Archives for 2006 » May
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris – All The Roadrunning
Perhaps the highest compliment that could be bestowed on this record is that if you didn’t know about Mark Knopfler’s Dire Straits days or Emmylou’s Gram Parsons past and subsequent solo flowering, you might well suspect these two have been singing partners for a long time. Such is the ease with which their voices and [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Radney Foster – This World We Live In
In a parallel universe, Radney Foster is the guy I’d pick to renovate my old Greek Revival house in New Orleans’ Garden District (my fantasy pied-à-terre in Tuscany is just fine as is, thanks). In that dimension, as in this one, Foster is a guy who has abiding respect for clean lines and classic forms [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Dave Alvin – West Of The West, Vol. 1
California is the land of plenty in more ways than just fresh fruits, cracked nuts, jagged mountains and warm beaches. Music, too, is a huge part of the state’s history, and native son Dave Alvin feels it. As a veteran singer-songwriter, he’s part of that musical history himself, but he’s also quick to recognize the [...]
Waxed - Record Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Matthew Sweet & Susanna Hoffs – Under The Covers Vol. 1
This is the feel-good album of a year that could surely use one. In their evocation of 1960s boy-girl harmonies, Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs conjure an era of comparative innocence, when the single reigned supreme. This collection of fifteen covers recalls that period when artists from the Turtles to Sonny & Cher to Gary [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Fred Neil – Self-Titled
An elusive, private and troubled man, Fred Neil created only a handful of albums. Right in the middle of that seven-year run (1964-1971) stands his most fully realized work. So completely unforced and organic in its execution, it seems apt that it bears nothing more than his name for a title. Neil was averse to [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Otis Rush – All Your Love I Miss Loving
For a variety of reasons, ranging from producer/label interference to his own notorious mood swings, Otis Rush has probably made fewer great recordings than any indisputably great musician of his time. But with this one, recorded live at a Chicago club in 1976 and only now seeing the light of day, he shows his stuff [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Irma Thomas – A Woman’s Viewpoint: The Essential 1970s Recordings
This nineteen-song collection chronicles the third phase of Irma Thomas’ remarkable career, following her Allen Toussaint-guided early years with the Minit and Imperial labels and her short time at Chess. The outstanding first half of A Woman’s Viewpoint consists of the 1972 release In Between Tears, with producer/songwriter Jerry “Swamp Dogg” Williams filling the Toussaint [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Bettye LaVette – Child Of The Seventies
It is argued, in David Nathan’s liner notes and elsewhere, that if this 1973 Betty (she changed it to Bettye later) LaVette album, recorded at Muscle Shoals but shelved at the time, had seen release before now, she’d have been a star. Well, maybe. But what seems most clear is that she had a wonderful, [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Tarkio – Omnibus
Unless you were a student at the University of Montana in Missoula during a few very particular years in the late 1990s, thus earning yourself sentimental insider stripes, the main attraction of these otherwise little-heard recordings will be the presence of bandleader/vocalist Colin Meloy, who later moved to Portland and became master of ceremonies in [...]
Not Fade Away - Reissue Review from Issue #63 May-June 2006
Two-Headed Dog – Better Than One
Most of what was once a towering wall of cassette tapes has been relinquished to the dustbin now, casualties of a dying format and a cross-country move. Only a few remain, boxed up in the back of the CD room, rarely touched yet priceless in their own way — a handful of cassettes containing music [...]
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