2007 Album Reviews: P

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

Mark Padmore: As Steals the Morn … (Harmonia Mundi)--Subtitled “Handel Arias and Scenes for Tenor” and co-credited to the Andrew Manze-conducted English Concert (a chamber orchestra), these selections from Handel’s operas and oratorios represent the logical next step for those who know only The Messiah. It will also expose admirers of “classical crossover” performers to the vocally glorious iceberg of which Andrea Bocelli, Josh Groban, and Il Divo are merely the tip. Padmore, a veteran of international stages and over fifty other recordings, thrillingly embodies roles ranging from the secular (Tamerlano, Rodelinda) and the pagan (Alceste, Semele) to the biblical (Samson, Esther, Jephtha), before going out on Handel’s Milton song cycle (“L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” “Ed Il Moderato”) and the title track (one of two duets with the soprano Lucy Crowe). In short, he opens doors into the past through which those who feel undernourished by the present can eagerly rush. Rating: Five consummate gentlemen out of five.

Pagoda: Pagoda (Ecstatic Peace)—Rock-film buffs who watched Michael Pitt play a doomed, Kurt Cobain-like grunge-rock superstar in Gus Van Sant’s Last Days won’t be taken off guard by Pitt’s real-life doomy grunge rock, especially if they remember Kim Gordon’s cameo. In short, this intermittently arresting caterwaul and doggerel is what you’d expect if Cobain had fronted Sonic Youth. And thought he was auditioning for the role of Jim Morrison. Rating: Three lives imitating art out of five.

Alan Parsons Project: I Robot (Arista/Legacy)—Circa 1977; not as good as the novel, better than the film.

Alan Parsons Project: Eye in the Sky (Arista/Legacy)—Circa 1982; Orwellian concept obscured by titling track seven “Psychobabble” instead of “Newspeak” and by “Sirius”’s becoming the theme song of the Michael Jordan Bulls.

Alan Parsons Project: The Essential Alan Parsons Project (Arista/Legacy)--At last, all of their prettiest, criticism-impervious “symphonic rock” melodies (“Eye in the Sky,” “Don’t Answer Me,” “Time,” “Day After Day [The Show Must Go On],” “Silence and I,” “Old and Wise”) and their Chicago Bulls theme (“Sirius”) in one place. Rating: Three-and-a-half jock (and schlock) jams out of five.

Parthenia/Alexandra Montano: Will Ayton: A Reliquary for William Blake (MSR)--Blake’s mystical lyricism has made the setting of his verses to music irresistible to everyone from Allen Ginsberg (ridiculous) and Robin Williamson (sublime) to William Bolcom (both) and Van Morrison (neither) to name just four. For sheer consistency and elegance of tone, however, no other musical Blake I know equals this recording’s title song cycle. Composed by the American composer/professor Will Ayton and performed with passionate but restrained delicacy by the Tudor-period specialists Parthenia (“a consort of viols”) and the late mezzo-soprano Alexandra Montano, it creates a musical context for fourteen Blake texts that, like Blake’s writing itself, is simple enough on its surface to draw listeners into the richer goings on just beneath. Particularly striking are the settings for “The Garden of Love” and “The Clod & the Pebble,” but at no point, not even during Montano’s recitations, does the cycle grind to a halt or give short shrift to the pervasively religious nature of Blake’s poetry. Meanwhile, the disc’s second half constitutes a primer on less well-known sources both literary (“Two Settings of Songs of Thomas Campion,” Phyllis McGinley’s “Ballad of the Rosemary”) and musical (“Four Pieces from Songs of the British Isles,” “Fantasia on a Theme of Henry Purcell,” Francis Pilkington’s “Rest Sweet Nymphs,” Ayton’s own “Incantations”) while sustaining the mood of the Blake half as well as its intent, which is to render the echoes of what Ayton calls his “hereditary legacy” resonant to the modern ear and thus make them part of our hereditary legacy as well. Rating: Four-and-a-half fearful symmetries out of five.

John Phillips: Jack of Diamonds (Varsese Sarabande)--There’s cool and there’s gauche, and often the nearly forty-year-old John Phillips of these mostly 1972-1973 sessions embodies the latter. With no Mamas or Papas to rein in his drug-fueled delusions of solo grandeur, he harnesses embarrassingly exhibitionistic lyrics (“Papa likes big tits,“ he sings over and over again in “Too Bad”) to jaded session pop that at its best sounds like Lou Reed (“Black Broadway,” “Last of the Unnatural Acts”) and at its worst meanders so woozily it’s unclear why anyone would bother releasing these mostly previously unreleased songs now. Then up pops the title cut, a Phillips composition that turns out to be the Grateful Dead’s “Me and My Uncle,” and suddenly everything gets better. By “Cup of Tea (Skyjacked),” “Yesterday I Left the Earth,” the instrumental “Flawless Space,” and the two unreleased Mamas and the Papas demos, Phillips is getting so much out of his delirium you almost want to turn on, tune in, and drop out yourself. Rating: Three-and-a-half California dreamers out of five.

Robert Plant/Alison Krauss: Raising Sand (Rounder)--It’s hard to say who’ll take the longest to warm up to this album: fans of Plant (ain’t nothin’ in the way of Led Zeppelin here), of Krauss (who sings not one but two implicitly lesbian songs!), or of producer T Bone Burnett (who foists upon the principals the most echo-drenched, woofer-rattling production of their careers). Initial surprise aside, however, anyone who’s ever gotten with Plant, Krauss, or Burnett before will admit that this project finds all three singing and producing talents with a relaxation resulting no doubt in part from their willingness to entrust themselves to each other in unusual contexts. Patient listeners will also eventually notice that the contexts aren’t all that unusual. “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” (written by Burnett’s ex-wife Sam Phillips) is only a somewhat more oblique type of gospel than Krauss usually performs when she feels the Spirit, and it’s easy to imagine the Everly Brothers’ “Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On)”--which has seldom if ever rocked harder--as having been a favorite of Plant’s, Krauss’s, and Burnett’s for years. As for “Please Read the Letter,” it’s certainly been a favorite of Plant’s, as he co-wrote it and recorded it with Jimmy Page nine years ago. And Krauss, what with her unerring ear for plaintive nuggets, would’ve probably recorded Dillard & Clark’s “Through the Morning, Through the Night” sooner or later. Not every experiment works. But Doc Watson’s “Your Long Journey” and the Mel Tillis-penned, Everly Brothers-recorded “Stick with Me Baby” sound as contemporarily charming in these light-as-air versions as anything in heavy rotation on Triple-A radio. And if Krauss’s take on Tom Waits’ “Trampled Rose” is too slow for commercial airplay, it’s still nice to hear someone with a voice as gorgeous as Krauss’s cover a song by someone with a voice as ugly as Waits’. Rating: Four-and-a-half omega bands out of five.

A Prairie Home Companion Duets (Highbridge)—Clever concept, this: take twenty-one years of acoustic duets as performed on radio’s pre-eminent roots-music showcase, skim the cream, and bookend the whole thing with the Everly Brothers singing songs their daddy taught them. It would’ve been less self-serving, however, if Garrison Keillor weren’t singing on five of the them and fresher if one weren’t yet another version of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Has Keillor been missing the DNC global-warming memos or something? Rating: Three-and-a-half powder-milk biscuits out of five.

Prince: Planet Earth (Sony/NPG)--Prince is still the most talented and visionary rock-pop-soul-funk musician on the planet after which this album is named, but nowadays even his best new music sounds a lot like his second-best old music. In other words, whereas most performers nearing the thirtieth anniversary of their debut would kill to sound like their youthful selves, Prince sounds trapped by a downright Dorian Gray-like incapacity to age. He sings the same, he waxes hippie-apocalyptic the same, he likes potentially reproductive activity the same, he rock-pop-soul-funks the same--he even looks the same--at forty-nine as he did at thirty and maybe twenty-five. And if such eternal youth has spared him the same mid-life musical crisis that afflicted such all-too-obviously aging musical visionaries as Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Neil Young at a similar stage, it has also prevented him from conveying anything like discovery, depth, or wisdom. So while I first took him at his word when he couched his massive London giveaway of this catchily disposable CD in anti-corporation rhetoric, I now think he just knows that his latest batch of hooks is no longer news enough to get him into the headlines. Rating: Three master baiters out of five.

John Prine & Mac Wiseman: Standard Songs for Average People (Oh Boy)--The standards are of the quaint, Western-swing and country type, with “In the Garden” and “Old Rugged Cross” thrown in for people who, being average, still attend church. And if in the long run this lovingly crafted album serves no greater purpose than to introduce these songs to new generations, well, there are worse such artifacts. Besides, it can’t help also introducing them to Prine and Wiseman, the former of whom possesses one of the most consistently high-quality catalogs in modern folk and the latter of whom holds his own here if only by singing at eighty-one a lot like Willie Nelson at seventy-four. Rating: Three-and-a-half memory lanes out of five.

2007 Album Reviews: K-L

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

Casey Kasem Presents The Long Distance Dedications (Top Sail Productions/WEA)—“Dear Casey, my name is Asra, and since last November I have been the chairperson for a grassroots committee to see that Barack Obama receives the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in 2008. At first my motives were selfless. I believed that the time had come for our country to live up to its noblest ideals and elect an anti-war, Muslim-reared, half-Kenyan-American who believes that the threat posed by global warming is greater than the threat posed by illegal immigration or by so-called Islamofascist terrorism (and who, unlike our current president, can speak in complete sentences). No sooner had I made a New Year’s resolution to build an eight-foot wall of separation between my heart and my head, however, than I found myself succumbing to Senator Obama’s charm: the freshness of his face, the seductiveness of his progressivism. The fact that he is already married only made him more John F. Kennedy-like (not to mention Bill Clinton-like) in my eyes. So imagine my heartbreak when I recently discovered that my dream man is a murderer: that’s right, he smokes—and not something harmless like marijuana either, but cigarettes, the second-hand fumes of which are not only making Al Gore sweat but also killing more potential Democratic voters than Hurricane Katrina and abortion combined. Now, don’t get me wrong. There’s no one I’d rather comfort through the ravages of chemotherapy than (*sigh*) Barack Obama. But somehow I don’t think I could do so without feeling a lot like Eva Braun. So, while I wish I could ask you to play him (in case he’s listening) “Against All Odds,” “Right Here Waiting,” or “You Are So Beautiful,” would you please play him “Springtime for Hitler” from The Producers instead?” Rating: Two formerly nicotine-stained fingers out of five.

The Kingston Trio: Nick, Bob & John: The Final Concert (Collector’s Choice)--The date: June 17, 1967; the club: the legendary Hungry i; the set list: one only a Peter, Paul & Mary fan could love--except he won’t. If the suffocating moral earnestness peddled by PP&M and their ilk sounds staler all the time, the fun that Nick Reynolds, Bob Shane, and John Stewart were having as they bade the world goodbye sounds as fresh as prime Smothers Brothers. Of course, knowing that it’s one’s last hurrah and having an audience packed with longtime friends and associates can go a long way toward loosening one (or in this case three) up. Whatever the reason, these versions of “Greenback Dollar,” “Tom Dooley,” and “Wimoweh” come off like rousing pub sing-alongs, with the Dylan, Donovan, Woody Guthrie, Gordon Lightfoot, and Eric Andersen covers not far behind (and the Johnny Cash-like “Reverend Mr. Black” way ahead). Even “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” belongs. Best of all is the ’tween-song patter, which takes up twenty-three minutes (out of seventy-two) yet, because it’s hilarious, actually feels too short. My favorite joke: “We took Scott McKenzie’s advice and came to San Francisco with flowers in our hair. We were attacked by locusts down near San Jose.” The liner notes explain the chicken-suit references. Rating: Four-and-a-half mighty winds out of five.

Diana Krall: From This Moment On (Verve)--No duller than Rod Stewart or Carly Simon, and better these chestnuts (Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Johnny Mercer, Sammy Cahn, Rogers & Hart, the Gershwins, et. al) than Krall’s own compositions. Rating: Three-and-a-half more American songbooks out of five.

Alison Krauss: A Hundred Miles or More: A Collection (Rounder)--Like Rosanne Cash, her only serious competition, Alison Krauss has never made a weak album. Unlike Cash or anyone else, Krauss has resisted the temptation to fulfill the compilation clause of her recording contract by merely tacking a handful of unreleased songs onto a body of work that her fans already own. Of the soundtracks, tributes, other people’s albums, and one TV show represented on this collection, only her contribution to O Brother, Where Art Thou? is likely to be widely redundant, and five of the best songs are previously unreleased. Krauss is generous in other ways too, showcasing little-known but deserving talent (two of the sharpest new ones are by Julie Lee) and long-forgotten has-beens (two better-than-you’d-think duets with John Waite). One cavil: She could’ve replaced the hokey “Sawing on the Strings,” the overt bluegrassiness of which stands awkwardly out given the album’s otherwise meditatively modern gestalt, with her excellent performance of Ricky Nelson’s “Anyone Else but You” as recorded with the Flying Burrito Brothers in 1999. Rating: Four daughters of the golden west out of five.

John Legend: Once Again (G.O.O.D. Music/Sony Urban/Columbia)—He hasn’t lived up to his chosen surname yet, but the music, call it soul with a bluesman’s attention to detail in the lyrics, benefits as much from the fact that nobody else is doing anything quite like it these days as it does from the fact that nobody else is doing it quite as buoyantly. Or as dramatically: taken together, “P.D.A.” and “Again“ illustrate both the seductiveness of sexual sin and its bitter aftermath, skillfully leaving out what’s better left to the imagination anyway. And, if his feel for things cosmic is naïve by contrast (“O God of love, peace, and mercy, / why so much suffering?” he sings, as if unacquainted with Job and-or Milton), something in his tone suggests he’s not beyond hoping there’s really an answer. Rating: Three-and-a-half half-full glasses out of five.

Benjamin Loeb: Scott Joplin: Piano Rags 2 (Naxos)--Ragtime experts don’t approve of Loeb’s every interpretative detail, but they do approve of many of them, and there’s no questioning Loeb’s confident establishment of an overall tone, which doesn’t so much preserve the sepia associated with these century-old pieces as burnish it until it gives off the melancholy glow just beneath their surface. It helps too that these compositions represent some of Joplin’s lesser-known work. Not only is there no “Maple Leaf Rag“ or “The Entertainer” to turn one’s mind off, but there‘s “Eugenia” followed by “The Creole Collision March” followed by “Reflection Rag” to turn one’s mind on. Rating: Four syncopated musings out of five.

Helen Jane Long: Porcelain (Warner Classics & Jazz)--Ignore the record-company name. Neither classical nor jazz, these melancholy New Age piano ditties (with occasional cello, violin, and viola) beat George Winston (not that hard to do) but not Fresh Aire Interludes by Jackson Berkey. So ignore the music too. Rating: Two ceramics out of five.

Nick Lowe: At My Age (Yep Roc)--The fourth installment in Lowe’s fifteen-years-and-counting flight from the power-popping pub-rock of his youth isn’t all that different from installments one, two, or three. The increased presence of trumpet, flugelhorn, sax, clarinet, trombone, and organ gives the late-night jazz-club jukebox melodies a more retro feel than usual, but the intricately wrought romantic wisdom of Lowe’s lyrics, both those he wrote and those he found, is strictly modern in its psychological maturity. The tension resulting from that combination finds a perfect tonic in Lowe’s magnificent singing. He once called himself the “Jesus of Cool”; now he’s more like a “Saloon Sinatra”--cool but aware that in doing it his way he risks breaking his woman’s heart. Rating: Four parties of one out of five.