Rockers Against Tobacco (R.A.T.), an impressively diverse collective of well-known rock and pop musicians, is about to do health-conscious music fans an enormous favor.
You Can't Buy Our Albums If You're Dead Vol. One, the first album on the R.A.T.-affiliatted Kiss My Ash Records, will hit stores this April and will be the first in a series aimed at (to quote the liner notes) "promoting death-free living among the music-buying public."
The collection features songs that allude favorably to cigarettes or smoking but with a twist: The newly re-recorded versions either demonize or expurgate the tobacco-friendly references altogether.
Most impressive of all, each song is performed by the act that made it famous--or at least as many members of that act who haven't yet succumbed to first or second-hand smoke.
"I believe I speak for all of us when I say that people who have to spend their life savings on chemotherapy or tracheotomies aren't going to have our latest boxed set of reissued recordings high on their list of purchasing priorities," says R.A.T. spokesman Lou Reed, a recovering smoker who contributed to You Can't Buy Our Albums a re-written version of his song 1984 song "Turn to Me."
"It used to go, 'When it's all too much, / you turn the TV set on and light a cigarette. / Then a public-service announcement comes creeping on. / And you see a lung corroding or a fatal heart attack. / Turn to me," says Reed.
"Now that verse ends 'Don't you dare turn to me, you [expletive deleted] scumbag."
Reed isn't the only big-name rocker to participate in R.A.T.'s maiden voyage. In "America," Simon & Garfunkel now ask "Kathy" to "toss [them] a Nicoderm." And the long-time clean-living Beach Boy Mike Love has redone Brian Wilson's "Johnny Carson" to include a line about a "cancer stick" (rhymes with "bound to make you sick") in reference to the beloved late-night comedian's carcinogen-related demise.
Likewise, Steve Miller's "The Croaker" ("I'm a smoker, / I'm a croaker ..."), Sir Mix-a-Lot's "Baby Got Emphysema" ("I hate small butts and I cannot lie!"), and Ozzy Osbourne's "Iron Lung" (a new version of Black Sabbath's "Iron Man") will almost certainly have listeners thinking twice before lighting up.
But not everyone who was invited to participate accepted.
Willie Nelson, for example, was slated to contribute a song called "Marlboro Men Are Frequently Secretly." Then he realized that many social services are funded by cigarette-sales taxes--and that therefore less smoking actually means less revenue for the underprivileged.
The country legend is now assembling an "answer" collection tentatively titled You Can't Keep 'Em on the Plantation Unless Smoke Gets in Your Eyes Volume One.
"By smoking more," writes Nelson at the Puffington Post, "Americans will be demonstrating the patriotic principal of taking one for the team."
Not surprisingly, Reed disagrees.
"Maybe he should just call his album With Friends like You, Who Needs Enemas," he says.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...)
Paul Simon: Surprise (Warner Bros.)—“I don’t pretend I’m a mastermind with a genius marketing plan,” Simon sings in “Wartime Prayers,” and the speed with which this album charted then vanished would seem to prove him right. But it’s not as if he isn’t trying. If in 1986 World Music blew fresh wind into his sails (and sales), he’s clearly hoping that Brian Eno’s “sonic landscapes” will do the same twenty years later. That they haven’t should not put off anyone who’s learned something from Simon in the past. Although, like the songs on 1983’s Hearts and Bones, these are more thoughtful than catchy, they’re plenty enjoyable as music in their tentatively experimental way, and their thoughtfulness, which finds Simon thinking both locally and globally and sometimes both at once, deserves attention. Rating: Three-and-a-half dangling conversations out of five.
Slayer: Christ Illusion (American)—Araya, King, Hanneman, and Lombardo are back, and boy are they pissed. “There’s no future. / The world is dead. / So save the last / bullet for your head,” they announce at the outset, and they only get angrier from there. In one speed-metal battering ram after another, they pummel Western culture with a relentlessness and a ferocity that bely their forty-something average age. As the album title indicates, the main target of their assault is Christianity. “You’ll never taste God’s breath,” shouts Araya in “Skeleton Christ,” because you’ll never see the Second Coming.” Interestingly, their take on militant Islam (“Jihad”) is ambiguous. Sometimes it sounds as if they’re mocking the terrorists, sometimes sympathizing with them. Less ambiguous is “Cult,” which contains the couplet “The target’s f***ing Jesus Christ. / I would’ve led the sacrifice.” Anyone concerned about whether Slayer gets a nuke? Rating: Two-and-a-half imminent interviews with Mike Wallace out of five. Chris Smither: Leave the Light On (Signature Sounds)—Smither’s recent tour with Steve Forbert last spring was a rare treat, and those who caught one or more of the shows will be pleased to know that Smither’s new album contains the excellent new songs that he was road testing onstage. Although slightly enhanced with drums and backing musicians, the mixed filial emotions of “Father’s Day” retain their poignancy, the creationism-vs.-evolutionism jokes of “Origin of Species” retain their humor, and the waltz-timed exotification of Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna” retains its patina of genius. Even the lesser material comes to life on the strength of Smither’s folk-blues facility on various acoustic guitars, his smoky baritone voice, and his stomping foot. Previously, home compilers could squeeze the highpoints of Smither’s post-alcoholic years onto one eighty-minute CD-R. Now, thanks to the quality not only of the three aforementioned songs but of the title cut as well, we’ll need two. Rating: Four skeleton keys in the rain out of five.
Rick Springfield: We Are the ’80s (RCA/Legacy)—Sure Springfield was the ’80s, but he was the ’70s too, and here’s hoping his teen-idol highlights get a similarly refurbished single-disc showcase. Meanwhile, were he not a soap-opera idol (i.e., uncool) while he was racking up these ’80s hits, he’d have probably already been immortalized on power-pop compilations on the strength of “Jessie’s Girl” and “I’ve Done Everything for You” alone. The other dozen songs here prove he wasn’t too shabby as a power-pop mortal either. Rating: Three-and-a-half working-class dogs out of five.
Bruce Springsteen: We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions (Columbia)—When Springsteen first came up, people pegged him as a “New Dylan,” but it’s been clear for years now that he was really an “Old Bono”: Earnest, uninhibited, and idealistic, he brings as much passion to his lousy albums as he does to his masterworks. The difference between the two therefore stems not from his heart but from his brain; when he engages the latter, he’s the boss, but when he doesn’t, he makes passion seem like a clinical disorder. We Shall Overcome isn’t devoid of entertainment value as pointlessly belated exercises in roots discovery go. The material is so time tested that no one could ruin it. The problem is that one has to listen past Springsteen’s messianic sense of self-importance. He needs “John Henry,” “Jacob’s Ladder,” “Shenandoah,” and “Erie Canal” more than those songs need him, but you’d never know it from the way he and his large band of acoustic-instrument-toting fellow travelers beat them into dead horses and then beat them some more. Meanwhile, the DualDisc format in which this album is solely available (unless you count the vinyl) renders its CD side unplayable in some CD players. (Get out a magnifying glass and read the disclaimer on the back.) Rating: Two-and-a-half blessings in disguise out of five.
Chip Taylor: Unglorious Hallelujah/Red Red Rose (And Other Songs Of Love, Pain, And Destruction) (Back Porch/EMI)—Sure he wrote “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morning”—about forty years ago, when he knew how to craft hooks and had sense enough to let other people sing them.
Susan Tedeschi: Hope and Desire (Verve Forecast)--Currently beating Bonnie Raitt at her own sweetness-and-grit game. Beth Thornley: My Glass Eye (Stiff Hips)—On her second album Thornley demonstrates why her songs have become sought-after items among compilers of TV and cinematic soundtracks. Namely, her musical ideas and her skills at fleshing them out exceed those of the major-label competition. The hooks, the shifting tempos, and the singing on the title track and “You’re Right Where” fulfill the hopes of Juliana Hatfield fans who never went all the way (so to speak) with her feminine-sensitivity side, while “Mr. Lovely” and “Done” rock out with a natural fierceness that vanquishes both gender issues and any questions about Thornley’s physical well-being implied by her album title and record-label name. So solid is the album as a whole that the excellent acoustic “Eleanor Rigby” cover at disc’s end feels more like an encore than a highlight. Rating: Four names able to be pronounced without embarrassment by lispers out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...)
Our New Orleans 2005 (Nonesuch)—“Net proceeds will be donated to Habitat for Humanity to aid those affected by Hurricane Katrina,” says the blurb, but obviously philanthropists could simply send a check. What justifies this album is what justifies any album: its music. More than most multi-performer albums, this one grooves, funks, and flows with a unity and purpose that one needn’t know or care about Katrina to enjoy. One reason is that all sixteen of these songs were recorded especially for this project, thus eliminating such multi-performer-album glitches as aural inconsistency and the need to skip over-anthologized cuts that one already owns. Another reason is that the performances sound as good as they do fresh, each one setting up the one that follows so that what might sound merely ordinary in another context (Dr. Michael White’s “Canal Street Blues,” for instance) sounds like a link in a very special chain here (following Buckwheat Zydeco’s plaintive “Cryin’ in the Streets” and anticipating the Wild Magnolias’ celebratory Mardi Gras medley). Moreover, as most of these acts are unlikely ever to record an album’s worth of compelling material again (exceptions: BeauSoleil, Randy Newman, maybe Dr. John), the one-song-per-performer format (Allen Toussaint gets two) brings out the best in everyone. Rating: Four-and-a-half French Quarters out of five.
Jim Peterik: Above the Storm (Frontiers)--Jim Peterik is so unpretentious and manifestly well intentioned that it seems cruel to point out that his new album, much like the songs he wrote or co-wrote in Survivor, are nothing but a reshuffling of verbal and musical clichés. “Life is what happens when you look the other way” (“Live Life”), “Ride every highway, sail every ocean, / don’t be afraid to show your emotion” (the title track), “Time to stop the hate, appreciate / each other for who we are” (“In the Days We Have”)—and there are plenty more bumper stickers waiting to happen where those came from. That such lyrics are pounded home with equally shopworn hooks and chord progressions and sung with an over-earnestness better suited to public-service announcements and beer commercials only aggravates the problem. Not that matters couldn’t be worse: if Peterik weren’t so unpretentiousness and manifestly well intentioned, he’d be obnoxious too.*
Tom Petty: Highway Companion (American)—Speaking as a Petty fan, I mean no animus when I say that, short of Greatest Hits and Full Moon Fever, he’s never made a great album. Pretty good is as great as he usually gets. He’s pretty good at being pretty good though, and this album proves he’s still an ace junk man, recycling Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” as “Saving Grace,” Sheryl Crow’s “A Change Would Do You Good” as “Jack,” and his own thirty-year history of Byrds-Dylan rock and roll as everything else. And just when you think consistency is his only virtue, he comes up with “Damaged by Love,” about virtue itself, and “Flirting with Time,” as hooky a pop song as he’s ever recorded. Rating: Three-and-a-half skid marks out of five.
Red Hot Chili Peppers: Stadium Arcadium (Warner Bros.)—These fellows broke out as a white-funk joke band, eventually maturing into slacker-rock credibility. The resulting decade-or-so’s worth of not-bad to pretty-good albums earned them career collateral in the form of a sizable critical-commercial fan base, and on this two-CD, twenty-eight-track album, they cash in. About half white funk and half slacker rock, no cut stinks and no cut has “hit” written all over it. Good bits abound, but usually not in the same song. In other words, Tedium Arcadium is more like it, with the tedium exacerbated by monochromatic vocals and guitar sounds. The equivalent of three vinyl LPs, the Peppers would’ve never gotten away with something this self-indulgent in the old days. Heck, in the old days only progressive rockers in concert and the Clash in the studio even tried it. And if it’s heartening that these guys don’t come on “progressive,” it’s disheartening that, unlike the Clash, they don’t stir much, if anything, up. Rating: Two-and-a-half jalapeno niños out of five. The Rewinds: The Rewinds (Livewire)—At fourteen tracks, this album goes on too long by at least a third to sustain its momentum, but in small doses its hooks could make you believe (again) that power pop with garage roots is the naked truth. Is it retro? Sure. Is it as good as what it’ll make you remember (Big Star, R.E.M.)? Often enough—for now. Rating: Three-and-a-half head demagnetizers out of five.
Linda Ronstadt / Ann Savoy: Adieu False Heart (Vanguard)—What a user-friendly album! Fans of Ann Savoy can burn the seven on which she sings lead as a Magnolia Sisters EP, fans of Linda Ronstadt can burn the five on which she sings lead as a Stone Poneys EP, and fans of Andrea Zonn (resophonic viola), David Schnaufer (dulcimer), and Dirk Powell (fretless banjo) can burn then loop all 2:40 of “Opening,” “Closing,” and the two “Interludes” as mood music. Better yet, Savoy fans will love the Ronstadt performances, Ronstadt fans will love or at least have their ears opened by the Savoy performances, and Zonn-Schnaufer-Powell fans will love the whole thing, as one or more of the three play on every song. And, for lagniappe, fans of Richard Thompson and “Walk Away Renee” get covers worth their time and attention. Rating: Four-and-a-half twin daughters of different fathers out of five. ____________________________________________________ *As published in the Illinois Entertainer
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...)
Mary Karlzen: The Wanderlust Diaries (Dualtone)—Within the first seven-and-a-half minutes, Karlzen goes from gentle, foggy-morning beauty to full-bodied rock to gorgeous Replacements cover, thus mapping out the musical and emotional parameters of an album that’s never dull and frequently arresting. It’s also consistently smart, so much so that when she sings the refrain that goes “Do you think I’m stupid or something?” there’s no temptation to answer in the affirmative. Even the song to her child and the song to her mother avoid bathos, sketching intimate portraits so plainspokenly that one almost wishes she’d gone for a filial hat trick and made “Rock and Roll Lullaby” and not Tom Waits’ “Heart of Saturday Night” the disc’s second-best cover. Rating: Four mother and child reunions out of five. KC and the Sunshine Band: KC and the Sunshine Band (Collector’s Choice)—Compilations aside, this 1975 album is the most consistently exhilarating disc from the greatest disco hit machine ever. Donna Summer, the Bee Gees—no one matched these Floridians when they were in the zone. Everyone knows “Get Down Tonight,” “That’s the Way (I Like It),” and “Boogie Shoes,” but almost no one knows “Ain’t Nothin’ Wrong” (imagine Archie Bell slowed down and sweetened up) or “I’m So Crazy (’Bout You)” (bubblegum at its brightest, bounciest, and most vibrant). It’s just as well this reissue adds no bonus tracks; in music this efficient they’d just be an encumbrance. Rating: Four glitter balls out of five.
KC and the Sunshine Band: Part 3 (Collector’s Choice)—Compilations aside, the great disco hit machine’s second-most consistently exhilarating release.
Killing Joke: Hosannas From The Basements Of Hell (Cooking Vinyl)--Doom and gloom don’t mean a thing if they ain’t got that boom, so congratulations to drummer Ben Calvert for providing heavy-duty “punch lines” to what would otherwise be an all-too-grim twenty-sixth-anniversary excursion from this relentlessly apocalyptic punk-metal band. Titles like “Implosion,” “Judas Goat,” and “The Lightbringer” (English for “Lucifer”) pretty much say it all, and it’s a good thing, as Jaz Coleman’s Lemmy-on-steroids vocals leave something to be desired in the enunciation department. Still, those needing clarity can always squint at the lyrics, whereupon they’ll encounter such cheery insights as “We come into this life in blood and tears we leave this life in blood and tears” and “Orwellian Machiavellian Hegelian dialectic world management has come and it’s to be expected.” Justifying Coleman’s liner admonition to “play at welding volume” are longtime guitarist Geordie Walker and sometimes bassist Paul Raven, who remain in meltdown mode from beginning to end.*
Andy Kim: How’d We Ever Get This Way?/Rainbow Ride (Collector’s Choice)—Kim is no lost master, but he did know the ins and outs of ’60s bubblegum well enough to plaster the top forty with it a few times. The co-writer of, and an uncredited performer on, the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar,” Kim made three LPs of immaculately conceived sugar pop under his own name that, had it been promoted with comic-book characters, might’ve conquered the world. Or maybe not—man doth not live by bubblegum alone. This disc compiles his first two albums, stranding his equally catchy third with his lachrymose, singer-songwriterly fourth on another two-on-one CD. So till a single-disc best-of comes out, this one’s the one to get. Rating: Three-and-a-half aural cavities out of five.
Lacuna Coil: Karmacode (Century)—Ambient, goth, progressive-metal bands shouldn’t cover Depeche Mode’s “Enjoy the Silence”; it makes their own songs sound gloomier and more melodramatic than they already do.
Lisa Loeb: The Very Best of Lisa Loeb (Geffen)—Lord, she took romantic disappointment hard. She made some pretty (sometimes too pretty) songs out of that disappointment too--songs certainly worth the attention of any guy inclined to make passes at girls who wear glasses. Rating: Three-and-a-half wishing hearts out of five. Andy Fairweather Low: Sweet Soulful Music (Proper American)—Forget the name of his current record label; if anything, Andy Fairweather Low is a proper Englishman. Although best known for his work as a sideman for Eric Clapton, the Who, and currently Roger Waters, Low made four solo albums for A&M between 1974 and 1980, proving himself an ace purveyor of philosophically acute, jaunty folk and pub-rock in the process. Sweet Soulful Music finds him picking up where he left off, singing one catchy, mainly acoustic ditty after another in a voice that’s equal parts Clapton and Paul McCartney. The lyrics, which use stoic good humor to plumb the mystery of life in a universe that’s just unfathomable enough to need plumbing, will prove catchy too, at least to anyone wise enough to know that “life, it ain’t no competition” and that sometimes one needs the help of “Jehovah” to “get over.” Rating: Four amen corners out of five. _________________________________________________________ *As published in Illinois Entertainer
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...)
Tony Gilkyson: Goodbye Guitar (Rolling Sea)—Gilkyson has more ideas than most sidemen (e.g., his Woody Guthrie cover swings) and more voice too. About his well-traveled guitar there’s never been any doubt; though he comes on roots-folky these days, he did replace Billy Zoom in X. Rating: Three-and-a-half wild gifts out of five. David Gilmour: On an Island (Columbia)—Surface similarities aside, this album is no Dark Side of the Moon. If anything, it’s better, or at least prettier. Better yet, more surface similarities aside, it’s also no Alan Parsons projectile. If anything, the title cut, “Smile,” and one or two others sound like (Brian Wilson’s) Smile outtakes that barely missed the cut. Gilmour’s pretensions to philosophical profundity aren’t as annoying as Roger Waters’ either—Gilmour’s no deep thinker, and he knows it. As for his musical pretensions, they’re just what he does, and he does them well. Does it all add up to much? I doubt it. Is “A Pocketful of Stones” about Syd Barrett? Seems possible. Will these dreamscapes help Sigur Ros fans see the error of their ways? Let’s hope. Rating: Three-and-a-half twilights of the gods out of five.
Gnarls Barkley: St. Elsewhere (Downtown)—The necrophilia song is as repulsive as it’s meant to be and the Violent Femmes cover as catchy as it’s meant to be. Meanwhile, Danger Mouse provides the extremely useful public service of bringing the Sly Stone aesthetic into the twenty-first century, namely, that the best in current black pop and the best in current white rock can be so tightly intertwined that not even the most determined musical segregationist can tell where one ends and the other begins. Stone fused his black and white components with hot funk and ace hooks. Mouse uses a supple electronica abuzz with what sounds like the tension of the times. I prefer his Gorillaz work for its higher highs, lower lows, and deeper depths, but I prefer this act to just about everything else currently topping the charts. Rating: Three-and-a-half dream teams out of five. Hacienda Brothers: What’s Wrong with Right (Proper American)—Something about this Dan Penn-produced honky-tonk R&B falls just short of the magic that it always seems about to deliver. Maybe it’s Chris Gaffney’s lead singing, which enlivens but fails to redefine Charlie Rich’s “Life’s Little Ups and Downs,” the Box Tops’ “Cry like a Baby,” and the Intruders’ “Cowboys to Girls.” Maybe it’s Dave Gonzalez’s background singing, which recalls but fails to incarnate that of any of several dozen vintage soul combos. Maybe it’s Dan Penn’s production, which boasts definition but fails to generate the hothouse atmosphere in which roots music thrives. On the other hand, having classic Charlie Rich, Box Tops, and Intruders on the same album amid songs that, even at their most generic, could easily be made special by Taj Mahal is pretty nice. As for “If Daddy Don’t Sing Danny Boy” and the instrumental “Son of Saguaro,” they’re nice enough, and maybe magical enough, on their own. Rating: Three-and-a-half swinging saloon doors out of five.
James Hunter: Believe What I Say (Hep Cat)—Those who’ve checked out Hunter’s more recent recordings will not be disappointed by this, his 1996 debut finally made available in the States. They should, in fact, be thrilled. Turns out he was just as blue-eyed soulful from the get-go as he is now, composing and singing like the combined reincarnations of Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Bobby Bland, and Billy Stewart. At his very best, he even gets close to conjuring Ray Charles, and, as if to convince the skeptical, he not only tackles “Hallelujah I Love Her So” but also gets that most devout of Ray Charles fans, Van Morrison, to duet with him on “Turn on Your Love Light” and “Ain’t Nothing You Can Do.” Makes the past seem like so nice a place to visit that you’ll think twice before deciding not to live there. Rating: Four-and-a-half nothings he can’t do out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...)
The Early November: The Mother, the Mechanic, and the Path (Drive-Thru)—That one filler-free disc could’ve been assembled from the best of these three is beside the point, which is that these relative nobodies have produced a rock opera that equals or beats any nonsense by Pete Townshend or Ray Davies. The theme: How children are reared matters. Is it pretentious? Of course—and a lot more listenable than you’d think. Rating: 750 times a day out of 1000.
Tim Easton: Ammunition (New West)—There’s wit and poignancy aplenty in Tim Easton’s latest lyrics, but it’s the acoustic instrumentation’s quiet intensity, the melodies’ melancholy beauty, and the singing’s disarmingly relaxed quality that make paying attention to Easton’s words a pleasure. That there are sharp songs about romance, politics, and their points of intersection won’t surprise owners of Easton’s previous albums. What might is that for every sharp song there’s an even sharper one in the same general vein. The eloquent despair of “I Don’t Want to Come Home,” for instance, gains resonance from the eloquent hope of “Next To You.” Heightening the effect is the humor. If the dryly ironic “J.P.M.F.Y.F.” (for “Jesus, Protect Me from Your Followers”) ultimately makes a serious point (and makes it more effectively than Dylan’s thematically similar “With God on Our Side”), “Dear Old Song and Dance” (which cites the allure of whiskey, wine, uppers, downers, heroin, cocaine, morphine, ecstasy, hash, mushrooms, Adipex, and Valium, to name just a dozen abused substances) will have the opiate-addicted masses laughing till they cry. Rating: Four-and-a-half vice versas out of five.
Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: I Stand Alone (Anti-)—Because he has help from Lucinda Williams, Flea, David Hidalgo, Corin Tucker, and DJ Bonebrake, Elliott doesn’t exactly “stand alone” on this album, but seldom have cameos been less obtrusive. Only Ernest Tubb’s “Careless Darling” and Jerry Irby’s “Driving Nails in My Coffin” feature second vocals, and at no point do anyone’s musical contributions detract from Elliott’s voice or acoustic guitar. It’s just as well. At seventy-four, Elliott has become the best kind of folk singer (an old one), and his skeletal picking has never cried out for flesh. Speaking of picking, most of these songs are so obscure that only the most diehard Carter Family, Leadbelly, and Hoagy Carmichael fan will hear them as covers. In short, if I Stand Alone is less evocatively other worldly than Good As I Been to You and World Gone Wrong by Elliott’s bestl-known protégé, it ain’t no heavy-handed Springsteen Seeger Sessions either. If anything, it’s the opposite. Rating: Three-and-a-half Guthrie sessions out of five.
Emerson, Lake & Palmer: The Birth Of A Band: Isle Of Wight Festival 1970 (Eagle Vision)—Recorded in 1970 at Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s Isle of Wight debut and originally issued in 1972, Pictures at an Exhibition is so raw that the late great noise-rock maven Lester Bangs raved about it in Rolling Stone upon its release. The audio side of this DualDisc contains Pictures in its entirety and restores two previously excised encores (“Take a Pebble” [lame] and “Rondo” [stark-ravingly mad]). The DVD side contains film of the entire performance and recent interviews with E, L, and P, in which they explain why they do and don’t deserve their reputation for pomposity and pretension. (Warning to the easily frightened: L has not aged well.) Of particular relevance is the teeny-weeny print on the back cover: “The disc may not play on some CD and/or DVD players.” Translation: about fifty percent of the world’s CD players don’t “read” the CD sides of these damned things. Rating: Three-and-a-half curses of Baba Yaga out of five.
Michael Franti and Spearhead: Yell Fire (Anti-/Epitaph)—Forget Neil Young and the Dixie Chicks: Franti is the real peacenik of the moment. Every song on this album criticizes the War on Terror and the mentality behind it either directly or indirectly (mostly the former), and if the lyrics will seem over-familiar to those already well-acquainted with left-wing blog postings, they take on fresh life (if not fresh depth) as sung-rapped by Franti and as reggae-fied by Spearhead. In other words, if Michael Moore doesn’t hire Franti to mastermind the soundtrack to his next pseudo-documentary, he’s even dumber than Joe Leiberman supporters suspect. Unfortunately for Franti, recent revelations that terrorists still intend to blow up passenger jets puts the lie to his utopian visions so thoroughly that only the most broad-mindedly generous listeners will be able to hear past them. Rating: Three heads in the desert sand out of five.
Nelly Furtado: Loose (Geffen)—She’s trying to be Shakira and failing just enough.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...)
Danielson: Ships (Secretly Canadian)—At his most obtuse, Daniel Smith, the leader of the Danielson Familie and its various offshoots, makes music that can fairly be described as “anti-rock.” Whereas most singers, for instance, even limited ones, strive to sing “well,” Smith emotes in a grating falsetto. Whereas most rock acts work variations on the 4/4 time signature, Smith assays a herky-jerk complexity that makes progressive rock sound punk simple. Ships lists thirty-seven contributors (Sufjan Stevens and Steve Albini the most notable) and sounds the way a Jackson Pollock painting looks: big, messy, and madly methodical when not methodically mad. Whether its songs can be said to express anything besides the thrill of unfettered creation (some would say self-indulgence) is hard to say, as the lyrics, when they’re decipherable at all, are often as abstractly impressionistic as the joyful noise in which they’re imbedded. Rating: Three-and-a-half trout mask replicas out of five.
Delaney and Bonnie: Home (Stax)—Hardly anyone remembers Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett anymore, but in the late ’60s and early ’70s they constituted the best of many possible worlds. A real-life married couple, their duets made up in sincerity what their voices lacked in natural and technical ability. Blue-eyed soul singers, they supplied a sweet complement not only to Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell but also to George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Three years and several strong if under-appreciated albums after opening for Blind Faith, they were divorced, and, despite intermittent solo bright spots, they never recaptured the musical magic of the youth they’d shared. Thanks, however, to the enterprising reissue department at Stax Records, that youth is once again available in all its debut exuberance. Recorded in 1969 with the cream of the Stax session-musician crop, Home captures Delaney and Bonnie when the bloom was still on the rose of their romance, talent, and creative energies. Unlike the Buckingham-Nicks version of Fleetwood Mac that would go multi-platinum half-a-decade later, the Bramletts did not take the vicissitudes of “free love” as a given, so a very real innocence sweetens their music. And, unlike so many reissues, the bonus cuts, especially “All We Really Want to Do,” improve rather than merely lengthen the original. Rating: Four-and-a-half marriages made in heaven out of five.
Dixie Chicks: Taking the Long Way (Open Wide/Columbia)—Natalie Maines’ voice is still too scrawny, but she’s getting better at using it, the harmonies help, and overall the seriousness foisted upon these talented women by Maines’ foot-in-mouth political pronouncements has been as good for their music as it has been disastrous for their U.S. concert bookings. I found the humor of their early hits and videos forced, as if they were so afraid of being dismissed as dumb blondes and brunettes that they had to make it obvious they were only kidding. Now that they have nothing left to lose, they’re free to write, play, and sing whatever they want, how ever they want. The result: they’re winning a Culture Battle even if they’re losing the Culture War and sounding refreshingly content and relaxed in the process. Sean Hannity can keep Martina McBride (and, God help us, Lee Greenwood); since when does being conservative mean you have to look a gift Chick in the beak? Rating: Four poultries in motion out of five.
Dragonforce: Inhuman Rampage (Roadrunner)—I can’t actually recommend this caterwaul and doggerel, but I can say that if you’ve ever wondered what Journey, Yes, or Rush would sound like with screaming guitars and heart-attack drums, Dragonforce provides an answer.
Bob Dylan: Modern Times (Columbia)—“Time Out of Mind was me getting back in and fighting my way out of the corner,” Dylan recently told Rolling Stone. “But by the time I made Love and Theft, I was out of the corner. On this record … I’m way gone from the corner.” In other words, if Love and Theft felt looser than the carefully recorded Time Out of Mind, Modern Times feels downright unfettered. It is, in fact, his most natural-sounding album since Blonde on Blonde, its terrain crisscrossed with wandering-boot-heel footprints from every highway, byway, and blazed trail of his musical odyssey. The fermentation of blues, country, folk, rock and roll, and gospel is lazily intoxicating, while the lyrics—both borrowed and new—tap an undiluted stream of romantic and religious consciousness that has built to a torrent by the time the album climaxes with “Ain’t Talkin’.” As Dylan fans know, however, what really makes or breaks a Dylan album, even more than the material or the production, is the voice, and the voice this time is so relaxed in its conversationally craggy tenderness that anyone who’s been around the block a few times will hear it speaking for him. I’d say “for him or her,” but, from Alicia Keys in “Thunder on the Mountain” to the unnamed “young lazy slut” in “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” women both elusive and all too accessible stoke the flames of Dylan’s various narrators, flames that are simultaneously passionate and purgatorial. So maybe, now as always, males will be more sympathetic. I’m one. Rating: Five smoke rings of his mind out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...)
Johnny Cash: American V: A Hundred Highways (Lost Highway/American)—Yep, Cash and Rick Rubin had one more in the can, and, nope, it’s not (very) morbid.
Johnny Cash: Man in Black: Live in Denmark 1971 (Country Music Video/Legacy)—The set looks like Hee Haw, the Danish crowd seems clueless if appreciative, and those distractions are all that’s wrong with this very entertaining 18-song DVD. With Carl Perkins, the Carter Family, and the Statler Brothers getting solo spots, the pace remains brisk. And it’s great to see Cash himself so vibrant and eager to please. Lagniappe: he reads a prepared statement in Danish. Four johns noir out of five. Johnny Cash: Personal File (Columbia/Legacy)—No wonder Rick Rubin had such an easy time getting Johnny Cash to pick up an acoustic guitar and sing his favorite songs into a mic throughout the ’90s. It turns out Cash had already been doing something similar on his own for years. He recorded about half of these recently discovered performances in 1973 simply to document the music that had come to mean the most to him over the course of his life, adding to them in stolen moments until 1982. Aside from six originals, the twenty-five selections on Disc One reflect the influence of country radio and other small-town musical sources (high-school music and English teachers, talent contests, family); the twenty-four hymns and gospel songs on Disc Two, eleven of which he wrote himself, reflect the influence of Jesus Christ. If admirers who overlook Cash’s weakness for bathos will have a hard time explaining his recitation of “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” skeptics who downplay his prophetic powers will be flummoxed by “If Jesus Ever Loved a Woman,” a lyrical love song of unknown origin that should have Pierre Plantard rolling over and telling Dan Brown the news. Rating: Four time capsules out of five.
Rosanne Cash: Black Cadillac (Capitol)—At first this inevitable concept album about the death of not only Johnny and June Cash but also Vivian Distin (Johnny’s first wife and Rosanne’s natural mother) struck me as both too narrow and too didactic. What would people who didn’t know and love Rosanne Cash’s parents the way Rosanne did and does make of her poignant attempts to say goodbye and to hold on simultaneously? What would the religiously indifferent or the many evangelical believers whom Johnny and June numbered among their fans make of the songs fueled by disappointment with Christianity’s insufficiency? Eventually, though, the music--by which I mean the lyrics, the melodies, the instrumentation, and most of all Rosanne’s remarkably expressive voice--turned me around. Not only are death and loss universal subjects, but Johnny Cash was one of the most universal figures of the last fifty years, a veritable pop-cultural Walt Whitman. A songs about him is a song about multitudes. As for the anti-Christian didacticism, it’s really more “anti-Christians.” She laments that “no one in the Bible / craves [her] company,” she assures zealots that she’s “not a soul [they] need to save,” and she succinctly points out that “[i]t’s a strange new world we live in, / where the church leads you to hell / and the lawyers get the money / for the lives they divide and sell.” Final verdict: not too narrow or too didactic at all. Rating: Four-and-a-half purities of heart out of five.
Cheap Trick: Rockford (Big 3/Cheap Trick)—Not since That ’70s Show was real life have these guys wanted us to want them this bad.
The Church: Uninvited, like the Clouds (Cooking Vinyl)—This psychedelic folk-rock awash in rainy-day jangle will remind longtime fans of what they first liked about the Church. If in the ’80s these Aussies added sparkle to a “paisely underground” movement into which they were sometimes unfairly lumped, these days they add gravity, if only by virtue of their drummer, to whatever cosmic pop is currently floating off into the ether. Even at its most derivative (the Pink Floyd-meets-U2 stretches, say), the music makes for the kind of background listening that holds up fairly well in the foreground too. As with so much melancholy pop, few standout tracks emerge once the clouds of inattention disperse. “Unified Field,” however, really stands out, and the reveries inspired by the haze into which much of the rest blurs will almost surely be pleasant. Rating: Three daydream believers out of five.
Nat King Cole: The Very Best of Nat King Cole (Capitol)—One disc, twenty-eight songs, one silky classic after another, less like Sinatra with soul than Johnny Mathis reared on jazz.
Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint: The River in Reverse (Verve Forecast)—That the road to hell may be paved with good intentions doesn’t mean that all roads paved with good intentions lead to hell. Sometimes they merely lead to harmless if aesthetically misbegotten collaborations like this one, which would have already gone the way of Elvis Costello’s other dubious duet albums if Katrina hadn’t turned New Orleans, here represented by Allen Toussaint, into a sort of national underdog deserving of vague if sincere sympathies and susceptible to commercial if unintentional exploitation. Most telling album-cover detail: Costello’s smiling, Toussaint’s not. Rating: Two-and-a-half meshes that didn’t take out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted...) Atreyu: Death Grip on Yesterday (Victory)—The real reason lead vocalist Alex Varkatzas is depressed: every time he tries to sing, he sounds as if he’s going to throw up.
The Beach Boys: Songs from Here and Back (Hallmark)—Available at Hallmark Gold Crown stores until July 23 and selling for $7.95 (“with the purchase of three Hallmark cards”), this collection of seven 1989 live songs plus one previously unreleased track apiece from Brian Wilson, Al Jardine, and Mike Love will be of interest primarily to fanatics. Of course, as fanatics already own Good Timin: Live At Knebworth England 1980 and the Sessions bootleg, they already have ’80s live versions of four of this disc’s live seven and two mixes of Brian Wilson’s cornball “The Spirit of Rock & Roll” respectively. Fanatics will therefore have to content themselves with the live “Dance, Dance, Dance” (O.K.), “Kokomo” (nice), and Carl Wilson-sung “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” (nicer). Even non-fanatics, meanwhile, will rightly suspect that the Jardine and Love cuts are cornball too. Rating: Two-and-a-half tropical drinks melting in our hands out of five. Andrea Bocelli: Amore (Decca)—Julio Iglesias for highbrows; and why do they call this stuff “easy listening” when it’s harder to listen to than Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music? Boston: Boston/Don’t Look Back (Epic/Legacy)—Recorded between 1976 and 1978 when the restrictions of vinyl imposed 40-minute limits on even the most self-indulgent acts, Boston’s first two albums would’ve easily fit onto one $18.98 CD. Yet Epic/Legacy has released these newly remastered editions separately at $11.98 a pop, essentially charging consumers five extra dollars, an amount which in these days of high gas prices actually means something. The aesthetically minded might argue that separately reissuing the albums in their original covers is necessary to recreate the sense of history-in-the-making that accompanied their first appearance. But the problem with Boston has always been one of form over content, so even seemingly minor details like packaging take on heightened significance. Remastered by the group’s technologically gifted lead guitarist Tom Scholz, the albums have never sounded better. Every detail of Scholz’s immaculate engineering glistens, making it easier than ever before to appreciate what one critic described as the group’s American Yes-meets-Led-Zeppelin fusion. Frankly, even thirty years later no rock band can touch it, and, given the ever-increasing preference for digital over analogue definition, it’s doubtful any rock band ever will. Unfortunately, the lyrics, which at their best were never more than functional, sound stupider than ever, a situation that will only worsen with each passing anniversary. Rating: Two-and-a-half stairways to M.I.T. out of five.
Chris Botti: To Love Again: The Duets (Columbia)—Foregrounding Michael Bublé, Sting, Paula Cole, Steven Tyler, and Gladys Knight, Botti’s easy-listening jazz beats Kenny G’s; it does not, however, beat the music that Bublé, Sting, Cole, Tyler, and Knight make on their own.
Bow Wow Wow: We Are the ’80s (RCA/Legacy)—“I Want Candy” and “Louis Quatorze” endure, and “See Jungle! (Jungle Boy),” “(I’m a) TV Savage,” “Elimination Dancing,” and “Go Wild in the Country” razzle if not dazzle, leaving eight others to remind one of how irritating Annabella Lwin and Malcom McLaren in tandem could be.
Buckcherry: 15 (Eleven Seven)—“Everything” is everything a great hard-rock song should be: simple but not stupid, empathetic, hooky, loud but not deafening, and faster than mid-tempo but slower than speed metal. “Carousel” and “Sorry,” which immediately follow, almost manage the same trick, except their lyrics are stupid, not simple, their emotional manipulation plainly discernible beneath their rote sweet-talk. True, Aerosmith could put them across, but Buckcherry hasn’t built up the stock of good will that Aerosmith has and therefore can’t pass off its dirty-old-man routine as a coded thank-you to its fans for sticking with them through the years. Also true: even if Guns N’ Roses could’ve gotten away with “Crazy Bitch,” and I’m not sure they could have, they could’ve done so only because they also had “Sweet Child o’ Mine,” and even “Everything” isn’t up to that standard. Rating: Three dobiddleys out of five.
T Bone Burnett: The True False Identity (DMZ/Columbia)—Burnett is a genius, but he hasn’t made a genius album since 1982, and this one, his first in fourteen years, is no exception. His knack for exploring religion, philosophy, and politics in a rock-friendly vernacular without oversimplification remains, but the music, instead of lightening the burden imposed by such weighty topics, mirrors it. Not since 1987’s The Talking Animals has Burnett put his name on anything this dark and dense, this baroque and overwrought, and, although (or maybe because) he's a genius, tends to over-think the problems of the world as well as his own. What almost redeems the enterprise is that sometimes when he thinks his about his own problems, he thinks about them humbly, even going out of his way now and then to see the log in his own eye as a log and the speck in his brother’s eye as a speck. Rating: Three parabolic parables out of five.
T Bone Burnett: 20/20: The Essential T Bone Burnett (Columbia/Legacy/DMZ)—Between playing in Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review and producing the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, T Bone Burnett released five albums and two EPs under his own name and three as the de facto leader of the Alpha Band. Other than relying overmuch on 1992’s The Criminal Under My Own Hat and not enough on 1980’s Truth Decay, this two-disc, forty-song overview faithfully chronicles his funny-sad, catchy-philosophical, and mostly otherwise out-of-print body of work, adding three previously unreleased songs (one with Magnolia Sister Ann Savoy) and re-recordings of several songs from 1983’s Proof Through the Night. If Burnett’s main themes were the wages of sin and the hope of redemption, his aesthetic challenge was the balancing of his pontifical tendencies (“Hefner and Disney”) with his roots-rock roots (“Driving Wheel”). His bull’s-eyes outnumbered his near-misses, which outnumbered his far-misses, and even atheists will thank God for “I Wish You Could’ve Seen Her Dance” and “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Rating: Four humans from earth out of five.
This "blog" is mainly an online storage site for the pieces that I've written (1990 to the present) for WORLD, the VILLAGE VOICE, the ILLINOIS ENTERTAINER, various Salem Press encyclopedias, BLENDER, OFFBEAT, TIMES OF ACADIANA, the [WITTENBURG] DOOR, ROCK & ROLL DISC, BRASS [New Zealand], and B-SIDE. In the late-'80s, I published some poems too. All of these and $3.50 might get me a tasty beverage at Starbucks.
(For the record, there are two pieces with my byline floating around the Internet--one on the Cranberries from B-SIDE magazine and one on Dr. Laura Schlessinger from WORLD--that were actually substantially rewritten by my editors. So I hereby officially disavow them.)
The collection features songs that allude favorably to cigarettes or smoking but with a twist: The newly re-recorded versions either demonize or expurgate the tobacco-friendly references altogether.
