2007 Album Reviews: S (Part One)

(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted…)

The Sadies: In Concert Vol. 1 (Yep Roc)—If what you enjoy about the Sadies in the studio is their transformation of a mythical roots past into timeless reveries, this live, two-disc set will shake, rattle, and roll your preconceptions. Taped live just eleven months ago, it rouses the rabble so thoroughly that you’d swear at times the band is a different Sadies. In a sense it is, as twenty-five special guests (Jon Langford, Neko Case, and Garth Hudson among them) garnish the proceedings. They’re relegated mostly to Disc Two, though, so those who prefer their Sadies unadulterated should stay with Disc One, which sounds as mythically rootsy as a fan could want until “16 Mile Creek” seven songs in, after which they start mixing in a historical rootsiness replete with hillbilly imitations and “Higher Power.” Overall effect: a mishmash that works often enough not to seem too long, though it is. Rating: Three-and-a-half spaghetti westerns out of five.

The Sadies: New Seasons (Yep Roc)--Having spent 2006 getting their live and soundtrack albums out of their system, the Sadies buckle down and make the best long-player of their none-too-shabby career. In one melancholy folk-rock original after another, Dallas and Travis Good lead their band through a reinvigoration of not only their sonic trademarks (the setting of minor-key melodies to spaghetti-western guitars and surf-rock drums, the paying of tribute to the McGuinn-Crosby-Clark Byrds vocal harmonies of yore) but also the concept of the album as a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, while individual highpoints do stand out, the most immediately arresting of them--the spooky love-gone-weird song “Anna Leigh,” for instance, leading into the spooky breakup-gone-weirder song “The Trial”--mutually reinforce each other’s sense of mystery without exhausting it or making the hauntingly evocative instrumentals “Wolf Tones” and “The Last Inquisition (Pt. V)” seem redundant. Rating: Six-and-a-half miles high out of eight.

Doug Sahm: Live from Austin TX (New West)--Sahm was tighter in the studio than onstage (and in the ’60s, ’80s, and ’90s than in the ‘70s), but this 1975 Tex-Mex/blues/swamp-pop Austin City Limits show is good, loose fun.

The Sandinista Project (00:02:59)--What made the Clash’s Sandinista! special was that even at three vinyl LPs (now two full-length CDs) it never felt too long; what makes this multiple-artist re-recording almost as special is that it only sometimes does (most notably on “Lightning Strikes [Not Once but Twice],” performed by a Clash tribute band). What keeps the Clash’s Sandinista! special is that, even twenty-six years after its release, it can still stop party conversations and have partygoers with no use for first-generation punk in general or the Clash in particular asking the host what’s playing; what makes this re-recording almost as special is that it functions like good party background music and good solitude foreground music simultaneously, like a well-programmed alternative-music radio station playlist (which--thanks to the stylistic diversity of the template--it more or less is). What makes the Clash’s Sandinista! special is that, even now, when the Communist revolution to which its title refers stands revealed as the naïve exercise in self-enslavement that mature people always knew it was, its ideological subtlety and shape-shifting unity keep it rockin’ in the free world; what makes this re-recording almost as special is that its thirty-five-performer roster (the Mekons’ Jon Langford and Sally Timms appear twice) suggests E Pluribus Unum at least as much as “Workers of the World, Unite!” Rating: Four career opportunities out of five.

Santana: Ultimate Santana (Arista/Columbia/Legacy)--The last Santana compilation consisted of two discs and had the word “essential” in its title. And, assuming there is such a thing as essential Santana (some days I’m not so sure), the adjective fit. This compilation consists of one disc and has the word “ultimate” in its title. Now, “Ultimate” can mean “best of its kind” or “last in a series,” so which is it? Well, if you think latter-day Santana duets like “Smooth,” “Put Your Lights On,” and “The Game of Love” (included here in both Tina Turner and Michelle Branch versions) represent his finest moments, you’ll say “best.” But, if this collection is his best, why did Arista re-include only six of the “essential” songs? Because they go with the overridingly contemporary flow? (Nah, ’cause they don’t.) So kids, who tend to prefer the duets, and their parents, who tend to prefer the essentials, can pack only one Santana disc on their next vacation? (Maybe. Family values are “in” during election years.) Because I’m not the only one who’s unsure on some days that more than six of Santana’s essential songs are that great? (I’d have replaced the ’70s non-hit “Samba Pa Ti” with 1985’s semi-hit “Say It Again” myself.) Of course, if “ultimate” means “last,” everything makes sense. That is, unless the wily Woodstock survivor has a new album’s worth of songs “featuring” Kanye West, Dave Grohl, and Taylor Swift in the pipeline. Rating: Three soul sacrifices out of five.

Boz Scaggs: Silk Degrees (Columbia/Legacy)—This blue-eyed soul classic is now thirty-one years old, the same age Scaggs was when he recorded it, and, yes, it sounds a little dated, but the moment it captures deserves to be preserved. From its swinging strings and singing backup chicks to its fast-dance/slow-dance pacing, you can tell it was crafted at the exact moment that Thom Bell passed the baton to Giorgio Moroder. Of its three deviations from the formula (not including this edition’s three bonus live versions), only “Lido Shuffle” hit the bull’s-eye, with all 5:11 of the barrelhouse-blues “Jump Street” still grinding what used to be side one to a halt. But pop-music formulas become formulas because, if ever so briefly, they illuminate afresh much that we thought was stale, and “What Can I Say,” “Georgia,” “Lowdown,” and “It’s Over” still do. Rating: Four silk Ph.D.’s out of five.

Billy Joe Shaver: Everybody’s Brother (Compadre)--Sony’s finally having granted permission, Shaver gets to include his early-’80s Johnny Cash duet “You Can’t Beat Jesus Christ” on one of his own albums . And it’s not alone -- not as a duet (other guests: John Anderson, Tanya Tucker, Kris Kristofferson), not as a Johnny Cash reminder (producer: son John R.; sole cover: Cash’s “No Earthly Good”), and not as gospel (other titles: “Jesus Is the Only One That Loves Us,” “Get Thee Behind Me Satan”). The love and friendship songs are all right too when they’re not outright heartbreaking, benefiting as they do from the prevailing acoustic honky-tonk ambience, Shaver’s weather-beaten voice, and one’s hearing them in the context of the “shooting incident” for which Shaver is currently under investigation. But the gospel songs steal the show, especially the one that goes “If you don’t love Jesus, go to hell.” Rating: Four Sunday morning‘s coming down out of five.

Billy Joe Shaver: Storyteller--Live at the Bluebird 1992 (Sugar Hill)--Son Eddy was still alive and on guitar, multiple ex-wife Brenda was still alive and in the audience, and the audience was quiet, all of which combined to bring out both the storyteller and the performer in the then-fifty-two-year-old star.

Shaw-Blades: Influence (VH1 Classic)--Talk about sophomore slumps. Twelve years after their first album (which consisted of original material ranging from not bad to pretty good), the Styx/Damn Yankee Tommy Shaw and the Night Ranger/Damn Yankee Jack Blades reunite for an all-covers disc. The theme is in the title: these songs “influenced” them, and--surprise!--they turn out to have had the same taste as the rest of us, from the good (the Zombies’ “Time of the Season,” the Hollies’ “On a Carousel,” Steely Dan’s “Dirty Work,” the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’,” Yes’s “Your Move”) to the crappy (Seals and Crofts’ “Summer Breeze,” ELP’s “Lucky Man,” Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” and “I Am a Rock”), and most of the time their versions sound either just like the originals or as ours probably would were we to record any. For what it’s worth, they also cover Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” just so we know they’re anti-war. Betcha they don’t play it around Ted Nugent. Rating: Two grand illusions out of five.

Simply Red: Stay (simplyred.com)--Simply Red is best known in the United States for its now-twenty-one-year-old original “Holding Back the Years” and its now-eighteen-year-old cover of the then-seventeen-year-old “If You Don’t Know Me by Now.” So if you don’t know the now-forty-six-year-old Mick Hucknall by now, this collection of his latest singer-songwriterly blue-eyed soul might seem like too much adieu about too little. Only it isn’t. Having continued recording and touring apace in his native England during the eleven years since Simply Red’s Greatest Hits, he’s kept his engine not only running but also well oiled. His reward? The best-selling “contemporary jazz” album according to Billboard. Only it isn’t--jazz, that is. (Apparently the appearance of Simplified on Verve Forecast in 2005 confused the bizzers.) And, despite such titles as “They Don’t Know,” “Lady,” and the title track, there’s not a cover in the bunch. There’s material worth covering though. With a little sympathetic retooling, “So Not over You” (a bittersweet ballad) and “Oh! What a Girl!” and “Good Times Have Done Me Wrong” (non-bittersweet non-ballads) could return Britney Spears and the Rolling Stones to the charts, respectively. Not that Hucknall’s versions need redoing; they have a life of their own. But they also have an openness that suggests the possibility and the desirability of further development. “I’ve been the master of low expectations,” he sings in “The Death of the Cool.” These songs demonstrate why these days he’s the master of something more. Rating: Four more brand-new flames out of five.

Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby: Ricky Skaggs & Bruce Hornsby (Legacy)--The trouble with recordings by veteran acoustic virtuosos like Skaggs and Hornsby is that they tend to cater to diehard fans while implicitly ignoring the public at large—to focus inward, in other words, instead of out. It’s a problem largely avoided on this album because Skaggs and Hornsby come from the opposite ends of just about every spectrum. Skaggs is a gospel-loving string picker with roots in bluegrass and country, Hornsby a secular-progressive ivory tickler with roots in pop, jazz, and the Grateful Dead. So if they were to accomplish anything together, neither could retreat into his musical comfort zone. The standout serious track is Hornsby’s “Mandolin Rain” recast as a minor-key Appalachian ballad (sort of). The standout joke is Rick James’ “Super Freak” transformed from a 'ho-down into a hoedown. In between they find fertile common ground in their mutual respect of the public domain. Rating: Three-and-a-half colliding worlds out of five.

Sly and the Family Stone: Stand! (Epic/Legacy)--The hits that first appeared herein (“Everyday People,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “You Can Make It If You Try,” the title cut) suggest that there would there have been no Prince, Michael Jackson, or George Clinton as we know them without Sylvester Stewart, but it’s the Stewart-composed, fourteen-minute instrumental “Sex Machine” that suggests even James Brown owed him a shout-out. And not only does a previously unreleased bonus track matter for once (check out “Soul Clappin’ II”), but the non-hits “Somebody’s Watching You” and “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey” retain their freshness as well. Rating: Four-and-a-half riots goin’ on out of five.

2007 Album Reviews: C

(As published in the Times of Acadiana unless otherwise noted…)

Eric Carmen: Boats Against the Current/Change of Heart (American Beat)--Two albums (from 1977 and 1978 respectively), one top-twenty hit (“Change of Heart”), several other songs that should’ve been (especially “Love Is All That Matters”), some gorgeous Bruce Johnston-arranged Beach Boys-like background harmonies, a way better “Hey Deanie” than Shaun Cassidy’s, and (I cannot tell a lie) some crap. Rating: Three Cleveland pop rocks out of five.

Mary Chapin Carpenter: The Calling (Zoe)—Carpenter is one of those dependable, talented singer-songwriters for whom the CD has been a curse: had she been limited by the restrictions of vinyl to ten songs instead of the thirteen that extend this album to almost an hour, her limitations would only be detectable as opposed to obvious. Or maybe all she needs is a sense of humor. No matter how empathetically observed, carefully sung, or lovingly crafted this album’s many worthy songs about middle-aged uncertainty, the seriousness begins to weigh heavily about half-way through, burdening the project beyond any relief that alternating the slow, quiet ones with the faster, louder ones can provide. The most regrettable consequence is that an excellent song like “It Must Have Happened” doesn’t stand out the way it should. Also, her “issues” songs (“Houston,” a.k.a. “Hurricane Katrina”; “On with the Song,” a.k.a. “Conservatives Suck”) feel included more for their change-of-pace potential than for their irrepressibility. And it’s too bad “Twilight” and “Bright Morning Star” weren’t covers (of Robbie Robertson and the old gospel tune respectively--she worked wonders with Lucinda Williams’ “Passionate Kisses” after all). Conclusion: what Jackson Browne would be doing were he a woman. Rating: Three habitats for humanity out of five.

The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show 1969-1971 (Columbia Music Video/Legacv)--Unless you’re under forty, you never saw Cash’s show, and unless you’re under fifty, you didn’t grasp its entertainment value or its caste-system-defying nerve. Those understandably glutted on posthumous Cash can take or leave his dozen-or-so solo performances. But where oh where else will you find Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong, Neil Young, Ray Charles, the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Stevie Wonder, Derek and the Dominoes, Pete Seeger, Neil Diamond, James Taylor, and a Who’s Who of future Country Music Hall of Fame inductees all in one place? Or learn that a mini-dress-wearing Linda Ronstadt was going to go on without panties until June Carter Cash had someone run out and buy her some? Rating: Four-and-a-half silver threads and golden needles out of five.

Chanticleer: And on Earth, Peace: A Chanticleer Mass (Warner Classics)--There are two problems with this ambitious and often enjoyable attempt to organize sacred compositions by an eclectic assortment of mostly contemporary composers around the structure of the Mass. The big problem is Kamran Ince’s “(Gloria) Everywhere,” a thirteen-minute piece the main idea of which is that Catholics, Jews, and Muslims are on equal spiritual footing. While such an idea might warm the hearts of those for whom “Why can’t we all just get along?” is a rhetorical question, it contradicts Catholic teaching and therefore has no place in a Mass. (For that matter, it contradicts Jewish and Muslim teaching as well.) On the other hand, given the Church’s recent attempts to establish a good-faith relationship with Jews, Shulamit Ran’s twelve-minute “Credo/Ani Ma’Amin,” which begins as a setting of Maimonides and segues into a Holocaust memorial, fits. That leaves fifty minutes of Catholic texts sung a cappella--and the small problem: Douglas Cuomo’s “Kyrie,” the opening (and recurring) notes of which sound like the beginning of the Star Trek theme. Rating: Three-and-a-half angels dancing on pin heads out of five.

Gene Clark with Carla Olson: In Concert (Collectors’ Choice)--The first disc of this belated testament to the late Byrd is an acoustic Carla Olson-free 1988 Mountain Stage performance padded with a few low-fi Carla Olson living-room recordings. The second disc is a reissue of the acoustic 1990 Clark-Olson show at McCabe’s Guitar Shop originally released fifteen years ago as Silhouetted in Light. These days only diehard Dylan fans remember Olson (for covering “Clean Cut Kid” as a Textone and miming Mark Knopfler’s playing in the “Sweetheart like You” video), and her deep alto harmonies do nothing special for Clark’s singing. Not that Clark needed much: even with one drug-and-booze-damaged foot in the grave, he could still out-sing Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, or Chris Hillman. Too bad his set list, which edges toward the upbeat only on the John Fogerty cover and “Feel a Whole Lot Better,” is so relentlessly slow and sad that it evokes Sandy Denny--whom Clark could also out-sing and who, had she not boozed both of her feet into the grave a dozen years earlier, could’ve out-sung Olson. Rating: Four-and-a-half miles high out of eight.

Gilby Clarke: Gilby Clarke (Spitfire)—Clarke will forever be remembered as the guy who replaced Slash in Guns N’ Roses, but this fourteen-track overview of his solo and Col. Parker recordings suggests that he deserves better. In keeping with Murphy’s Compilation Law, it could’ve been better, if only by including his cover of Bowie’s “Hang onto Yourself.” And it’s too bad that neither the Stones nor the New York Dolls hired him after The Spaghetti Incident? The glittery raunch of his playing, singing, and subject matter—as well as his relative youthfulness, his hooks’ serrated edges, and his willingness to play second fiddle—would’ve fit either act like a fingerless black-leather glove. Rating: Three-and-a-half monkey glands out of five.

The Clash: The Singles (Epic/Legacy)--For some, the lifting of these songs from the albums and politics that provided their original context deprives them of power and meaning. Eventually, though, every band must pass the greatest-hits test, and this re-sequenced reissue of the 1991 compilation of the same name--now enhanced with “Train in Vain” and “Groovy Times”--finds the Clash (still) doing so with flying colors. Rating: Four Hitsville U.K.s out of five.

Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen (Columbia/Legacy)--Already a relatively successful poet and novelist by the time he recorded this album in 1967 at the age of thirty-three, Cohen could’ve cemented the Christ-like status that he enjoys in the eyes of many by dying promptly upon its release. Instead, he embarked, armed with nothing more than his eerily deadpan voice and the soon-to-be-classics “Suzanne,” “Sisters of Mercy,” and “So Long, Marianne,” upon forty years’ worth of wandering in the desert, chronicling his romantic and spiritual revelations in a body of work that would eventually include eleven original albums, three live ones, and a proliferating number of best-ofs. That his revelations often turned out to be mirages is now apparent with hindsight, as is the sentimental tendency that once moved the critic John Simon to dismiss him as the “thinking man’s Rod McKuen.” Only Cohen could undo a clever line about “tarnish[ing] the golden rule” by rhyming it with “his spirit continues to drool,” and the inclusion of the two previously unreleased songs doesn’t help. Still, because I caught myself resenting having to slide the disc out of a sleeve and thereby risk scratching it, I guess I hope to play it again. And again. Three-and-a-half guilty pleasures out of five.

The Comfies: Close to Me (Livewire)—The milieu is power-pop, and, like most of their ilk, these Georgia boys don’t always achieve the balance of power and pop required to turn catchy songcraft into magic. Catchy songcraft, however, is nothing to sneeze at, and on a twenty-minute EP almost-magical songs like “Medicine” and the title cut loom large enough to make it easy to overlook the sole dud-on-arrival (“That’s What She Gets”). Meanwhile, “Your Sunshine,” “Understanding 23,” “In My Room” (not the Beach Boys’ one), and “Dear Miss Anderson” sound more magical with each listen. Rating: Three-and-a-half comfort zones out of five.

The Complete Motown Singles Vol. 8: 1968 (Hip-O Select)--If the five-disc Hitsville U.S.A. box demonstrated both the cream of the Motown crop and that cream’s depth, this six-disc box demonstrates the depth of the crop. Not that there’s no cream. 1968 was a very good year for Marvin Gaye and a pretty good one for Stevie Wonder and the Supremes. And although Smokey Robinson, the Four Tops, and the Temptations had begun to tail off, hearing their classic sound emerging from little-known songs is almost like discovering a parallel universe, an effect enhanced by discovering over six hours of “The Sound of Young America” from such all-but-forgotten performers as Shorty Long, Rita Wright, Paul Peterson, the Detroit Wheels without Mitch Ryder, the Fantastic Four, and the white Canadian R. Dean Taylor. Rating: Four-and-a-half Detroit pop cities out of five.

The Corigliano Quartet: Music for String Quartet (Naxos)--Although only time will determine John Corigliano’s true stature as a composer, some conclusions can already be drawn, if only in pencil, one of which is that he’s occasionally susceptible to composing under the influence of the trendy. His Symphony No. 1 was a response to the AIDS epidemic, his Mr. Tambourine Man a response to Bob Dylan. The three compositions featured on this disc derive to one extent or another from more traditional sources of inspiration--a Corigliano family heirloom (“Snapshot: Circa 1909”), a poem (Richard Wilbur’s “A Black November Turkey”), Bartok (String Quartet)--and, with the exception of the gimmicky use of violins to simulate police sirens in String Quartet, find Corigliano at his most serious, challenging, and evocative. The fourth piece, String Quartet No. 2, by the former Corigliano student Jefferson Friedman, is a worthy complement. Rating: Three strings out of four.

Elvis Costello: My Aim Is True (Deluxe Edition) (Hip-O/UMe)--One man’s largess is another man’s glut. So, although early Costello is the Costello on which to pig out if pig out on Costello one must, the two-disc, demos-and-all recontextualization--which results in nearly every song’s appearing twice if not thrice--sometimes makes what has seemed definitive for thirty years now seem somewhat haphazard. And the complete August 1977 concert on Disc Two makes the somewhat haphazard seem definitive. Rating: Four fingers lying in the wedding cake out of five.

Elvis Costello: Rock and Roll Music (Hip-O/Universal)--Fans already well-versed with the highlights of Costello’s first ten years should skip The Best of Elvis Costello: The First 10 Years, the twenty-two-track highlights compilation with which this twenty-two-track compilation is being simultaneously released and which is almost identical to Rykodisc’s The Very Best of Elvis Costello and the Attractions from 1993. Instead they should go straight to this “rock-themed collection of hits, key album tracks, B-sides and previously unreleased rarities” from those same first ten years. Back then Costello was a kind of pub-punk Ani DiFranco, recording way too many songs with way too many words but doing so with enough verve to make the overabundance feel more like enthusiasm than arrogance. The Attractions, of course, were co-billed for a reason: namely, that their stripped-down attack kept their boss’s delusions of genius from becoming too grand (and, now we know, from aging gracelessly). Meanwhile, as well-versed EC fans also already know, there’s a pretty good second volume of overlooked first-ten-year goodies waiting to happen too. Rating: Four kings of Britannia out of five.

Randy Crawford & Joe Sample: Feeling Good (PRA)--More smoke than fire, this is nevertheless sophisticated lounge-jazz by two performers who know how to sing it (Crawford) and play it (Sample). Not only is the album as a whole ideal for romantic dinners in upscale settings, but the covers (Nilsson’s “Everybody’s Talkin’,” Leo Sayer’s “When I Need You”) feel included less for their crossover appeal than because Crawford and Sample genuinely like them. Rating: Three-and-a-half midnight cowpeople out of five.