Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2014: S

MICHAEL W. SMITH & FRIENDS

The Spirit of Christmas (Sparrow/Universal)

Despite his contemporary-Christian-music reputation, Michael W. Smith doesn’t slight Santa or other secular aspects of the holiday’s cultural components.  Indeed, he leads with them (“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Happy Holiday/Holiday Season.” “White Christmas”).  Even the special guests (Vince Gill, Lady Antebellum, Little Big Town, Martina McBride, Carrie Underwood, Amy Grant, the Nashville Children’s Choir, and the London Symphony Orchestra) signify broadmindedness.  But from the mid-disc medley of “Deck the Halls,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “O Come, All Ye Faithful” onward, it’s sacred all the way.  And unifying the halves, and tethering the whole to the past, is a prayerful recitation of the 17th-century Irish carol “The Darkest Midnight” (a.k.a. “On Christ’s Nativity”) by Bono. 

CHRIS SMITHER

Still on the Levee (Signature Sounds)

Chris Smither is an American treasure.  At his sonic core are his nimbly picked acoustic guitar, his stomping foot, and his baritone voice.  At his emotional core is a world-weary drollery that stares less into the abyss than at mystic shores just a leap of faith away.  With Still on the Levee, he marks his seventieth birthday by re-visiting twenty-four of his most enduring compositions with the occasional assistance of like-minded collaborators.  Most of the material, however, he approaches solo, as if too much help would deprive it of its powerfully lonesome conviction.  And by concluding each of the set’s two discs with a different new version of “Leave the Light On,” he makes hoping to get old before one dies seem like a worthy goal indeed.

THE SOIL AND THE SUN 

Meridian (Audiotree)

The Polyphonic Spree meets U2 meets Iron And Wine meets Justin Vernon meets Sufjan Stevens—or something like that.  Fairy airy at their best, airy fairy at their worst, the problem isn’t that these Christian Michiganders use their precisely layered vocals to distill biblical quotations into introspective journal jottings.  It’s that they do so with an oversensitivity that only a wimp’s mother or girlfriend could love.  Not until the middle of Track Five, “Samyaza,” do the drums that barely besmirched the group’s first two even more unnecessarily incorporeal albums make their presence felt.  It could be argued, of course, that, as a tonic to the religion-driven beheadings that hog the headlines these days, such blissed-out music serves a purpose.  But music for crusaders might be more useful still.

HARRY DEAN STANTON

Partly Fiction (Omnivore)

On this soundtrack to the 2013 documentary of the same name, Stanton doesn’t sing “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33,” the Kris Kristofferson song that inspired the title.  But he does sing--and sometimes add poignant harmonica and insightful commentary to--“Danny Boy,” “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” “Everybody’s Talkin’,” “She Thinks I Still Care,” “Blue Bayou,” “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” “Canción, Mixteca” (the theme from Paris, Texas, in which he starred 30 years ago), and five other songs close to his weather-beaten, 88-year-old heart.  Stanton’s sweet tenor voice, meanwhile, sounds at least three decades younger, and it’s as pliant as a well-used baseball glove.  Jamie James accompanies on acoustic guitar, Don Was on occasional bass.  Casual, beautiful, autumnal, and frail, in that order.

SWANS 

To Be Kind (Young God)

There are two kinds of people in this world: the 99% who say that life’s too short to spend two hours trying to decide whether this latest double-disc Swans opus is the best album-to-get-rid-of-party-guests ever or only as effective as the Shaggs’ debut, and the 1% who say that repetitive, nihilistic overkill is a spiritual purgative and-or a good joke.  (No Wave they used to call it.)  To determine where you fall, listen to Disc One’s penultimate track, “Bring the Sun/Toussaint L’ overture.”  Its thirty-four minutes will have you either exhilarated by the manifold ways in which the eighteenth-century liberation of Haiti led to the heart of darkness or thinking that maybe the Frozen soundtrack wasn’t so bad after all.

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2014: T-Y

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2012: S

SAY ANYTHING 

Anarchy, My Dear 

(Equal Vision)

Max Bemis has referred to himself an “ADD-infected, clumsy, and right-brain- centric dolt of a man,” and on Anarchy, My Dear he proves it.  Or, rather, careening within post-punk parameters of his own devising, he proves it again, having already given abundant evidence--both in and outside the nuthouse--that he contains self-contradictory multitudes.  This time he has “Randy Newman in [his] head” (“Night’s Song”), a welcome addition that sharpens his humor ( “Don’t want to hear about how the latest Rihanna single / is a post-modern masterpiece”), his misanthropy (an entire song wishing Stephen Hawking dead), and his pop sense (“So Good” and “Overbiter” could qualify for Now That’s What I Call Music).  All this beause of Randy Newman?  Heck, wait ’til Bemis discovers Angry Samoans.

HARRY SHEARER 

Can’t Take a Hint 

(Courgette)

The first requirement of satirical songs is not that they work as satire but that they work as songs.  If in addition they’re funny and-or insightful, all the better.  The ten acts referred to as “featured” on this album’s cover (most notably Fountains of Wayne, Dr. John, and Judith Owen) guarantee sufficient musicality.  Whether any of the cuts, however, would’ve provided, say, The Book of Mormon with serious Grammy or Tony Awards competition is dubious, mainly because of the obviousness and safety of Shearer’s targets.  Sexually predatory priests (“Deaf Boys”), Madonna (“Like a Charity”), Sarah Palin (“Bridge to Nowhere”), Joe the Plumber (“Joe the Plumber”)--will it come as a surprise to anyone that Shearer is against them all?  What is surprising: the lameness of his Ian Dury impersonation.

SKRILLEX 

Bangarang 

(Big Beat/Atlantic)

Bangarang is not only this EP’s title but also what this EP’s music sounds like.  In fact, “bangarang” would make a better name for the entire hyper-electronic genre of which Skrillex is currently the best-selling example than “dubstep.”  Listeners needing more explanation might imagine minimalism, hip-hop, Keith Emerson’s synthesizers, machine guns, and jackhammers force fed into a garbage disposal then trash compacted until even such lyrics as poke out--“Bass makes that bitch come” (“Kyoto”), “Come on, baby, light my fire” (the Doors-featuring “Breakn' a Sweat”)--function more as aural shards than sentient expression.  The pummeling can get dull, like a wind-up toy ramming repeatedly into a wall.  It can also get impressive, as if Skrillex just might break on through to the other side.

CHRIS SMITHER 

Hundred Dollar Valentine 

(Homunculus)

It must be nice to have Chris Smither’s chief aesthetic problem, which is that he’s so consistent and consistently good at what he does his albums have begun to sound nearly identical.  What he does, for those who don’t yet know, is set existential conundrums to brisk, acoustic folk-blues and sing them in a warm, husky baritone soaked in stoicism with his tapping foot for a heartbeat.  What’s new this time is that he has finally eschewed covers, thus quashing doubts about whether a verse like “They say the good die young, but it ain’t for certain. / I’ve been good all day, I ain’t hurtin’. / And anyway I’m too old to die young” is his own.  And if you like that one, there are plenty more where it came from.

ESPERANZA SPALDING

Radio Music Society 

(Heads Up International)

After her “Best New Artist” Grammy in the wake of Chamber Music Society, Spalding could’ve played things safe and merely reprised that album’s jazzy, non-verbal charms.  Instead, she has created an elastic jazz-pop tour de force, assembling a cast of dozens (four drummers alone, Jack DeJohnette included) and replacing the vocalise with lyrics.  Some of them, such as those in “Black Gold” advising African-Americans to boost their self-esteem by pondering ancient Egypt, are embarrassingly naive.  And “Vague Suspicions” and “Endangered Species” barely make sense.  But “How can we call our home, the land of the free / Until we've unbound the praying hands / Of each innocent woman and man” (“Land of the Free”)?, especially as Spalding sings it, ain’t bad for an Afrocentric “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

Illinois Entertainer 2013: U-W

Chris Smither: Live As I'll Ever Be (2000)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana ... )

Chris Smither
Live As I’ll Ever Be
(Hightone)

Smither doesn’t exactly squander the considerable good will he’s established between himself and his audience over the years with this in-concert summary of his Hightone years. As the most fluid and bluesy of acoustic guitar folk-pickers and as the least affected of white-blues singers, he’s too talented for that. Still, seven of these sixteen performances are available in perfectly fine studio versions on 1997’s Small Revelations and four others on 1995’s Up on the Lowdown, forcing diehard Smitherites to ask themselves just how much they value applause and Smither’s imitation of the peddler who used to hawk fruit and vegetables in the New Orleans neighborhood where he grew up (“No Love Today Intro”). Rating: Three-and-a-half Smithereens out of five