Archives for 2008 » October
Record Review from web archive October 31, 2008
Jon Carroll & Love Returns
What’s this, two releases in a year? Did Jon Carroll discover Red Bull or something? It was a decade between Home & Away and last year’s Love Returns, and now the most reliable sideman in Washington, D.C., puts out another just mere months later. The two-disc, eighteen-song Live Returns was recorded at the acoustically-pleasing Barns [...]
Column from web archive October 31, 2008
Ry Cooder gets the rhythm of the muse
The recent release of two double-disc sets associated with Ry Cooder is, I suspect, more of a fortuitous coincidence – at least for a music columnist – than a calculated career boost. Yet the juxtaposition of The Ry Cooder Anthology: The UFO Has Landed (Warner Bros./Rhino) and Buena Vista Social Club At Carnegie Hall (World [...]
Live Reviews from web archive October 31, 2008
CMT Alan Jackson Tribute Taping
There was a party here in Nashville in mid-August marking Alan Jackson’s 50th birthday, and also his reaching the major milestone of 50 million albums sold. Granted that when it comes to discussions of even relatively contemporary country music, some seem content to reverse the old Elvis Presley hits package title and presume 50 million [...]
Record Review from web archive October 30, 2008
Loudon Wainwright III
To those of us who discovered Loudon Wainwright III in the mid-1980s, going back and listening to his early albums was slightly jarring. Oh, sure, there was the same combination of sardonic, self-deprecating humor and wistful, elegiac observation, the same melodic expansiveness and even the same ability to push his vocal delivery outside the bounds [...]
Column from web archive October 30, 2008
Vic Chesnutt, Elf Power, And The Amorphous Strums Cause Really Long Headline To Be Written
Vic Chesnutt And Elf Power, Together At Last: Singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt and fellow Athens, Georgia, musicians Elf Power – known for darkly weird folk and darkly weird pop, respectively – have teamed with backing band the Amorphous Strums for the darkly weird folk-pop disc Dark Developments. Recorded in Chesnutt’s attic, the disc is already prompting [...]
Feature from web archive October 29, 2008
Lambchop still believes in the old, weird Nashville
Kurt Wagner has led a life in music for a couple of decades now, but one thing he had never tried was something most songwriters do after learning their first three chords: Perform solo.
“I steadfastly tried to stay away from that,” he said.
Understand the reason: This is the lead singer of Lambchop, a rotating collective [...]
Column from web archive October 29, 2008
Jesse Malin covers new ground
Cover albums are a crapshoot, and the only thing that increases the odds of success is the motivation. Is it simply a matter of milking some radio or blog buzz by tackling a kitschy chestnut? Is it a self-indulgent trip to nostalgia city? Save it for
Record Review from web archive October 29, 2008
Amy Ray
Amy Ray’s solo albums have indulged the punk spirit that lurks underneath her work with Georgia duo the Indigo Girls. On her own, Ray unleashes a rebel yell through insurgent rock styles from rockabilly to reggae. Didn’t It Feel Kinder, released on the label she owns, is her third and best album, one that shows [...]
Column from web archive October 28, 2008
Man enough: In memory
of Levi Stubbs
Levi Stubbs – the man who sang “Reach Out I’ll Be There” and “Standing In The Shadows Of Love”, “Ask The Lonely” and “Ain’t No Woman Like The One I Got” – died last week. All of those records were credited to the Four Tops, of course, as were “Seven Rooms Of Gloom” and “I [...]
Record Review from web archive October 28, 2008
Ryan Adams & the Cardinals
If Ryan Adams were a politician, he’d be the sort that pundits enjoy describing as a “polarizing figure.” His detractors – including Robbie Fulks and Paul Westerberg, the latter of whom obviously inspired Adams – consider him arrogant and derivative. His defenders – including Elton John – regard him as raggedly brilliant.
Both camps will find [...]
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