belated additions
COMRADES! Some goodies for you to check out.....SNOW PATROL plays to expectations, NACHITO HERRERA offers up some nice latin piano jazz, and MARIA McKEE returns to form.....As far as int'l discs go, Indian film composer A.R. Rahman gets a 2-CD retrospective, GECKO TURNER looks for the electronica crossover.....and TANGO No. 9 stakes a claim for the best tango band to ever come out of San Francisco.....Artist: Snow Patrol
Title: Eyes Open
Label: Polydor
Genre: alt / indie
Grade: A
Snow Patrol's fourth album, Eyes Open, doesn't fall short from where they left off with Final Straw (2004); in fact, their hungry indie-rock sound only gets bigger and better this time around. All guitar hooks and singalong choruses are firmly in place. Snow Patrol are the kind of band that embrace simplicity as beautiful and human flaws as art. These Scots are onto something big. (4 stars)
Reviewer: MacKenzie Wilson, All Music Guide
Artist: Nachito Herrera
Title: Live at the Dakota 2
Label: Dakota Live
Genre: jazz / int’l
Grade: A
“Rumba in the tundra”! I tip my hat to Tom Surowicz’s liner notes—ye gods I wish I’d made that up. Cuban émigré Herrera, now Minneapolis-based, follows up his 2002 live set with another scorcher, proving once and for all that son and snow are not, in fact, diametrically opposed.
Reviewer: bjorn ingvoldstad
Artist: Maria McKee
Title: Peddlin’ Dreams
Label: Eleven Thirty
Genre: singer / songwriter
Grade: A
While McKee’s label touts Peddlin' Dreams as a return to rootsy American rock and folk styles, and as the album that logistically follows You Gotta Sin to Get Saved (1993), this simply isn't true. This is not a look back but a further look in. It's true that acoustic guitars permeate the mix, and the songs walk the folk-rock border, but they are the frame for the rich, labyrinthine, multidimensional songs here. McKee wrote or co-wrote nine of the album's 12 tracks. Using folk, country and rock backdrops, McKee's songs offer stories of the broken, the lost, the wider-eyed and the hopeless. Peddlin' Dreams is a melancholy record to be sure, but it's moving, utterly beautiful and carefully, artfully wrought. (4 stars)
Reviewer: Thom Jurek, All Music Guide
Artist: A.R. Rahman
Title: Introducing A.R. Rahman
Label: Times Square
Genre: int’l
Grade: A+
In common with compilations of prolific film composers in general, this two-CD collection -- as lengthy as it is -- is a necessarily selective overview of some of A.R. Rahman's work. With 24 tracks and more than two hours of music, it includes excerpts from soundtracks spanning 1993-2001, most of the selections containing vocals. Working in contrast to the stereotypes many viewers have of the flashy, sometimes cheesy music heard in much Indian cinema, the material here is thoughtfully assembled and dignified, though it does make frequent use of melismatic and female upper-range vocal styles not often heard in Western popular music. All of the material is taken from soundtracks performed in the original Tamil language, Rahman's native tongue. (4 ½ stars)
Reviewer: Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide
Artist: Tango No. 9
Title: Radio Valencia
Label: Spillhouse
Genre: int’l / Bay-area tango
Grade: B+
“A hot ticket on the San Francisco tango dance circuit” (?!—hey, that’s what their publicist asserts, anyhow), Tango No. 9 delivers up a serviceable set of Argentinian-esque tracks for your programming pleasure. Seeing them live would be fun, I’d guess, but the disc fails to demand wide exposure. Still, they’d be a hit at Lotus for sure.
Reviewer: bjorn Ingvoldstad
Artist: Gecko Turner
Title: Guapapasea!
Label: Quango
Genre: int’l / electronica
Grade: A-
Turner’s blend of loungy latin electronica has been a mainstay on the CMJ New World Top Ten for weeks, so we’re a little late to the party here. There’s a lot to work with, but I recommend starting with the insistent “Limón en la Cabeza” (03) and then working your way out from there.
Reviewer: bjorn ingvoldstad
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