Both Sides of the Gun

Disc 1
1	Morning Yearning 4:09
2	Waiting for You 3:34
3	Picture in a Frame 4:36
4	Never Leave Lonely Alone 2:51
5	Sweet Nothing Serenade Instrumental 2:45
6	Reason to Mourn 4:26
7	More Than Sorry 3:24
8	Cryin' Won't Help You Now 2:35
9	Happy Everafter in Your Eyes 2:31
Disc 2
1	Better Way 3:58
2	Both Sides of the Gun 2:44
3	Engraved Invitation 2:55
4	Black Rain 2:57
5	Gather 'Round the Stone 3:08
6	Please Don't Talk About Murder While I'm Eating 2:34
7	Get It Like You Like It 3:28
8	The Way You Found Me 2:53
9	Serve Your Soul 8:22

Barnes & Noble

Retro-minded funk-folk-rocker Ben Harper has always reveled in a split musical personality, but he's never done it with such clarity and confidence as on this sprawling set. For the benefit of folks who prefer to experience Harper's personas one at a time, Both Sides of the Gun is divided into separate acoustic and electric discs. The second disc contains most of Both Sides' most intriguing elements -- both in terms of the songwriting and the adventurous arrangements, which extend to sitars, vibraphones, and full-on string sections. Harper uses the thicker sound to up the emotional ante on some of the more serious tracks (the Hurricane Katrina paean "Black Rain," for instance, pits a moody orchestration against a psychedelic-soul backbeat reminiscent of late-'60s Motown) and to punch up the playfulness of winking interludes like the Stones-y "Please Don't Talk About Murder While I'm Eating." The acoustic set finds Harper in more familiar territory, unwinding plangent ballads with a deft blend of emotion and restraint. At times -- as on the hoary "Picture in a Frame" -- he doesn't quite get that balance right, but that's due more to his aptitude for turning on the melodic schmaltz than to anything else. When he settles into the folksy groove that he, along with contemporaries such as Jack Johnson, has mined so well over the years (see the New Morning-styled "Morning Yearning"), he makes it easy for the listener to come aboard for the long run. And that kind of friendliness is always welcome. David Sprague

All Music Guide

After seven albums and 12 years in the game, it can stop being said that Ben Harper is hard to categorize, because at this point, the fact that he always incorporates diverse elements -- from folk to hard rock to funk -- into his music and makes something very much his own is a given. He's practically created a genre. So maybe that's why it's so surprising that Both Sides of the Gun, a two-disc album, has little of that very thing that makes him so unique. Instead, he chooses to show off the range of his musical interests, and ends up with something closer to a compilation than a Ben Harper album. The softer, acoustically based disc is full of pretty love songs and sweetly strummed guitars, and though Harper has done this before and kept his own style intact (in "Two Hands of a Prayer" and "When She Believes," for example), here he comes off sounding a bit boring. He hasn't forgotten himself completely: both "Never Leave Lonely Alone" and "Crying Won't Help You Now" are good songs, sounding strongly of him while also experimenting with other styles (Latin/French and gospel, respectively), but almost all the other tracks could have been pulled off any run-of-the-mill singer/songwriter album from the past ten years. Things improve slightly on the other, louder, disc ("Please Don't Talk About Murder While I'm Eating" is all electric blues, complete with a distorted slide guitar solo, and "Serve Your Soul" is the most Harper-ish of everything, blending folk guitar, pure rock, raw blues, and socially conscious lyrics into one eight-minute masterpiece), but there's still that sampler-record feeling there. "Engraved Invitation" and "Get It Like You Like It" are heavily influenced by the Rolling Stones, "Both Sides of the Gun" alludes to Curtis Mayfield and James Brown, and "Better Way" is practically a tribute (at least musically) to Prince's "7." Harper has always borrowed from other artists, but he's also always added enough of himself to make it not quite so...blatant. It's not that he isn't able to perform such a diverse selection: there are plenty of excellent cuts and most of the album is quite good. Harper is a fantastically talented musician, and he has really developed his voice since Diamonds on the Inside and is unafraid to do things with it, going from a croon to a scream and always sounding great. But why he's copying other people's styles instead of building on his own is both odd and disappointing, because he's always been able to experiment before while also preserving his individuality. If in Both Sides of the Gun Harper is trying to show his audience what a wide variety of music he can cover, he certainly accomplishes that. But if he's trying to create an album that is really about him, he doesn't quite deliver. Ben Harper is in there, don't worry, but he can be a little hard to find. ~ Marisa Brown, All Music Guide

Rolling Stone

He is, for all his flash, just Ben, a gifted singer, songwriter and guitarist bent on seeking transcendence in everyday places. James Hunter