Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2013: J-L

ALAN JACKSON

Precious Memories Volume II

(EMI)

Christianity has played a large role in this country superstar’s life--from his churchgoing Georgia youth to the reason he and his wife of nearly twenty-five years are still married--and his first volume of evangelical hymns has sold almost two million copies.  So it’s no surprise that he’d record a followup.  It is disappointing, however, that there’s not even a smidgen of originality in his interpretations.  On the other hand, to an increasingly unchurched music-listening populace (and an increasingly tradition-averse generation of evangelicals reared on “praise songs”), Jackson’s straightforwardly homespun, faithfully drawled performances might be just the thing to situate these folk songs (which is, after all, at least one thing they are) in the canon of what Rod Stewart fans know as the “Great American Songbook.”

NATALIA KILLS 

Trouble 

(Interscope)

The surface tension in this British hottie’s vulgarly explosive pop goes back at least as far as Jerry Lee Lewis.  In “Problem” she wants to get “lick[ed] down” and concludes “there’s no salvation for a bad girl.”  In “Stop Me” she wants to get “fuck[ed]” in Paris and wears pumps to be “closer to God.”  But the surface is where the tension remains because Kills herself only goes back as far as Hall & Oates (sampled in “Daddy’s Girl”), Sid and Nancy (name checked in “Devils Don’t Fly”), and Cyndi Lauper (vocally imitated throughout, to the particular detriment of the otherwise stunning classic-girl-group homage “Outta Time”).  As for Prince, Kills gives him a run for his money where both “Controversy” and making like a rabbit are concerned.

HUGH LAURIE 

Didn’t It Rain 

(Warner Bros.)

More O.K. covers of (mostly) blues standards, this time with Laurie acknowledging his vocal limitations by sharing the mic with Gabby Moreno (“Kiss of Fire,” “The Weed Smoker’s Dream”), Jean McClain (“The St. Louis Blues,” “Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair,” “I Hate a Man like You,” the gospel title cut), and Taj Mahal (“Vicksburg Blues”).  Would that he shared it more.  Producer Joe Henry and the crack sidemen do what they can to ambience things up, and at times it’s almost enough.  Meanwhile, lest anyone thought all the jokes based on Laurie’s starring role in House were spent mocking his first album, here’s another: If he eventually eclipses his acting career by continuing to make albums, there’ll come a time when people simply refer to him as Doctor Who?

LESS THAN JAKE

Greetings and Salutations

(Fat Wreck Chords)

Take Less Than Jake’s 2011 EP, mesh it with Less Than Jake’s 2012 EP, add the two non-EP cuts “View from the Middle” (a song extolling political moderation) and “Flag Holders Union” (a song conflating moderation, indecision, and the Cuban Missile Crisis), and--voilà--a new twelve-track Less Than Jake album!  Will the EP-buying LTJ diehards who’ve already sprung for most of these power-ska declarations of in-dependence be cool with having to buy them again?  Probably not.  LTJ’s fringe demographic, however, might consider its patience rewarded: Sax-and-trombone-buttressed catchiness abounds.  That lead singer Chris Demakes has nothing more to say than that he has nothing more to say than what he said in 2006‘s “The Rest of My Life” almost doesn’t matter.

Let Us In Americana: The Music of Paul McCartney ... for Linda

(Reviver)

If there’s anything for which music consumers have been clamoring less than a new solo Paul McCartney album, it’s a collection of long-famous compositions by the erstwhile Cute Beatle and Head Wing performed by long semi-famous roots-folkies.  Yet, now that such a collection has arrived, it turns out to have been (almost) worth clamoring for.  Jim Lauderdale and Sam Bush run away with “I’m Looking Through You” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face” respectively, with Buddy Miller’s “Yellow Submarine” not far behind.  Why Ketch Secor wants to “Give Ireland Back to the Irish” or Holly Williams to subject the 21st century to “My Love” is anyone’s guess.  But, on the whole, the steel guitars and redneck accents take the stuffing out of Sir Paul to salutary effect.

LISSIE 

Back To Forever 

(Fat Possum)

It’s no slight to this Illinois native to say she writes (melodically always, verbally sometimes) like Stevie Nicks and (minus the frayed vocal cords) sings like her too.  In fact, given Nicks’ knack for creating (you’ll forgive the expression) classic pop-rock, the comparison is a compliment.  The apparently anti-surface-mining “Mountaintop Removal” aside (there are other places to become one with nature after all), there’s not a dumb or musically maladroit cut on this album.  Riffs and hooks co-mingle just as they should.  And while there’s filler (“Cold Fish” has mediocre Alanis Morisette tattooed all over it), it just proves that Lissie’s a mere mortal rather than a goddess in progress.  And therein end the Stevie Nicks comparisons, for better and for worse (but mostly better).

ANDY FAIRWEATHER LOW & THE LOWRIDERS 

Zone-O-Tone 

(Proper)

Andy Fairweather Low has long paid his bills by playing guitar and singing on albums or tours by more famous performers, but he wouldn’t have gotten those gigs if he weren’t money in the bank.  He excels at conversationally re-contextualizing blues, soul, and gospel tropes and tunefully setting them to pop styles that, in addition to the aforementioned genres, include a few that would’ve seemed right at home in the days of Vaudeville.  Whether exhorting (“If you can’t have what you want, / hold on tight to what you got”), criticizing (“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have sold out to the rich”), supplicating (“Take me to the river and wash my sins away”), or devoting an entire acoustic waltz to “Love, Hope, Faith & Mercy,” he drinks from an ocean of wisdom.

NICK LOWE

Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family 

(Yep Roc)

Lowe has spent the last forty-plus years promulgating everything from pub-rock and power-pop to neo-rockabilly and autumnal acoustic introspection, all with a gimlet eye focused on both the log in his own eye and the splinter in his neighbor’s.  And on Quality Street: A Seasonal Selection for All the Family, he reaps what he has sown.  More than anything else, he and his jauntily rootsy combo sound relaxed, as at peace with both Santa and the Virgin Birth as C.S. Lewis was in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.  Seamlessly blended cover tunes, traditional numbers, two originals (one catchy and funny, one thought provoking)--it’s nearly impossible to tell where the secular ends and the sacred begins, maybe because for Lowe the two are one.

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2013: M-N

2006 Album Reviews: K-L

(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