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(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
The Moody Blues: A Night at Red Rocks with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Deluxe Edition (Threshold/Polydor). The hits generated more momentum on this album’s old non-deluxe single-disc version, which excised the mushy non-hits that are now included.
New York Dolls: The Best of New York Dolls: 20th Century Masters, the Millennium Collection (Mercury). The one to own if you’re going to own more than New York Dolls but less than New York Dolls and In Too Much Too Soon.
NorthernBlues Gospel Allstars: Saved! (NorthernBlues). Ace demos for an as-yet-unrecorded album of gospel standards and some that might be.
A Perfect Circle: Thirteenth Step (Virgin America). The cover sticker proclaims the presence of ex-Smashing Pumpkin James Iha; the booklet reveals the absence of Iha at the time of the recording.
Poco: Running Horse (Drifter’s Church). Surprisingly little in the way of horsefeathers for an album that had me thinking “Jayhawks” until my wife said “Eagles.”
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Mardi Gras: The Language of New Orleans Volume 7
(Louisiana Red Hot)
That Louisiana Red Hot has assembled yet another collection of second-line rhythms o’erlaid with the sort of singing and musicianship that’s made New Orleans an R&B Mecca isn’t news. What is, is that LRH has done so without so much as one cross-licensed classic track or big name. The oldest recording dates from ’94, the newest from 2002, and although I’d heard of Smoky Greenwell, Bag of Donuts, Sammy Ridgely, and the Rebirth Brass Band, I couldn’t have hummed you anything by them till now. Actually I still can’t: As with so much second-line, this genre exists to help the good times roll, functioning even at its funkiest like an exotic strain of background music. The exception is Drew Young’s “Mardi Gras Morning,” a happy but hardly giddy rock and roll shuffle that’s no one’s idea of background music (Iguanas music maybe) and probably has less to do with Young’s years spent in New Orleans than with his current status as a struggling musician in that Mecca of foreground music, New York City. Rating: Three-and-a-half big apples out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
The Marsalis Family: A Jazz Celebration
(Marsalis/Rounder)
Anyone who’s ever been put off by the Marsalis machine because of its grandeur, size, or seemingly effortless efficiency will find in this filial pow-wow just enough spontaneity and music for music’s sake (as opposed to culture’s sake or Sony Records’ sake) to enjoy the good time that was obviously had by all. Wynton speaks, but only for twenty-nine seconds, and anyway it’s Harry Connick, Jr.’s fifty-six-second spoken bit that’ll have you turning up the volume. Stanley Crouch, who not only doesn’t speak but also doesn’t contribute liner notes, may not even have been in attendance. The “Supreme Spiritual Being,” on the other hand, to whom the liner notes attribute guidance and blessings, almost certainly was: Making “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” work for eight minutes without evoking Oklahoma! is some trick. Rating: Four broad ways out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Masked and Anonymous: Music from the Original Motion Picture
(Columbia/Sony Music Soundtrax)
By no means is this soundtrack as consistently enjoyable a Dylan-covers album as Coulson, Dean, McGuiness, Flint’s Lo and Behold (1972, and in print), but it comes nearer the mark than Gotta Serve Somebody from earlier this year, in part because it contains four new performances by Dylan himself, the least predictable of which is “Dixie,” the Civil War-era minstrel classic that grows more politically incorrect with each passing day. There is, alas, esthetic incorrectness as well, most notably the Magokoro Brothers singing “My Back Pages” in Japanese and Articolo 31 rapping “Like a Rolling Stone” in Italian. (I was hoping for “Ugliest Girl in the World” in Tagalog myself.) Furthermore, the bigger-name performances are more interesting than definitive. One cut, however, stands out, and it’s not even in the film: the Dixie Hummingbirds’ “City of Gold,” a luminous gospel number that Dylan performed during his 1981 tour but that’s gone unreleased in any version 'til now. Rating: Three properties of Jesus out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Massive Attack
100th Window
(Virgin)
Forget Horace Andy, Sinéad O’Connor, and Robert Del Naja. It’s the dub-heavy bass beats and eerie samples over which they whisper-sing ominously and-or ethereally that are this album’s real reason for being. That Del Naja and Neil Davidge generated their own samples this time no doubt required them to travel deep into their own inner cosmoses and shape their desired sounds from whatever primordial ooze they found there. And judging from this album’s deep, dark, Eastern-influenced soundscapes, Naja and Davidge probably went ooze hunting right after a séance aimed at contacting the tormented soul of some long-forgotten pharaoh. Rating: Three-and-a-half toots uncommon out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
John Mayer
Heavier Things
(Aware/Columbia)
The soft-spoken, too-precious introspection persists, but with airy electronics where the acoustic guitar used to be, the burden gets shifted from the words to the hooks, which, thank heaven exist, and which could be ersatz Seal when they’re not ersatz Sting. And although only Seal or Sting fans will likely find these songs “heavier,” “Something’s Missing” and “New Deep” aren’t bad as existentialism for beginners goes. And “Daughters” (gently) pulls the wings off “Butterfly Kisses.” Rating: Three-and-a-half pussycats in the cradle out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Edwin McCain
The Austin Sessions
(ATC)
On this primarily acoustic album’s less predictable material (the jaunty “Let It Slide,” the interracial love song “Popcorn Box,” the playful “Little Girls”), McCain’s recently acquired vocal edge provides him access to a soulfulness that may surprise those who know him mainly for “I’ll Be” or “Solitude.” But it’s by switching back to his smoother croon that he puts over “No Choice,” a minor-key Buddy Mondlock folk tune that proves there’s always room for mandolin-laced artifacts bemoaning the perfidy of the music biz. Too bad he also has to go and turn Dire Straits’ “Romeo and Juliet” into a drag. Rating: Three-and-a-half minor-label debuts out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Tim McGraw
Tim McGraw
(Curb)
The hype is that after years of going multi-platinum for his major label, McGraw’s finally gotten permission to record with his road band instead of the usual Nashville studio pros. Thing is, one only gets to play in McGraw’s road band in the first place by being able to recreate that Nashville studio-pro sound, note for note, night after night, indoor sports arena after indoor sports arena. Meanwhile, the son of a pitcher man continues to harvest what he perceives to be the cream of the Nashville-songwriter crop. I like the way pre-marital sex and abortion are a big deal in “Red Ragtop” and chuckle sympathetically to the almost Nugent-worthy “Who Are They” (in which the “politically correct” who say “don’t pray in school but have safe sex” probably live in L.A. and might not have souls). I slap high-fives with the line from “I Know How to Love You Well” that goes “I may not be the best of singers / There’s better guys I’ve heard.” And I savor this liner thanks from drummer Billy Mason: “The Osmond Family, Barry Manilow your talents have inspired me to work hard.” Rating: Two-and-a-half gopher balls out of five.(More McGraw: http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/tim-mcgraw-faith-hill-concert-preview.html and http://arsenioorteza.blogspot.com/2010/07/tim-mcgraw-faith-hill-live-review-2000.html)
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Milestone/Galaxy: Original Jazz Classics Sampler
(Milestone/Galaxy)
A less haphazard ransacking of an important jazz label’s catalogue you won’t easily find. Although tracks three through sixteen don’t command attention like tracks one and two (about which more in a second), many of them make themselves felt before fading into the background. As for tracks one and two, they’re enough to turn dabblers into obsessives, what with McCoy Tyner’s 1973 swirling “Song of the New World” apparently conceived to convince progressive-rock fans that they’ve been barking up the wrong tree (and that it’s not too late to learn new tricks) and Lee Konitz’s “Duplicity,” a freely exploratory minimalist duet from 1967 with the violinist Ray Nance apparently conceived to encourage the self-consciously avant-garde to put their John Cage records away. Rating: Three-and-a-half summers of love out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Michael Hutchence
Michael Hutchence
(V2)
One especially tawdry footnote to this former INXS frontman’s 1997 suicide was the insistence of his girlfriend, Paula Yates, that his death by hanging was accidental. “I won’t have my child grow up thinking that her father left her,” she said. So I guess it’s better the child grows up thinking her father died from autoerotic asphyxiation. Yates would serve her man’s memory better by simply playing her daughter this album, which Hutchence completed a week before his death. Once past such tabloid-baiting lyrics as “Don’t save me from myself,” “I just wanna slide away and come alive again,” and “Saw a million pieces of the shape I’m in / Hanging from a chandelier,” one can’t help noticing the obvious care that Hutchence and his first-rate support cast put into the project. Does it sound all that different from INXS? Not really. Is it better than INXS’s Greatest Hits? No. Does it sound like the work of a man with no reason to live? Not by a long shot. Rating: Three-and-a-half suicide blondes out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
The Minus 5
Down with Wilco
Yep Roc)
After years of leading the Young Fresh Fellows, Scott McCaughey has finally achieved a youthful freshness worthy of his pet sounds. Better yet, the jokes work: “The Days of Wine and Booze” (a title), “They call me DJ Mini-Mart ’cause that’s where I work” (a line), “Bitterness is reserved for stupid people / not for someone intelligent like me” (another)--each draws you in just enough for the melodies to get their hooks in. That Wilco is the band helps. That McCaughey sings like John Lennon without the world or Yoko Ono on his shoulders--moving so naturally from the absurd to the touching to the comic that it’s hard to tell where (or whether) one ends and the other begins--helps too. Rating: Plus 4.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
R.E.M.: In Time: The Best of R.E.M. 1988-2003 (Warner Bros.). Rock as feeling, mood, and texture; lyrics as inside jokes, non-sense, and occasionally disarming directness.
Duke Robillard: Exalted Lover (Stony Plain). Shut up and play your guitar, you find yourself saying; then he does, and things still don’t improve.
Salsa Around the World (Putumayo). Music to mourn Celia Cruz by.
Shirley Scott: Queen of the Organ, Shirley Scott Memorial Album (Prestige). The female Jimmy Smith and-or McGriff, both out front and backing Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, Stanley Turrentine, Mildred Anderson, et al, circa 1958-1964.
The Songs of Hank Williams Jr. (A Bocephus Celebration) (Warner Bros.). Consistently enjoyable and in the spirit of the original, but too bad Trick Pony got the Monday Night Football theme.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
My Morning Jacket
It Still Moves
(ATO/RCA)
What has the college crowd crowing over these melancholy fellows is not their songs but their sound: keening vocals, languid jangle, and random choogle deliquescing amid enough reverb to cover an all but total lack of form and content. Perfect symbol of their willful indifference: rendering the title of track one, on both cover and booklet, in a font so illegible you’ll have to consult allmusic.com to tell whether its “Malgatah” or “Malapetah” only to learn it’s “Mahgeetah.” Lyric that says it all: “Oh shit run!” Rating: Two vengeful Montezumas out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Ted Nugent
Craveman
(Spitfire)
Like other forces of nature, Ted Nugent is better off channeled than simply letting go. And whether it was the Amboy Dukes in the ’60s/’70s, his own band in the ’70s/’80s, or Damn Yankees in the ’80s/’90s, what has always channeled him best is the strictures of commercial radio. His last major-label effort’s having stiffed, he spends most of this minor-label onslaught in full gonzo mode, and while the results are hardly dull, they’re also predictable: He’s big, he’s bad, he rocks loud and hard, he’s politically incorrect, he’s straight (in both the chemical and the sexual senses), he’s well hung, he can outcuss Eminem and the Insane Clown Posse combined, and he knows his Second Amendment. So what else is new? Including the way the name of his current record label captures his essence now at least as accurately as "Epic" did then? Rating: Three-and-a-half whites of their eyes out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Primal Scream
Evil Heat
(Epic)
Style: aurally abrasive, verbally scathing techno-punk. Weltanschauung: “A life of work / is a life of crime / you pay your taxes / you serve your time / all that money / where does it go? / schools, prisons, hospitals, roads? / government funding of military science? / genetically modified ultraviolence?” Best song: “Autobahn 66.” Lagniappe: a bonus DVD featuring high-quality footage of the band playing to a stadium full of ecstatic European admirers, who have every reason to be ecstatic. U2 fans, this is the techno-punk you were really waiting for when you settled for Pop and Zooropa. Rating: Four unforgettable fires out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Punk: The Early Years
(Music Video Distributors)
Trust the title. Not only does this sixty-minute documentary chronicle punk’s early years, it was shot during those years as well (1977 and 1978 to be precise). Caught up in the moment, the documentarians indiscriminately capture both wheat (X Ray Specs) and chaff (Generation X), sheep (the Slits) and goats (Eddie and the Hot Rods), in rare (if not necessarily spectacular) performances and rarer (if even less necessarily spectacular) interviews. Set exclusively in London, the film ignores the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television, and Blondie, all the while hinting, in interview after interview with various label honchos, at what would turn out to be both England’s and the U.S.’s second most important contribution to the music: major-label involvement (i.e., money), without which punk might’ve vanished without a trace. In short, an educational appendix to Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury. Rating: Three-and-a-half bollocks out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Ian “Mac” McLagan and the Bump Band
Best of British
(Gadfly)
One could be forgiven at this late date for not expecting too much from this ex-Face keyboardist and Stones sideman, but, really, this is the least mossy-sounding bit of Stonesiness to roll down in longer than most of us who can remember would like to. Ron Wood guests twice and Billy Bragg once, but it’s McLagan’s writing and singing--both looser and funnier than the recent work of his legendary mates--that put this one over, with “She Stole It!” and “This Time” bordering on vintage. Rating: Four ooh-la-la’s out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Putumayo Presents French Café
(Putumayo)
If you’re wondering how the compilers at Putumayo overcome the problem of making an attention-getting album out of music meant to be talked over by people drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, well, they don’t exactly. While two or three of these tunes will prick up your ears, good luck trying to remember which ones they were or how they go after the espresso wears off. And although it helps to know that “Un Jour Comme un Autre” (“A Day like Any Other”) was cut by a thirty-year-old Brigitte Bardot, it turns out to be a French-café song like any other. Rating: Two-and-a-half rendezvous of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade out of five.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Rod Stewart: As Time Goes By ... The Great American Songbook Volume 2 (Arista). Those seeking proof that Rod can still carry a tune merely get proof that nowadays the tunes carry Rod; those seeking proof that Rod’s still a roué get a “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered” wherein he gets hot for Cher.
George Strait: For the Last Time: Live from the Astrodome (MCA Nashville). Enjoyable though bland and vice versa, with these fightin’ words for Dixie Chicks fans: “Me and my family were real fortunate a few years ago. We got a call from President and Mrs. Bush, and they invited us to come up to Camp David and spend the weekend.... I’ll remember that forever.…”
The Strokes: Room on Fire (RCA). Like the Cars before them, a thinned out, shinier version of a putatively underground music with the catchy quotient boosted.
Booker T. & the MGs: Soul Men (Stax). Funky karaoke.
Booker T. & the MGs/The Mar-Keys: Stax Instrumentals (Stax). Funky karaoke/groovy karaoke.
Susan Tedeschi: Wait for Me (Tone Cool/Artemis). Ersatz Bonnie Raitt, right down to the way Tedeschi locks into a groove and waxes sensual when not waning sentimental.
(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )
Reckless Kelly
Under the Table and Above the Sun
(Sugar Hill)
If ever an act were tailor-made for the “No Depression” (alt-country, Triple-A) format, this Oregon-gone-Austin quintet is it. Early-morning vocals drawling southward, heartland harmonies meshing heavenward, mandolins and twelve-string guitars constituting the musical equivalent of sepia tones for that bygone-era feeling—atmosphere doesn’t come much thicker. But at a time when even the reformed Poco and the 138th incarnation of the Flying Burrito Brothers make sharper albums and still find themselves outmaneuvred by the Jayhawks, one can’t help wondering whether, when all is strummed and done, country-rock-based mood music will turn out to have been any better than the Mantovani-based kind. The liner notes proclaim Reckless Kelly’s songs the “solution” to the “problem” of the “[p]re-teen, pre-packaged, pro-tooled, pretentious, industry-driven, corporate-sponsored, tasteless, soulless, cyborg music that surrounds our lives and crowds our ears,” and maybe they are. Then again, maybe they’d be just as obnoxious as anything on Now That’s What I Call Music! 14 given an equal opportunity to surround and crowd. Rating: Three R. Kellys out of five.
The Moody Blues: A Night at Red Rocks with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, Deluxe Edition (Threshold/Polydor). The hits generated more momentum on this album’s old non-deluxe single-disc version, which excised the mushy non-hits that are now included.
NorthernBlues Gospel Allstars: Saved! (NorthernBlues). Ace demos for an as-yet-unrecorded album of gospel standards and some that might be.
