WFHB ADDS 11.13.06
DATE: 11.13.06ARTIST: The Slip
TITLE: Eisenhower (Bar None)
GENRE: ROCK/ALT
GRADE: A+
REVIEW: The Slip, a Boston trio known for their enthralling live act, turn in their jazz hats for radio-rock caps on their first album for their new label, Bar/None Records. Eisenhower isn't a sell-out album, it's a bust-out album, and these eccentric anthems will surely turn The Slip around the corner on their alt-jazz past to better things. With a smooth rock panache, The Slip feel like a normal, radio-friendly rock band on the surface, but any deeper, it's obvious that there's much more going on. Their production is the key that turns the lock. The way their anthem "Even Rats" starts out with sliding, blipping guitars and pattering, metallic drums before diving into the slower, stadium-core riffs is an example of how both accessible and atypical the album is. There's an array of drum experimentation on Eisenhower, such as on "Airplane/Primitive", where the beat seems to careen over itself on a loop. "The Soft Machine" is built on in-between half-beats that turn the song into a higher energy, more-compelling lap around the alternative pool. Uncommon guitar arrangements make up about a hundred of The Slip's multi-faceted sound. "Life In Disguise" is a jumbled acoustic track with cardboard box drums, but the melody steals the show like something the Goo Goo Dolls would do if they were actually cool. While The Slip's jazzy sound was often ignored before, Eisenhower should change that, and with touring, spotlight the trio's abilities to transform modern rock into something beyond.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS:1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9
REVIEWER: Megan Waters
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST: Gob Iron
TITLE: Death Songs for the Living (Transmit Sound)
GENRE:COUNTRY/ALT
GRADE: A+
REVIEW: Leave it to Jay Farrar, who has sung his share of grim folk and country songs with his current band, Son Volt, as well as his previous outfit, the alternative country pioneering Uncle Tupelo, to pair with Varnaline's Anders Parker in this oddly named group (British slang for "harmonica") and make an album about hard times and diseases so obscure you'll have to look them up in a medical dictionary. The duo's stark, yet elegant reimagining -- on acoustic instruments plus an occasional haunting electric slide guitar -- of songs such as the Rev. J.M. Gates' "Death's Black Train," the Stanley Brothers' "Wayside Tavern" and the traditional murder ballad "Hills of Mexico," is bloody brilliant. Make that bloody and brilliant.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 1, 3, 5, 9
NOTE: all the even-numbered tracks are nice instrumentals. There is really not a bad track on here...
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST: Miho Hitari
TITLE: Ecdysis (Rykodisc)
GENRE: rock/alt
GRADE: A
REVIEW: This is the very best project that either Hatori or Honda have been involved in since Cibo Matto's much-heralded first album, Viva! La Woman - it happily stands alongside that album as being a perfectly realized piece of dreamy electronic-ambient pop confections. And unlike Honda's last two releases, there isn't a single trivial or redundant track on Ecdysis - it all coheres together to form a marvelous musical expression of beauty, warmth, and of course eccentric (and thoroughly charming) originality. With its strong emphasis on ballads, it most clearly resembles Bjork's trip-hop masterpiece `Homogenic.' But Hatori takes her music and makes it definingly her own: `Song For Kids' is sung exclusively in Japanese, and numbers like `Walking City' and `Spirit of Juliet' reside entirely inside Hatori's own lyrical universe, yet are poetic and evocative enough to take you along for the ride. Hatori doesn't forget about the party, though - she gets her & our groove on in preposterously infectious fashion with `Barracuda,' `Song For Kids,' and most notably in `Sweet Samsara Part II,' where she actually seems to coin a new musical genre: Buddhist funk! Her delightful exhortation for us to "flow with me, flow!" might even get the Dalai Lama to hit the dancefloor in platform shoes. But the pure beauty of musical balladry is ultimately Hatori's finest achievement - the completely magical torch songs `In Your Arms' and `River of 3 Crossings' are as delicate and shimmering and transcendent as anything in Bjork's (or for that matter Cibo Matto's) entire repertoire.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10
REVIEWER: amazon.com
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST:Emily Haines & The Soft Skeleton
TITLE: Knives Don't Have Your Back (Last Gang)
GENRE: singer/songwriter
GRADE: A
REVIEW: In the liner notes of her solo album, Metric frontwoman Emily Haines displays an old textbook illustration of the human heart, blown up so that it fills the translucent X-rayed ribcage on the page before it. White arrows, a new feature added to an old drawing, penetrate the heart from all directions. The gamut of human emotions originate in the heart, so to speak, and for 45 minutes we are expected to see that organ as the body’s only operator; its only troublemaker; its only recourse worth noting. This is an old argument, but a lovely idea, and most rewarding if Haines can display for us the hows and whys of the heart’s grandness. The Soft Skeleton, the other half of the music-makers here, are “a few of my favorite musicians,” Haines explains, and their additions are indeed limber and delicate under the singer’s hand. Noted modestly in the depths of the liner notes, Haines, by the bye, “wrote the songs and played them on piano while singing.” And it’s the piano that does the brunt of the work. The Tokai String Quartet and all-male cast of guitarists, keyboardists, drummers, and brass players skirt around a handful of pieces like curious onlookers trying their hand at the performance—they’re just here to help. Knives is a quietly simmering LP, and it’s only on centerpiece “Mostly Waving” that the helper instruments bring any wallop. Much of the album’s pieces have such a precise contextual feel, which fights with a lingering sense of displacement. Written and recorded over four years in Montreal, Toronto, Asheville, and New York, there’s an episodic transience to each track that yet allows them considerable uniformity, owed to the mulled piano and Haines’ sandy-throated soprano. What Haines adds to this underpainting is the entire spectrum of blue.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 2, 5, 6, 7, 9
REVIEWER: stylusmagazine.com
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST:Rodrigo y Gabriela
TITLE: Rodrigo y Gabriela (Rubyworks)
GENRE: INTL/GUITAR
GRADE: A
REVIEW: Mexico's liveliest pair of pluckers is back with a follow up to their successful 2003 debut Re-Foc. There seems to be a bit more of style, substance and everything else on the new record, and while there's evidence of influence from rock, flamenco, jazz and metal - and The Shadows - the duo now have a stronger signature sound. Most of the songs are breathless, built on sublime reels up and down the frets and fast, Andalucian-style call and response. Perhaps it's relocating to Dublin that has made Rodrigo and Gabriel so free and easy with their own folk roots: they'll take on anything. Two tracks feature fiery fiddler Roby Lakatos, who brings his Hungarian gypsy soul into the mix, while a version of Stairway to Heaven re-imagines the song as a quasi-medieval meditation. Virtuosity is everything on this disc, and Rod and Gab will continue to appeal as much to guitar students as folk music fans. They have a youthful energy that is infectious and a winning, fresh-faced style.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 1, 3, 5, 6, 7
REVIEWER: bbc.co.uk
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST:Anders Parker
TITLE: Anders Parker (Baryon)
GENRE: COUNTRY/ALT
GRADE: B+
REVIEW: The former Varnaline singer holed up for three days in a Los Angeles recording studio with Wilco’s Ken Coomer, Son Volt pedal-steel expert Eric Heywood and Dumptruck guitarist Kirk Swan to put together a “small-room”– sounding record, on which everyone plays together without thinking about it too much. Parker could use an extra shot of electricity here and there — as Varnaline’s swan song Songs in a Northern Key put forth so well — but overall this is an unassuming, casually cool record that will sound even better years from now after the songs have been committed to memory and then forgotten. All of Parker’s work sounds like a half-remembered dream, emitted from another room and another decade. He doesn’t trust the government (“False Positive”), and he’s a skeptic at heart (“Proof”). But he’s also something of a sentimentalist who wishes his friends could stick around even if he has to leave.
NOTE: Parker is also half of Gob Iron, the Jay Farrar Son Volt offshoot that was also added at WFHB this week.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 4, 5, 7, 9, 11
REVIEWER: orlandoweekly.com
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST:Eleanor McEvoy
TITLE: Out There (Moscodisc)
GENRE: singer/songwriter
GRADE: A-
REVIEW: Back with an album even more stripped down that Early Hours, and on which she's taken charge of the arrangements and plays pretty much everything you hear, this finds the South Wexford singer-songwriter variously mediating on ecology, economics and, in songs about relationships ended, lacking and desired, female strengths and vulnerabilities. Opening in k.d.lang mood, the smokey lounge ambience, brushed percussion and vibes of Non Smoking Single Female offers a witty plea for romance written in small ads style but with a sub-text about consumerism. In more serious moods, she moves on embrace the bitter hurt of To Sweep Away A Fool, masculine commitment phobia on Quote I Love You Unquote (co-penned with Dave Rothery of The Beautiful South), the wounded heart sarcasm of the mandolin and fiddled based Suffer So Well, the marimba tinged So Much Trouble's tale of a woman discovering her husband's infidelity and, by way of a mirror image, temptation resisted in the Gaelic infused folk of Wrong So Wrong. At least Little Look looks on the brighter side of holding fast to a relationship in the face of everything.It doesn't always work, the use of programmed drums and synths at odds with the more organic nature elsewhere, but, again drawing on a musical cocktail of jazz, folk and blues, and never compromising her accent in the phrasing, for the most it's another quiet triumph for one of Ireland's most golden yet far too unappreciated talents.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 1, 2, 3, 4, 7, 8
REVIEWER: netrhythms.com
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST: Badly Drawn Boy
TITLE: Born In The U.K. (Astralwerks)
GENRE:rock/alt
GRADE: B
REVIEW:After a bout with writer's block left most of what would have been the fifth Badly Drawn Boy album on the scrap heap, Damon Gough regrouped by writing a set of songs inspired by growing up in the United Kingdom. The results are Born in the U.K., an album that, of course, nods to Bruce Springsteen's rousing-yet-searching Born in the U.S.A. (the Boss is also thanked in the liner notes), but also feels like it's trying to win -- and impress -- as big an audience as possible. At times, Born in the U.K. is impressive, but not necessarily with its most ambitious moments. After the relatively restrained One Plus One Is One, Gough returns to the elaborate, heavily arranged sound of Have You Fed the Fish? for most of the album, and too often, his words and melodies end up drowning in their busy surroundings. To be fair, Gough does harness the album's widescreen sound effectively at times: "Degrees of Separation" is the closest Born in the U.K. comes to clearly elaborating on its concept, setting memories of the Thatcher era to rock that nods to "God Save the Queen," both the national anthem and the punk anthem. "Journey from A to B" is another standout that makes the most of its Springsteen and Phil Spector homages. As the album unfolds, Gough seems to get his footing; it's as though he spends the first half of the album trying to wow his audience but only proves impressive once he gets rid of the pretense. Enough of Born in the U.K.'s second half works well that it makes the album's early missteps even more mystifying: "Walk You Home Tonight"'s hints of blue-eyed soul and Motown nail the sophisticated but accessible sound that Gough strains for in other places, as do "The Way Things Used to Be"'s slight country twang and "Long Way Round (Swimming Pool)"'s Burt Bacharach-style pop.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS: 3, 5, 8, 10, 11
REVIEWER: allmusic.com
DATE: 11.13.06
ARTIST: Nellie McKay
TITLE: Pretty Little Head (Hungry Mouse/Sony)
GENRE: singer/songwriter
GRADE: A
REVIEW: Pretty Little Head, the Nellie McKay record that Columbia refused to release in early 2006, is remarkably similar to Get Away from Me, the record it released to wide acclaim in 2003. Like McKay's debut, it's a two-disc album packed with brash wordplay, passionate causes, and a diverting variety of New York music locales, from the Brill Building to Cafe Carlyle to the South Bronx. If it sacrifices some of the humor and precocious flair of her debut in favor of more social criticism, it's still a very entertaining and occasionally beautiful album that allows space for McKay's continuum of emotions, from gleeful to melancholy to furious. A key part of her charm is that few of her activist songs are dour or academic (although a song about food, and titled "Food," is the most delightful song on the record). McKay, who sits in the production chair, sounds as musically astute as her predecessor Geoff Emerick (a large feat), and her band, resourceful and economical, again functions as an excellent vehicle for her eccentric songwriting. As on her debut, no songs are obvious highlights, although they're all good or great. In the bitter relationship song "There You Are in Me," McKay prefaces the title with "Everyone you meet secures a wretched seat within your memory/Wipe their filthy feet upon the yearning of your soul," but sings it with such energy and insistency that it doesn't sound maudlin or depressing. "The Big One" may make commercialism sound as terrifying as apocalypse, but "Columbia Is Bleeding" (about allegations of animal cruelty at Columbia University) is a quietly bewitching song quite apart from its subject matter. Although she may not strain for the humor of her first album, she summons a quiet beauty that's new for the elegy "Gladd" (which honors peace activist Gladd Patterson). Pretty Little Head sounds like a record from a woman coming out of girlhood -- more confident, more wise about love, and more focused about her concerns, if no less passionate.
RECOMMENDED TRACKS:
CD1: 1, 3, 9, 12
CD2: 1, 3, 4, 5, 8
FCC: CD1#5, CD2#9 (both contain “shit”)
REVIEWER: allmusic.com
also added (see Cathi Norton's review): Buddy Guy Can't Quit the Blues (Silvertone)
posted by WFHB Music @ 10:18:00 AM
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