squares was followed up by the rather forgettable Heavier Things, which was about as heavy as Tom Delonge’s Angles and Airwaves was ‘revolutionary’ (i.e. not at all). All throughout this period of course, were the comments here and there that Mayer was an ‘amazing blues guitarist, if only he would actually show it!’. So he did. In 2005 he released Try!, a live blues album under the name the John Mayer Trio, featuring the amazing musicians Steve Jordan and Pino Palladino. It was an hour of ripping blues and funky grooves, throwing away the cloak of the pop orientated, boring ‘ol Johnny boy. The aforementioned guys, still cleaning their pants, took a 180 and went about telling everyone how they just ‘knew he had it in him!’ and went away feeling even worse than they already did.

The aptly titled Continuum is just as it sounds, an album back on track after a brush with the blues. Mayer announced before the last song of the last show of the trio that “…I’m John Mayer, and for a few more minutes, we are the John Mayer Trio”, setting the tone of what was to come – a return to the dusty drawing board of Squares and Heavier Things. Experience however, is not something that gives up on you so easily. Continuum, while living up to its name, is an amalgamation of the older, laid back Mayer and the groovin’ blues shred of the Trio, and the result is nothing short of spectacular, bringing the best of both worlds into a beautiful album that many have been waiting him to finally produce. While to some, Mayer may have lost the charm he had on Squares with such songs like No Such Thing (Who can forget the lyrics “I wanna run though the halls of my high school, I wanna scream at the top of my lungs!”) and Your Body is a Wonderland, Continuum has got it’s own parallel grace that gives it it’s own favour, which as the final product demonstrates, is a good thing. Songs here no longer blend into each other, playing like one long track - each one clearly haven been written as a separate entity, fixing a problem that was a slight bother on his previous records.

The heavier blues influence in his work is obvious just by looking at the track listing itself. It contains two songs from Try!, Gravity and Vultures (both of which were rerecorded for the album), as well as the Hendrix classic Bold As Love, which not only fits perfectly on a record such as this, but is played true to it’s roots, not sacrificing any of the magic of the original. Mayer also writes of Gravity: “"I wrote 'Gravity' last summer, and it changed everything… for the first time, holding back - then it was a whole new game. That might be the most important song I ever wrote.” Not only that, but it’s a hell of a catchy tune too. What Mayer says about ‘holding back’ is reflected very well on the album too - there’s nothing pretentious about any of the songs, everything just seems to ‘fit’, right in place: the solos are tastefully done and don’t go on for any longer than they need to, and there’s an incredible interweaving of guitar playing and vocals, neither of which detract from the other. If anything, this is his most minimalist album yet, with songs like The Heart of Life and Dreaming With a Broken Heart being carried along by simple, but remarkably effective hooks. Lyrically, Mayer has always been one for simple and direct, demonstrated neatly in Slow Dancing In a Burning Room:

I was the one you always dreamed of
you were the one I tried to draw
how dare you say it's nothin’ to me
baby, you're the only light I ever saw

It’s hardly Shakespeare, but quite frankly, it doesn’t matter – the chicks go wild for it. While most of the album is centered around broad themes like life and growing up, the first single from the album, Waiting on the World to Change, is a call for social awareness, and also manages to showcase the soul and R&B influences that Mayer has dabbled in, earning him praise from artists like Kanye West and Jay-Z. Mayer’s broad range of songwriting is reflected in the folksy melody of The Heart of Life. The first time I heard it, I could have sworn I had heard it before – not because it was generic, but rather, because it seemed like such a perfect song, which should have already been written by someone, somewhere. But no, it was a Mayer original. Two other standout tracks are the obligatory ‘missing-love’ songs, mentioned before – Slow Dancing in a Burning Room and Dreaming with a Broken Heart. The sort of tunes which you lie in bed, listening to as the rain beats outside the window – absolutely stellar. It’s not all gloom and doom though, with tracks like Belief, I Don’t Trust Myself (with Loving You) and Stop This Train, providing the perfect counterweights to the breakup songs.

"I knew I had bought the time to learn everything I needed before I started this one... This is the first endeavor in my entire life, music or otherwise, that I did not cop out for a second on."

-John Mayer

It’s true; this is, by the standards of everything else Mayer has done, his strongest album yet. That isn’t to say it doesn’t have its flaws however. Because of the individual nature of each of the songs, Continuum has a lack of cohesion as a ‘record’, feeling more like bunch of really well written songs thrown in together because they all sounded awesome and would be cool to have on a single album. And then of course, there Mayer’s voice, which, while I find goes really well with the music, some people just can’t seem to stand, and I can see where they come from as well as some borderline boring tracks like In Repair and I'm Gonna Find Another You. Those points aside however, Continuum is one hellava pop record, from one hellava guitarist, continuing the pop-revival of last few years, bringing talent and beauty to a scene that was once dominated by synths and generic songwriting that looked set to destroy music forever. Keep Rockin' Mayer.

4.5/5

its so exciting to have an album released this great...


i'll be enjoying this many many many years to come.


i've played this for a month straight.. and it hasn't even begun to wear thin, i'm only touching the surface...

if you go to best buy.. they have a special limited edition EP of "Waitin on the world" with the album version, and two b-sides!

1. Waiting on the world (Album version)
2. Waitin on the world (With ben harper)
3. Good Love Is On The Way (Studio version)


oh, and did I say its only $1.99?


track 3 is worth it alone.. it should have been on the album