Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2014: C

CAGE THE GODS

Badlands (The End)

What kind of chicks are these leather-clad revivers of good-ol’ hard rock trying to seduce?  The kind who like being called “little woman,” being dragged “back to hell,” and being reminded that since those who gave them what they want find them “so fucking beautiful”, they should simply “handle it.”  And that’s just Track One (of 13).  In short, boilerplate bad-boy misogyny lives or at least refuses to go gentle into that good night.  Call it the daze of Guns ’N Roses.  No, the title cut isn’t a Springsteen cover.  (Would that it were.)  No, “Falling” isn’t a LeBlanc & Carr cover.  (Ditto.)  Only “Bruce Willis” (“I wake every morning with a feeling I’m getting too old for this shit”) justifies the effort.  (Hey, Looper wasn’t that bad.)

ERIC CARMEN 

The Essential Eric Carmen (Sony/Legacy)

What makes this thirty-track, “essential” collection better than the eighteen-track, 1997 “definitive” one with which it shares sixteen cuts?  Not the obscurities--neither the pre-Raspberries “Get the Message” nor 2013’s “Brand New Year” goes all the way, and the studio version of “That’s Rock N’ Roll” on The Definitive is more essential than this album’s live 1976 run through.  Meanwhile, “I Wanna Hear It from Your Lips” remains vanished down the memory hole, and 1997’s not-bad I Was Born to Love You might as well never have happened.  Still, Carmen’s sixteen definitively essential/essentially definitive moments really are pretty great.  And then there’s the heretofore uncollected “Love Is All That Matters,” the most beautiful melody that Carmen ever lifted from a nineteenth-century Russian composer.

CARLENE CARTER

Carter Girl (Rounder)

The latest album by June Carter Cash’s daughter replants the Carter Family’s musical roots in twenty-first-century alt-country soil--seven of the dozen songs were written by the family’s paterfamilias, A.P. Carter (eight if you count “Lonesome Valley 2003,” an A.P. classic updated by Carlene and NRBQ’s Al Anderson).  Rife with gospel-music archetypes, they’ll apprise newcomers to the “first family of country music” of the fact that Christianity used to be cool.  But it’s the Carlene original, a re-recorded “Me and the Wildwood Rose,” that sets the tone: “In my Grandma's house her children would sing, / guitars a twangin' and their laughter would ring. / I was little, but I was the biggest kid. / I wanted to do what the grown-ups did.”  At fifty-eight, she finally has.

ROSANNE CASH 

The River & the Thread (Blue Note)

In interviews, Cash has related the fascinating backstories of these eleven songs (fourteen in the deluxe version) with so much detail that they almost overshadow the songs themselves.  She also lets on as how, at fifty-eight, she now regards the music of her hit-filled youth as rather lacking in gravitas.  Well, given the alt-country heaven from which she’s channeling the meditative melodies of her maturity and the autobiographical richness of her Deep South lyrics, it’s easy to see (and hear) what she means.  Still, there are a river and a thread running through her entire impressive oeuvre, and they’re worth listening for--especially when they unite her with her daddy’s old-time religion and thus unbreak the circle bye and bye, Lord, bye and bye.

CIBO MATTO 

Hotel Valentine (Chimera)

Yuka Honda and Miho Hatori haven’t recorded as Cibo Matto since Bill Clinton was president.  But shuffle these ten new tracks among the nineteen on 2007’s Pom Pom: The Essential Cibo Matto and you’ll be hard pressed to tell which are which--that is, unless you’re one of the relatively (and obviously) few consumers who pushed 1999’s Stereo*Type A (the band’s previously highest-charting release) all the way to 171 on Billboard and therefore have an unfair advantage.  The partly rapped, partly sung lyrics still sound like hijacked playground chants, and the largely electronic, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink instrumentation still sounds like pop art for pop art’s sake.  Only the minimalistic (and maybe racist) “Housekeeping” justifies the formula--hence (no doubt) Hotel Valentine’s debuting at 168.

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2014: D-F

Illinois Entertainer Reviews 2009 (Part III)

I published twenty-nine reviews in the Illinois Entertainer in 2009. Below are five of the brief ones.

ROSANNE CASH: The List (Manhattan)--Listeners have long wondered why some all-covers albums by performers better known for their own material actually turn out well, especially since most such albums don’t. Well, with The List Rosanne Cash has solved the mystery. First, have an iconic roots musician for a father. Second, get that father to give you a list of one hundred essential songs from a particular genre (country in this case) when you’re eighteen and listen to them a lot for the next thirty-five years. Third, choose a dozen of the songs. Fourth, marry a top-flight producer for whom arranging such material represents a lifelong dream. Fifth, possess a voice so gorgeous that the cameo harmonizers (Springsteen, Costello, Tweedy, Rufus Wainwright) just get in the way. It’s really quite simple when you think about it.

CRAIG CHAQUICO: Follow the Sun (Shanachie)--No one who has bought a new Santana album in the last two decades has any business looking down his nose at this nimble take on Latinized jazz-rock--even if Chaquico was a member of Starship and therefore partially responsible for “We Built This City.” That city, incidentally, was San Francisco, so this album’s sole vocal track, “Lights Out San Francisco,” might’ve been a belated make-up call, except it’s stupid too: “So tired of living like a rolling stone,” sings guest vocalist Rolf Hartley (I dunno, Keith Richards seems to have a lot of fun), and “When I’m all alone, holding my own” (no comment). So stick to the others: breezy, Laserium-lite soundscapes fully deserving of titles like “Solar Wind,” “Island Breeze,” “Fantasy in Paradise,” and “The Coast of Orion.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Easy Come Easy Go (Decca)--The subtitle, “12 Songs for Music Lovers,” is pretty funny. Finally, a CD for people who actually love music! It’s also inaccurate, as one of the songs--the experimental version of the Miracles’ “Ooo Baby Baby” that takes up eight of this album’s fifty-six minutes--is unlikely to be loved by anyone. The rest, however, is one impressive example after another of Faithfull’s unique ability to transform any room in which her music is played into a post-punk Moulin Rouge. No one else finds songs, whether old (Dolly Parton, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Randy Newman) or not so old (Neko Case, the Decembrists) better suited to her voice, and no one else has a voice like Faithfull’s. It’s enough to give cigarettes, if not necessarily heroin, a good name.

WOODY GUTHRIE: My Dusty Road (Rounder)--As recounted at length in the accompanying booklet, the story behind the 2003 discovery and subsequent refurbishing of the metal masters that function as this four-disc set’s Rosetta Stone is almost as interesting as the songs themselves. Serendipitously well-preserved, the masters turned out to contain Guthrie’s 1944 recordings for the Stinson company, much of which had been released over the years but in annoyingly lo-fi versions. Of the fifty-four tracks thematically organized herein (“Woody’s ‘Greatest’ Hits,” “Woody’s Roots,” “Woody the Agitator,” “Woody, Cisco and Sonny”), six have never been previously released, and one, “Bad Repetation” (sic), wasn’t even known to have existed. Would the left-wing individualism they enshrine matter much if it hadn’t inspired Bob Dylan and he, in turn, countless others? Maybe not. But it did, so it does.

BRUCE HORNSBY & THE NOISEMAKERS: Levitate (Verve Forecast)--With its frequently snappy tempos, relatively modest song lengths, and gregariously catchy hooks, Levitate evokes the top-forty-friendly Bruce Hornsby of old just enough to make the lyrics easy to ignore at first. When the melodies of “Paperboy” and “Invisible” could teach Paul McCartney a thing or two, who cares that the former has a verse about cannibalism or that the latter’s narrator hates his own skin? Eventually, though, the wacky triptych of “Space Is the Place,” “Michael Raphael,” and “Simple Prayer” will force even the most insouciant listener to play armchair metaphysician. And the characterization of nineteenth-century American pioneers as Nazis (“The Black Rats of London”) and red-state residents as rednecks (“In The Low County”) will have reasonable folks wondering how nuts Hornsby would’ve gone if McCain and Palin had won.

2006 Album Reviews: C

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

Johnny Cash: American V: A Hundred Highways (Lost Highway/American)—Yep, Cash and Rick Rubin had one more in the can, and, nope, it’s not (very) morbid.

Johnny Cash: Man in Black: Live in Denmark 1971 (Country Music Video/Legacy)—The set looks like Hee Haw, the Danish crowd seems clueless if appreciative, and those distractions are all that’s wrong with this very entertaining 18-song DVD. With Carl Perkins, the Carter Family, and the Statler Brothers getting solo spots, the pace remains brisk. And it’s great to see Cash himself so vibrant and eager to please. Lagniappe: he reads a prepared statement in Danish. Four johns noir out of five.

Johnny Cash: Personal File (Columbia/Legacy)—No wonder Rick Rubin had such an easy time getting Johnny Cash to pick up an acoustic guitar and sing his favorite songs into a mic throughout the ’90s. It turns out Cash had already been doing something similar on his own for years. He recorded about half of these recently discovered performances in 1973 simply to document the music that had come to mean the most to him over the course of his life, adding to them in stolen moments until 1982. Aside from six originals, the twenty-five selections on Disc One reflect the influence of country radio and other small-town musical sources (high-school music and English teachers, talent contests, family); the twenty-four hymns and gospel songs on Disc Two, eleven of which he wrote himself, reflect the influence of Jesus Christ. If admirers who overlook Cash’s weakness for bathos will have a hard time explaining his recitation of “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” skeptics who downplay his prophetic powers will be flummoxed by “If Jesus Ever Loved a Woman,” a lyrical love song of unknown origin that should have Pierre Plantard rolling over and telling Dan Brown the news. Rating: Four time capsules out of five.

Rosanne Cash: Black Cadillac (Capitol)—At first this inevitable concept album about the death of not only Johnny and June Cash but also Vivian Distin (Johnny’s first wife and Rosanne’s natural mother) struck me as both too narrow and too didactic. What would people who didn’t know and love Rosanne Cash’s parents the way Rosanne did and does make of her poignant attempts to say goodbye and to hold on simultaneously? What would the religiously indifferent or the many evangelical believers whom Johnny and June numbered among their fans make of the songs fueled by disappointment with Christianity’s insufficiency? Eventually, though, the music--by which I mean the lyrics, the melodies, the instrumentation, and most of all Rosanne’s remarkably expressive voice--turned me around. Not only are death and loss universal subjects, but Johnny Cash was one of the most universal figures of the last fifty years, a veritable pop-cultural Walt Whitman. A songs about him is a song about multitudes. As for the anti-Christian didacticism, it’s really more “anti-Christians.” She laments that “no one in the Bible / craves [her] company,” she assures zealots that she’s “not a soul [they] need to save,” and she succinctly points out that “[i]t’s a strange new world we live in, / where the church leads you to hell / and the lawyers get the money / for the lives they divide and sell.” Final verdict: not too narrow or too didactic at all. Rating: Four-and-a-half purities of heart out of five.

Cheap Trick: Rockford (Big 3/Cheap Trick)—Not since That ’70s Show was real life have these guys wanted us to want them this bad.

The Church: Uninvited, like the Clouds (Cooking Vinyl)—This psychedelic folk-rock awash in rainy-day jangle will remind longtime fans of what they first liked about the Church. If in the ’80s these Aussies added sparkle to a “paisely underground” movement into which they were sometimes unfairly lumped, these days they add gravity, if only by virtue of their drummer, to whatever cosmic pop is currently floating off into the ether. Even at its most derivative (the Pink Floyd-meets-U2 stretches, say), the music makes for the kind of background listening that holds up fairly well in the foreground too. As with so much melancholy pop, few standout tracks emerge once the clouds of inattention disperse. “Unified Field,” however, really stands out, and the reveries inspired by the haze into which much of the rest blurs will almost surely be pleasant. Rating: Three daydream believers out of five.

Nat King Cole: The Very Best of Nat King Cole (Capitol)—One disc, twenty-eight songs, one silky classic after another, less like Sinatra with soul than Johnny Mathis reared on jazz.

Elvis Costello and Allen Toussaint: The River in Reverse (Verve Forecast)—That the road to hell may be paved with good intentions doesn’t mean that all roads paved with good intentions lead to hell. Sometimes they merely lead to harmless if aesthetically misbegotten collaborations like this one, which would have already gone the way of Elvis Costello’s other dubious duet albums if Katrina hadn’t turned New Orleans, here represented by Allen Toussaint, into a sort of national underdog deserving of vague if sincere sympathies and susceptible to commercial if unintentional exploitation. Most telling album-cover detail: Costello’s smiling, Toussaint’s not. Rating: Two-and-a-half meshes that didn’t take out of five.