My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: B

KATY B

On a Mission

(Columbia)

In “Easy Please Me” (this disco doyenne likes omitting words from titles), Katy B complains no “man” pleases her because “their lines are far too cheesy” and “no boy is on the level.”  Besides not knowing the difference between a man and a boy, she’s also a hypocrite: She herself isn’t on the level either.  “You don’t have to have a lot of money,” she sings.  “All you’ve got to have is fire burning deep in your soul.”  Yeah, right.  Beats like hers don’t grow on trees.  In fact, they’re probably the best money can buy.  They’re also the only aural detail of these songs that makes them seem special to the extent that they do.  Recurring subject: feeling good.  Recurring malaise: not making feeling good feel all that special.

JAMES BROWN

The Singles Volume 10: 1975-1979

(Hip-O Select)

What bliss it must have been to be James Brown in the mid-to-late ’70s. Judging from these thirty-six A and B sides, all he had to do to get on the good foot was assemble his musicians, tell them to make it funky now, grab the mic, and freely associate on whatever theme happened to be occupying his mind at the time. If the jam went on too long for seven inches of vinyl (as was the case, for instance, with “For Goodness Sakes, Look at Those Cakes”), he’d just fade it out halfway through then bring it back up on the flipside. Biggest surprise: the David Bowie “Fame” sample in “Hot (I Need to Be Loved).” Best line (from “Woman”): “My mother was a woman--and she still is.”


My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: C

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: C

CANT

Dreams Come True

(Terrible)

Any album with the word “dreams” in its title had better be dreamlike if not necessarily dreamy, and on that count Chris Taylor, a.k.a. Cant, scores a ten.  A kaleidoscopic array of electronica envelops these songs, unifying them into a haze that’s soporific without being dull, maybe because by Track Four (the misleadingly titled “Bang”) Taylor’s dreams start to sound a lot like nightmares, becoming downright horrific by Track Six (the slowly churning “She Found a Way Out”).  By the time Track Eight (the bad-acid-trippy title cut) careens around, Taylor has descended all the way into a Dante’s Inferno of his own making, and in neither of the last two tracks (“Rises Silent” and “Bericht”) does he find a way out.

JOHNNY CASH

Bootleg 3: Live Around the World 1956-1979

(Columbia/Legacy)

That hearing Cash “live around the world” from 1956 to ’79 isn’t as exciting as hearing him live at Folsom Prison or San Quentin in 1968-’69 says more about the crowds than him.  “Here’s a song called ‘I’ll Never Forget Ol’ Whatsername,” he cracks on Disc One, Track Eleven.  On Track Sixteen: “No, I don’t drink anymore--I don’t drink any less, but....”  In short, although you own these songs in multiple other versions, this collection isn’t entirely redundant.  By Disc Two he’s playing the White House: “[H]e was born in Arkansas, and he now lives in Tennessee,” quoth President Nixon.  “But he belongs to the whole country.”  Then Cash sings “A Boy Named Sue,” albeit with a vocal screech where the “son of a bitch” should be.  

CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH

Hysterical

(Red General Catalog/V2)

Alec Ounsworth’s most impressive accomplishment this time out is that, from what sounds like bits of early New Order and U2, he has fashioned a shimmeringly anthemic sound that keeps the keening thinness of his voice from being annoying.  He even delivers the mellow change of pace “Misspent Youth” without making the modern-day Hamlet pose he strikes in it seem ridiculous.  As for the poses he strikes elsewhere, they’re tougher to assess because the music’s windswept grandeur tends to overwhelm what he’s singing.  Taken as a whole, though, this album sure sounds good--hooky, pretty, and sometimes both.  His formula fails him only once: The seven-minute “Adam’s Plane” not only doesn’t get to wherever it’s going but also doesn’t sound as if it ever will.

CORNERSHOP FEATURING BUBBLEY KAUR

Cornershop & the Double ‘O’ Groove Of

(Ample Play)

“Minus the mock-heroic guitars,” writes Spin’s Mikael Wood of this album, “Tjinder Singh's globalist critiques lose some of their pop-political punch.” Well, maybe, but as all 10 of these songs are sung in the Punjabi tongue of the guest lead vocalist and lyricist Bubbley Kaur, the politics would be lost on Cornershop’s English-speaking fans anyway. What won’t be is that Tjinder Singh and Benedict Ayres have seldom if ever recorded a bubblier (pun intended) or catchier version of the East-meets-West synthesis they’ve spent the last 18 years perfecting. Sitars and synthesized clavichords atop dub-wise bass and drums whose bustling shuffle might or might not be programmed--it’s a sound for sore ears. “Double Decker Eyelashes” is to cry for. And good luck not shaking it to “Don’t Shake It.” 


My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: E

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: E

KURT ELLING

The Gate

(Concord)

You needn’t be a fan of vocal jazz to enjoy the latest album by this perennial Grammy nominee, although being a little old might help. Under producer Don Was, Kurt Elling and his combo transform King Crimson (“Matte Kudasai”), the Beatles (“Norwegian Wood”), Earth, Wind & Fire (“After the Love Is Gone”), and Stevie Wonder (“Golden Lady”) into acoustic, late-night meditations entirely worthy of the Bill Evans-Miles Davis (“Blue in Green”) and Marc Johnson (“Samurai Cowboy”) company they keep. The real coup though is Joe Jackson’s “Steppin’ Out.” By slowing the tempo and upping the swing quotient, Elling puts the emphasis on the music and takes the burden off the lyrics, the too-inside nature of which he meanwhile renders moot by singing them in a sandpaper baritone that’s pure mood. 

BRIAN ENO

Drums Between the Bells

(Warp)

Quoth Eno in the liner notes: "We are right at the beginning of a digital revolution in what can be done with recorded voices....  Speech has become a fully-fledged musical material at last."  Funny, you’d think the guy would’ve heard of Laurie Anderson by now.  All the same, if it’s by keeping his head in the sand that he dreams up soundscapes as eerily beautiful as the ones he has created on this album for the poems of Rick Holland, more power to him.  In fact, although the words (read by an assorted cast) and the soundscapes mesh just fine, the soundscapes sparkle even more brightly on their own--as anyone who plunks for the limited-edition package and its bonus disc of the entire album voice free will discover.


My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: F-G

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: F-G

THE FLYING BURRITO BROTHERS

Authorized Bootleg/Fillmore East, New York, N.Y.: Late Show November 7, 1970

(Hip-O Select)

The Flying Burrito Brothers (or “the Flying Bean Sandwiches,” as one member jokes on this album right before “I Am a Pilgrim”) have been legendary for so long that it’s easy to forget how relatively small a deal they were when these forty-two minutes of music were recorded forty-one years ago. Gram Parsons, who’d just been replaced by future Firefaller Rick Roberts, wouldn’t achieve drug-casualty status for three years, Bernie Leadon was yet to become an Eagle, and the rhythm section of former Byrds wasn’t exactly auditioning for the Rolling Stones. But, oh, could Sneaky Pete Kleinow pick that pedal steel and make it weep, and, oh, could they sing! “Lazy Days,” “My Uncle,” and, lest we forget, “Wild Horses”--like, Susan Boyle has nothing on these guys. 

ARETHA FRANKLIN

The Great American Songbook

(Columbia/Legacy)

Now that Rod Stewart has relinquished dibs on the “Great American Songbook” franchise, Sony moves in with this eighteen-track teaser for its dozen-disc box, Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete On Columbia. That’s “Columbia” as in Columbia Records, the label long maligned for trying to turn Franklin into a cross between Nancy Wilson and Mahalia Jackson and of therefore clipping the soulful wings she would later sprout on Atlantic. It turns out it’s not that simple. She sounds plenty soulful on “Cold, Cold Heart,” and elsewhere she’s hardly chopped liver. The accompaniment (the metropolitan equivalent of countrypolitan) is what takes getting used to.  But Franklin sure did.  And although she wouldn’t record Young, Gifted And Black until 1972, she sounds all three here--and in that order. 

GOLDMUND

All Will Prosper

(Western Vinyl)

Goldmund is Keith Kenniff, an American composer and musician mysteriously attuned, on this album at least (he also records shoegaze, ambient, and children’s music), to the melodies of the Civil War-era United States--music that, as his PR puts it, “tied friends and families together in a time when the nation was being torn apart.”  With nothing more than a piano and an acoustic guitar, he resurrects “Dixie,” “Shenandoah,” “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” and eleven other contemporaneous songs in shatteringly ghostly renditions.  Not every melody registers instantly.  Several (“The Death of General Wolfe,” “Bonnie Blue Flag,” “Who’ll Save the Left?”) might even strike anyone less than intimate with the popular music of that period as new.  As for the one genuinely new song, Kenniff’s “Ashoken Farewell,” it fits. 

GREEN DAY

Awesome As Fuck

(Reprise)

As a description of the band and-or the music itself, this album’s Walmart-unfriendly title is either comic hubris or self-delusion. “Awesome”? This? But as a reaction to the ride on which Billie Joe, Mike, and Tré found themselves when they recorded these seventeen intensities in sixteen cities, it’s understandable and just the shibboleth to let the inarticulate hordes for whom they speak know that, even while pushing forty and with a Broadway musical just around the corner, they’re still American idiots at heart. 21^st Century Breakdown provides five songs, “21 Guns” benefits from the communal vibe, and “Cigarettes and Valentines” makes its debut. What was almost certainly not retouched in the studio: “San Diego, let me hear you scream!” “What’s in your heart, Michigan?!” and (twice) “Let’s get fuckin’ crazy!”  


My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: H-K

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: H-K

JOE HENRY

Reverie

(Anti-)

“I’m dead to the world,” Joe Henry sang in 1993, and in 2011 he sounds it.  Not once during the hour it takes these fourteen songs to drag past does he up the tempo.  And while the smoky, detritus-strewn, crap-bar atmosphere he and his band create suits his eloquent introspection (think Leonard Cohen for the early-Tom Waits claque), his voice doesn’t.  That it’s gritty as sandpaper isn’t the problem.  Lines like “Some take wine for water, / some make bread from stone, / some take love for granted like they’ll never be alone” (“Dark Tears”) are particularly convincing coming from someone who sounds hungover.  But his voice is thin as sandpaper too.  And when he comes on extra soulful, even his sharpest lyrics can rub you the wrong way.

THE JAYHAWKS

Mockingbird Time

(Rounder)

As birds of a feather, it was inevitable that Gary Louris and Mark Olson, the two wings with which the Jayhawks originally took flight but who’ve been estranged since 1995, would reunite.  But did Louris have to count his chickens prematurely by telling Rolling Stone that his and Olson’s “goal” was “to make the best Jayhawks album that’s ever been done”?  Carefully constructed though Mockingbird Time is, it isn’t the best Jayhawks album that’s ever been done.  Rather, its hooks and lyrics feel as tentative as you’d expect from songwriters learning to collaborate again after a long separation.  In other words, although Louris and Olson still skillfully blend the Eagles and the Brothers Everly and Flying Burrito, they have a way to go in terms of blending with each other again. 

TOBY KEITH

Clancy's Tavern

(Show Dog/Universal)

If this album is any indication (and with a lead cut called “Made in America” it had better be), Toby Keith’s Southern “blue dawg” Democrat politics are simply what would’ve passed for ordinary national sentiments back when his grandmother, the bar-tending “Clancy” of the title track, was making the “regular Joes of the world” happy by keeping their beer glasses full and their ashtrays emptied.  The church-going neighbors probably considered the tavern a den of iniquity, but Keith remembers it as a macrocosm of a democratic bonhomie unique to the country he loves.  And not only do the rest of his latest songs keep that spirit alive, but the best of them (“Tryin’ to Fall in Love,” “Beers Ago,” “Red Solo Cup”) might’ve even qualified for Clancy’s jukebox. 

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: L

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: L

MIRANDA LAMBERT

Four the Record

(Sony Nashville/RCA)

If only for the energy, humor, and intelligent sympathy that Lambert, her studio hands, and her co-writers put into it, this album deserves its acclaim.  But it’s not quite energetic, funny, or intelligently sympathetic enough to justify its fifty-seven-minute length.  In other words, it doesn’t provide the jolt that the twice-as-lean new album by Lambert’s side project, Pistol Annies, does, in part because the Annies are also twice as mean and somehow (therefore?) more country.  Still, Lambert solo is country enough to have benefitted from playing by country’s rules, one of which is that if you can’t bowl ’em over inside half an hour minutes, maybe you deserve to be passed over by posterity for the music that Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette were making at your age. 

HUGH LAURIE

Let Them Talk

(Warner Bros.)

Just what we need--an album of blues and jazz classics for people too busy watching House to discover the dozens, if not hundreds, of better versions available for the downloading.  (Not for nothing, one suspects, does the disc lead off with “St. James Infirmary.”)  As a vocalist, Laurie isn’t bad.  With his ability to carry a tune in a battered bucket, he certainly does better by this material than Bruce Willis did by his in the 1980s.  But Laurie still sings like someone who’s famous for acting, i.e., like someone who’d be doing well to land a steady gig in a French Quarter dive were he not better at playing doctor.  Would you leave change in his tip jar?  Yep, but probably not as much as this album costs.

NICK LOWE

Labour of Lust

(Yep Roc)

Whereas “instant classic” usually puts the “moron” in "oxymoron," this pub-rock tour de force has been proving itself worthy of the term for thirty-two years. And, as this reissue adds the previously U.K.-only “Endless Grey Ribbon” and the previously B-side-only “Basing Street,” it’s more classic now than ever. It’s also more instant. Lowe’s decision to keep Terry Williams’ drumming high in the mix provides sterner reproof to the Age of Digital Compression than it did to the Age of the Aphex Aural Exciter, and, now as then, the hooks and wit just keep on coming. Lovers of the former will enjoy discovering that the oft-anthologized “Cruel to Be Kind” gets stiff competition from the never-anthologized “Skin Deep.” As for lovers of wit, they get bawdy punch lines out the wazoo. 
My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: N-P

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: S

 

THE SHOES
Crack My Bones

(Southern Fried) 

Power-pop fans will be forgiven for taking umbrage at the nerve of Guillaume and Benalways, two French producer types who simply by adding a “The” to their moniker have co-opted the name of one of that power pop’s greatest bands.  What next?  The Big Star?  The Cheap Trick?  (The The The?)  Eventually, however, even power-pop fans--who after all love nothing more than a killer hook--will warm up to these techno tunes.  By enlisting vocalists far less annoying than Tom Bailey and Dave Gahan, for instance, Guillaume and Benalways make it easy to appreciate what is in many respects an effervescent reconfiguring of Thompson Twins and Depeche Mode.  And by adding abundant fizz of their own, they’ve come up with music worthy of being called “soda pop” if anyone’s is.  

THE SMITHS

Complete

(Rhino)

Rhino’s reissuing the first eight Smiths albums in a box is as good a reason as any to assess their place in pop-music history.  But first let’s assess the box’s place in box-set history.

By including Hatful of Hollow (BBC-recorded alternate versions and both sides of two singles circa 1984), The World Won’t Listen (the first of two Smiths 1987 compilations), Louder Than Bombs (the second), and Rank (a 1988 live album), Complete presents seven songs three times and twenty-nine songs twice.  And most of the overlap sounds the same even when it isn’t.   

So unless you really like songs about ballerina-skirt-wearing priests (“Vicar in a Tutu”), suns that shine out of behinds (“Hand in Glove”), or walking on the Wilde side (“Cemetry Gates”), their popping up repeatedly can make you want to accept Morrissey’s invitation on “Is It Really So Strange?” and kick him, punch him, butt him, and break his face.  One wants to shout at him, “There’s no I in ‘Smiths.’”  Only there is--and, unfortunately, there’s one in “Morrissey” too.  

Only five of the titles on Complete start with “I,” but four other titles contain it, and two contain “Me” and “My.”  Nine songs begin with it.  In “Bigmouth Strikes Again” Morrissey reproaches himself for hurting someone else then compares his feelings of guilt to the agonies of Joan of Arc at the stake. You get the idea.

Still, on most of the Smiths’ songs, the metallic jangle and drone of Johnny Marr’s guitar rode catchily propulsive rhythms even when it couldn’t override Morrissey.  And, yes, a pretty good compilation of Smiths songs for Smiths haters can be carved from their oeuvre.  

There are, for instance, the instrumentals “Oscillate Wildly,” “The Draize Train,” and “Money Changes Everything” (not Cyndi Lauper’s).  And medleying “Rusholm Ruffians” with Elvis Presley’s “His Latest Flame” (on Rank) took Morrissey out of himself, as did “Girlfriend in a Coma,” “Girl Afraid,” “Golden Lights,” and “Accept Yourself.”  Amid such company, even “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” and “I Want the One I Can’t Have” wouldn’t seem insufferable.  

But the highlights would be “How Soon Is Now?,” the jittery ferocity of which nipped comparisons between the Smiths and R.E.M. in the bud, and “What Difference Does It Make,” on which Marr did override Morrissey. 

The title of this public service?  Not That There’s Anything Wrong with That--or, better yet, Narrowsmith.   


My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: T

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: T

THEE OH SEES

Carrion Crawler/The Dream

(In The Red)

Thee Oh Sees don’t rock.  They careen.  And on this double-titled single disc, they careen harder than they do on their other 2011 releases (Castlemania, Singles Vol. 1 + 2).  By Track Two--the double-titled single song “Contraption/Soul Desert”--the San Francisco foursome is barreling full throttle down a boulevard of broken flashbacks in a psychobilly hot rod fueled by dirty water, and the other songs recreate the sensation.  From amid the din, John Dwyer and his sidekick Brigid Dawson sing in unison, but it’s hard to make out what because, as at their shows, the drums, guitar, bass, and keyboard are mixed as high as the vocals.  Some have categorized the band as “garage rock,” but in garages cars stand still.  “Yerba Buena Tunnel rock,” anyone? 

THIN LIZZY

Jailbreak (Deluxe Edition)

Johnny the Fox (Deluxe Edition)

(Universal)

In 1976, with Bruce Springsteen in litigation limbo and Jimi Hendrix in Rock-and-Roll Heaven, Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott came off like a reasonable-enough facsimile of the two to be worth settling for, especially if by “settling” one meant relishing a hard-rock apotheosis like “The Boys Are Back in Town” a dozen times a day on the radio. The result? Jailbreak, Lizzy’s sixth album, went gold, and the follow-up, Johnny the Fox–well, didn’t. Yep, it was over that fast, at least in the U.S. Maybe Lynott was just too bloody Irish (“Fools Gold” even cites the Great Potato Famine). Or maybe because, as these rarities-enhanced reissues inadvertently prove, “The Boys Are Back in Town” was as good as Lizzy got, and fans quickly spread the word around. 

2011 Illinois Entertainer reviews, W-Z

My 2011 Illinois Entertainer Reviews: W-Z

WAX

Melted

(Lightyear)

Here’s the story: In 1970 a Philly band whose members would go on to success in Baby Grand and the Hooters (Rob Hyman) or just Baby Grand (David Kagan) or producing Cyndi Lauper and Joan Osborne (Rick Chertoff) or managing oldies acts (Rick Levy) enters a studio and plays twelve songs totaling an hour while the tape rolls. Then the label goes belly up, the album goes unreleased, and the tapes go missing. Then, forty years later, the omnipresent John Kalodner finds them, and the album finally gets released right after the band’s bassist (Beau Jones) dies. So how’s the music? A freewheelingly funky mélange of boogie, prog rock, and other ingredients that would eventually characterize album-oriented ’70s FM playlists. Best line: “I have laughed myself silly reading Edgar Allan Poe.”

KATHARINE WHALEN & HER FASCINATORS

Madly Love

(Five Head Entertainment)

If ever you need an example of too many influences spoiling the broth, this album will do just fine.  Whalen and-or her publicists have cited this album’s literary sources (Victorian literature, Richard Brautigan, an antique Children’s World Book Encyclopedia), musical sources (early jazz and folk), and human sources (Whalen’s own life) as if by providing such footnotes they could persuade listeners to doubt what their own ears will tell them--namely, that all but the simplest of these ten songs (“Roses and Pine,” “When I Dream,” “With You”) is more convoluted and cluttered than any style of pop need be.  And whereas someone with a more straightforward vocal approach might be able to cut through the murk, Whalen’s eccentric mannerisms (Judy Garland doing Chrissie Hynde?) make even the easy stuff sound hard.

ZZ TOP

Live in Germany 1980

(Rockpalast/Eagle)

Eagle sure knows how to milk this gig.  Originally filmed at one of the “rock nights” sponsored and broadcast by the German TV show Rockpalast, it was released in 2009 as a twenty-two-track DVD and again in 2010 as the first half of the two-DVD Double Down Live.  And now we get it again--minus the visuals and seven songs (“I’m Bad, I’m Nationwide” and “Tube Snake Boogie” among them).  Of course, the fifteen surviving cuts (“Cheap Sunglasses,” “La Grange,” and “Tush” among them) smoke: With Gibbon’s, Hill’s, and Beard’s ascension to iconic status via MTV still three years off, they had to make sure their white-trash-compacted amalgam of hard rock and barbecued blues got over on its own merits.  But this particular show is beginning to feel refried.