Music Freedom to have ringtones
(5/11/04) Dirtypop.net

We've been told that in the next week or so MusicFreedom.com will be putting up JC ringtones for most major carriers. Woo!

Chasez pleases crowd
(5/11/04) John Artale Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The ad for the JC Chasez show said it was the "Perfect Mom's Day Gift." This was especially true if your mom was Mrs. Robinson. Some of the dancing was pretty suggestive, but they said the same about Elvis.

Chasez and his six dancers gyrated, pumped, bumped and grinded enough to ensure their further firing from any upcoming sporting event. They also managed to add enough character to make every song on Chasez's solo album palatable.

A crowd of 1,725 (median age 17) witnessed JC, the dancers and a good five-piece band deliver a nearly 90-minute show at the Chevrolet Amphitheatre Sunday night. Performing in front of a set of white cubes that looked like big styrofoam Saltines meant to represent a padded cell, the band performed in scrubs and the female dancers entered in nurses' uniforms. (Those didn't last too long.)

Chasez delivered 14 songs, most from the unfortunately named "Schizophrenic" album. He opened with "All Day Long I Dream About Sex," a song the band played hard and that Chasez delivered with a deep vocal eerily reminiscent of Pete Burns, which suits the music, as it's eerily lifted from Dead or Alive.

On "If You Were My Girl" he bucked and pranced like Mick Jagger in his '80s aerobics phase. For "One Night Stand" everybody was dressed as pimps and hookers. While it's far from Jacques Brel, it worked nicely as a Brel primer for an audience that currently favors candied lipsticks. This was followed by some chatter about how beautiful both the day and Pittsburgh were. That was followed by screams. Everything he said was pretty much always followed by screams, lest some of us forget that this man is, after all, from 'N Sync.

Oh yeah, he can sing, too. There were some high notes and vocal runs in "Dear Goodbye" that made you think it would be possible for him to just stand there and still be effective.

After "Come to Me," the weakest song of the night, the mood was salvaged by a cover of Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" including the opening "Dearly beloved ..." monologue. Three songs later was "Shake It," which sounded way too much like a Prince song. The set ended with "Some Girls (Dance With Women)," which has the double punch of Latin guitar flourishes and some inspired if not all-too-literal choreography.

After yet another hard performance on "100 Ways" as an encore, the go-home lights were on seconds after the band put down their instruments. This was an audience with a bedtime.

Opening act Samantha Ronson led her boy band through a half-hour set of light mall rock while sounding like a young charm school graduate version of Alanis Morissette. Her big song "Built This Way" is featured in "Mean Girls," which both she and her audience (and they were there) agree is a very good movie.

Entertainment Africa Schizo review
(5/11/04) Richard Holmes Entertainment Africa (thanks charlidos!)

It can’t be easy being Jason ‘JC’ Chasez. Apart from the dubious honour of having been a member of the Mickey Mouse Club along with playmates Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears, it seems that he is doomed to live in the shadow of Justin Timberlake, also a member of Disney’s favourite pop-star factory.

After the 1994 demise of the Mickey Mouse Club the two toyed with the idea of performing together, but it wasn’t until some bright record industry spark started putting together a boy-band called *NSYNC that the two lads were thrown together in a whirl of coiffured hair and cheesy dance steps.

When the band went their separate ways, it was Timberlake who immediately shot to fame with the release of the acclaimed ‘Justified’ in late 2002. Released nearly two years later, 'Schizophrenic' is the album that Chasez hopes will catapult him back into Timberlake’s stratosphere. To add insult to injury though, Timberlake’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction” occurred just a few days before the release of ‘Schizophrenic’, dominating the US media at precisely the time that Chasez was hoping to grab some of that limelight for himself.

Now good-looking singers with great voices aren’t exactly an endangered species in today’s world of manufactured pop, but Chasez’s trump card is that he does seem to have a fair helping of song-writing talent on his side. As part of the team behind *NSYNC’s massive album ‘No Strings Attached’, Chasez has obviously honed his flair for writing a top-notch pop song. Combined with some impressive production work by dance act Basement Jaxx, ‘Schizophrenic’ makes for a formidable debut album.

The thumping opening track ‘Some Girls Dance With Women’ has certainly done well on charts around the world with lines like “Some girls dance with women/Knowing that it gets them attention/I wanna get in with them” grabbing the attention of teenagers everywhere.

Yet this constant sexual innuendo, while playful at times, proves to be Chasez’s downfall. In much the same way that Timberlake has cast himself as the sexiest twenty-something around, so Chasez seems to be trying to take over the mantle of All American Sex God. However, where Timberlake does ‘sexy’ with ease, Chasez sounds more like the geeky kid who’s just trying too hard.

While Timberlake’s lyrics ooze sex without trying, when Chasez sings lines like “Cause when I'm all alone/I lie awake and masturbate" and confesses that he has to "adjust the button fly on my Levis when you walk into the door," he comes across more like “desperate teenager” than the “unstoppable sex machine” he was going for. The decidedly retro ‘All Day Long I Dream About Sex’ is a particular low-point, with robotic vocals layered over a nasty 80’s synth-beat.

In the end, the constant sexual references and panted come-ons get tired and ultimately bring the album down. If the music and production on ‘Schizophrenic’ were as ham-fisted as many of his lyrics, Chasez would be consigned to the ‘has-been’ bin faster than you can say ‘Vanilla Ice’.

But the music saves him: there is a lot of really good music on the album. The driving dance-club beats of ‘Shake It’ or the funk on ‘She Got Me’ all go to show that the man really can write good pop songs. Just pray that somebody else looks after the lyrics on the next one.