Record Reviews
📝 2096 reviews| Artist | Title | Review |
|---|---|---|
| Eberhard Weber | Later That Evening | <P>This is one of bassist Eberhard Weber's more stimulating ECM releases, due in part to his colorful sidemen: guitarist Bill Frisell, pianist Lyle Mays (in a rare vacation from Pat Metheny), Paul McCandless (switching between soprano, oboe, English horn and bass clarinet) and drummer Michael DiPasqua. The quintet plays four of Weber's originals (including the 16½-minute "Death in the Car Wash") and, although the music is sometimes introspective and full of space, Frisell largely keeps the proceedings unpredictable and adds some fire and otherworldly sounds.</P><P>— <B>Scott Yanow</B></P> |
| Tim Weisberg | Live At Last | |
| Gillian Welch | Hell Among The Yearlings | <p>Lacking some of the focus that made her debut album so stunning, <i>Hell Among the Yearlings</i> is nevertheless a thoroughly satisfying second album from Gillian Welch. Instead of backing away from the rustic folkiness of <i>Revival</i>, Welch deepens her bleak, clear-eyed worldview, which makes her spare, old-timey arrangements all the more powerful. On occasion, the performances and songs are a bit too studied to be truly effective, but those moments are fleeting -- <i>Hell Among the Yearlings</i> offers ample proof that Welch is a talented, individual songwriter and that her debut was no fluke.</p>— <b>Thom Owens</b> |
| Gillian Welch | Time (The Revelator) | <p>Gillian Welch's third album, Time (The Revelator), finds the folk vocalist and musician shifting her attention from achingly beautiful mountain ballads to achingly beautiful pop/rock ballads. Regarding this album, Welch states: "As opposed to being little tiny folk songs or traditional songs, they're really tiny rock songs. They're just performed in this acoustic setting. In our heads we went electric without changing instruments." This philosophy is most evident in songs like "I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll" and "Elvis Presley Blues," with her longtime collaborator David Rawlings accompanying her on Louvin-esque high harmonies and vintage guitar. Fans of the duo's neo-old-timey sound will be happy to hear a few of their familiar, intimate dust bowl folk songs peering through the fence posts.</p><p>The banjo-driven "My First Lover" could've been recorded on Alan Lomax's back porch, while the title track aches and moans along with the best of her two previous albums. Rawlings' production on the album remains warm and intimate throughout, capturing the subtleties of the acoustic instruments and earthy harmonies. Highlights include the passionate romp "Red Clay Halo," which includes the best elements of time-honored folk stylings and their newfound passion for rock & roll, and the hushed awe that captures the audience in the Ryman Auditorium during the live recording of "I Want to Sing That Rock and Roll." <i>Time (The Revelator)</i> ends with an unprecedented 15-minute track called "I Dream a Highway," which drifts lazily through the album's final moments, sweetly dozing in the current like Huck and Jim's Mississippi River afternoons. Welch and Rawlings are at the top of their form and continue to make the best Americana recordings without resorting to drenching their albums in guest stars, but by writing and performing heartfelt songs that speak with a clear and undeniable honesty.</p><p>— <strong>Zac Johnson</strong></p><hr/><p>Although his hardcore Compton posturing may have led you to believe otherwise, Tracy Morrow (aka Ice T) was not raised in a Los Angeles ghetto. The Original Gangsta was actually born in another O.G.-- the Original Garden State, New Jersey. But no matter his roots, T had gangsta in his goddamn blood. After his parents died, T realized his ice-cold destiny, determined to move to South Central and adopt the gangsta lifestyle. And adopt it he did, rising above his critics to rap convincingly about killing people, selling addictive drugs, and enjoying the copious bounty of many large black asses. Luckily for Gillian Welch, the path to acclaim in the folk-country genre doesn't require moving to Oklahoma, Appalachia, or a Mississippi riverbank. Nor does it call for songs about killing people, peddling crack, or mining for black ass-gold (in fact, the latter is probably anathema to the cause). Rather, it's just fine if you sound like you know what you're doing and appreciate tradition, and Welch achieves that with ease. Gillian Welch's third LP, Time (The Revelator) is ample proof. Despite being born and raised in Los Angeles, the child of a husband and wife songwriting duo who scored the theme to "The Carol Burnett Show," Welch has managed to create some refreshingly charming, rustic folk-country music that bears the mark of a culture buried in the Blue Ridge, 3000 miles removed from her home. That she's only 33 makes her feat of authenticity even more remarkable. Welch's selling-point are her plaintive vocals, as tender as they are weathered. Her voice is, in and of itself, a stereotype of the South: genteel, soulful and honest. Even with seemingly frivolous lyrics like on "Elvis Presley Blues," Welch's voice expresses depth, coloring the song with experienced, time-warped romanticism. Accompanying Welch on vocals is a soft palette of acoustic instrumentation. Although the songs carry a greater pop influence than her prior releases, the sound is still unmistakably country. Strummed or fingerpicked acoustic guitar occupies the foreground on most tracks, with the occasional twang of a banjo, as on the bluesy "My First Lover." Adding to the spacious character of the orchestration is the album's absence of percussion. The result is plenty of room for melodies, with the focus squarely on Welch's voice. Time (The Revelator) wavers from heartbroken lament ("Revelator," "Everything Is Free") to Southern nostalgia ("I Want to Sing that Rock n' Roll," "Red Clay Halo") but not once does it stray from Welch's reflective, reserved storyteller's demeanor. The vocals and lyrics alike are open and vulnerable. More than simply an expression of her music, Time (The Revelator) is a glimpse into the artist's personality. Those without the heritage need to work to attain their destiny. For Ice-T, it meant moving to Compton, living the life of a hustler, and filming cinematic masterpieces like Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo and Frankenpenis. For Gillian Welch, it meant studying at Berklee School of Music and listening to old Delmore Brothers and Carter Family recordings. Whatever her path, though, her results are as good as the original.</p><p>— <strong>Brad Haywood, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Gillian Welch | Soul Journey | <p> SETTING: The Lactating Orchid, an independent business establishment ASH: Feminist bookstores creep me out. I sometimes worry that I'll get an inrection. REESE: Being here shouldn't unnerve you any more than I'm freaked out by Foot Locker, or Colonel Rapehawk's Burrito Sports Satellite Steakhouse. ASH: These places brim with so many contradictions. The clientele range from pragmatic activists to tarot-addled goons, so the merchandise fittingly runs the gamut from useful political analyses to superstitious hokum. And why are Gillian Welch CDs always playing? REESE: Be charitable, patriarch. Welch fascinatingly embodies modern feminism's slipperiness. She should be a cliché within a cliché wrapped in a cliché with a side of clichéradish sauce, especially under the weight of those "Southern," range-roaming, country-road tropes. But her albums are weirdly fresh and weirdly, er, cool. ASH: Especially this new album with its occasional-- and radical, for Welch-- "full band" approach (featuring contributors to albums by rural postureminders such as Beck and Son Volt). REESE: Did you just speak in a parenthetical? Or am I inside your mind? ASH: Alls I'm saying is that points on this album have much more to do with the sparse, dolorous pop of Aimee Mann than they do with countresses like Emmylou Harris. REESE: Hey wait, Emmylou Harris covered Gillian Welch. ASH: Exactly my point. Harris is known as an expert arranger, while Mann and Welch are songwriters, even though-- ahem-- they compose with male partners. Besides, Harris covered Welch's most popular tune, "Orphan Girl", which every self-dramatizing spaghetti-strapper over-lip-syncs in her Honda Civic. REESE: I love that song. ASH: The song is, like, the hokey pokey of familial absentia. "I have no mother, no father, no sister, no brother/ I am an orphan girl"? I'm gonna write one called "Multiple Amputee" that goes "I have no arms, no legs..." REESE: Metallica already did that. If you weren't stupid, you'd see that "Orphan Girl" is a formal eschewing of the matriarchal burdens associated with rural womanhood, just as the speaker on this album's "Wrecking Ball" appropriates the "rolling stone" stance usually romanticized by men. You know, I can't help but notice that your own Southern-tropist swoon-tune gets covered here: wasn't "I Had a Real Good Mother and Father" popularized by Bonnie "Prince" Oldham back in his days as a Palace sibling? ASH: What a tune. [ASH blushes and fingers his lip.] While we're dishing out penis-points, let's give some credit to the sweetly rendered song associated with Mississippi John Hurt, "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor". Also note that the arrangement owes a dollar or two to the first disc of Dylan's "bootleg" threefer. Meanwhile, your precious "Wrecking Ball" is just an outtake from Jason Molina's Magnolia Electric Co. with fiddle overdubs. REESE: Hmph. I see what you mean about the crossroads of seriousness and blarney, though. How can an album so reticent and measured bear a moniker as new-agey as Soul Journey? That reeks of Shirley MacLaine and that star-chart-fondling crystal-culture. ASH: A shame, because the songs are so no-nonsense, trafficking in classic idioms (riding with the "top down" is libertine, etc) and landscape metaphors ("lowlands" and "black highways" mean trouble, etc). Except for "One Monkey"? What the hell? "One monkey don't stop the show"? REESE: Is it about not being distracted from the big picture by an insulting fad, such as a Nashville whorelet or a dopey politico? Is its punishing repetition purposeful, or a cave-in to Tracy Chapmanship? Maybe it's borrowing the language of pre-Civil Rights-era America, saying something about one uppity Negro not being a threat to the status quo? That explanation would offset some of the cultural baggage that this "throwback" music totes around. ASH: I don't know. This album's most "bluegrass" song ("No One Knows My Name") is just a refashioning of "She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain When She Comes". Seems pretty harmless. REESE: Hey, look, this store sells those bumper stickers that say THE BANJO IS AN AFRICAN INSTRUMENT! Maybe I could include Welch in my doctoral thesis on Anglosimilitude. It would fit with my bachelor's thesis, King Kut: Castration Metaphors in Old-School Rap and my master's thesis I Am the Eighteenth Pale Descendant: Steven Patrick Morrissey and Whiteness as an Othering Force. ASH: I wish I were a turntablist. "One Monkey" would make a mean mash-up with Whodini's "The Freaks Come Out at Night". REESE: Ugh. That kind of futurism, which debases art's factory-sealedness, is why I want to take refuge in pastoral works such as Soul Journey. Lightning Bolt makes me feel seventy years old and addicted to painkillers and marathons of Diagnosis: Murder. ASH: Fair enough. Welch is definitely the most relevant of the O Brother Pluck Art Thou gang of neo-yodelers. And I reckon that if you find the bleats-n-beats of The Rapture soulless, then you might love this soft, warm, but still interestingly distant work. Then again, Soul Journey remains a tad raptureless.</p><p>— <strong>William Bowers, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Kyung Wha-Chung | Mendelson - Bruch - Violin Concertos | |
| Bukka White | The Panama Limited | |
| Bukka White | Parchman Farm | |
| Snowy White | Peace On Earth | |
| Tony Joe White | Closer To The Truth | |
| Chris Whitley | Living With The Law | |
| Rusty Wier | Rusty Wier | |
| Leo Wijnkamp | Rags To Riches | |
| Leo Wijnkamp | Rags To Riches | |
| Wilco | Yankee Hotel Foxtrot | <p>Myth, it has been said, is the buried part of every story. On April 23rd, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot finally emerges into the light of day, having spent the last year interred in its own cluttered mythology: a hermetic studio gestation, with the inscrutable guidance of Chicago ex-pat/kindly wizard, Jim O'Rourke; internecine squabbles; conflict and resolution with American media behemoth AOL Time Warner; the release portentously slated for September 11th, but mysteriously delayed; the indecipherable short-wave radio prophecies; and, eventually, the hero's welcome, with the first stirrings of spring. It's all there: the miracle birth; the unlikely hero; the, um, benevolent mentor; the primordial menace; good over evil. Joseph Campbell would be pissing himself if he weren't dead. The miraculous birth narrative of Wilco's fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, is already old hat: banished from straightedge AOL Time Warner imprint Reprise on the cosmically short-sighted judgment of label executives who deemed the album a "career-ender," Wilco streamed Yankee Hotel from its left-wing website to millions before signing with weirdo progressive AOL Time Warner imprint Nonesuch. Long is the way and hard that leads up from AOL Time Warner into the light, I guess. But the unique circumstances of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's long deliverance make for more than just pointless disc jockey chatter before spinning "Heavy Metal Drummer." The long delay and streaming audio conspired to ensure that everyone in the world has already heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot in part, if not in its entirety. Vast digital pre-circulation, corporate controversy, and buzz like a beard of bees have rendered all reviews afterthoughts at best. But myth is always an afterthought, and these days, the motif I like chewing on best is, without question, that of the Unlikely Hero. Who would have predicted an album of this magnitude from Wilco? As much I love the band, the fact remains that they were together for five years before they produced anything that could stand with Uncle Tupelo's March 16-20, 1992 or Anodyne. AM is rather forgettable, while the expansive Being There, though frequently inspired, travels on paths blazed by Tom Petty on Damn the Torpedoes, if not The Flying Burrito Brothers. 1999's dolorous Summerteeth was exponentially more sophisticated than anything that came before it, though its heroin innuendoes, shades of domestic abuse and nocturnal homicidal impulses sat somewhat ill at ease alongside the album's lush and infectious pop arrangements. Of course, Summerteeth was a strange and majestic, albeit dark, deviation from the alt-country genre Jeff Tweedy co-invented. But since Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, it has retroactively become more of a harbinger of things to come. Upon being pressed by the Chicago Sun-Times about abandoning alt-country, Tweedy dismissively bequeathed the old Wilco sound to Ryan Adams. And you can never go home again. So does Yankee Hotel Foxtrot justify the controversy, delay and buzz? Everyone, I think, already knows that the answer is yes; all I can offer is "me too" and reiterate. And after half a year living with a bootleg copy, the music remains revelatory. Complex and dangerously catchy, lyrically sophisticated and provocative, noisy and somehow serene, Wilco's aging new album is simply a masterpiece; it is equally magnificent in headphones, cars and parties. And as anyone who's seen the mixed-bag crowd at Wilco shows knows, it will find a home in the collections of hippies, frat boys, acid-eating prep schoolers, and the record store apparatchiks of the indiocracy. No one is too good for this album; it is better than all of us. But for all the talk of terminally hip influences-- Jim O'Rourke, krautrock, and The Conet Project-- Yankee Hotel Foxtrot still conjures a classic rock radio station on Fourth of July weekend. And this extends beyond the alternating Byrds/Stones/Beatles comparisons that pepper every Wilco review ever written; Yankee Hotel Foxtrot evokes Steely Dan, the Eagles, Wings, Derek & The Dominos and Traffic. The slightly disconnected, piano-led "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," is delicately laced with noise, whistles and percussive clutter, like some great grandson of "A Day in the Life." The muted, "Kamera" strums along darkly with acoustic and electric guitars; the twittering electronics in the background don't quite mitigate the tune's comparability to the clever and precise (though now largely neglected) jazz-inflected blues-rock of Dire Straits' stunning debut. The cone-filtered and anthemic country psychedelia of "War on War" could have been jammed straight out of a hot "Bertha" at a 1973 Grateful Dead show. The violin and coked-up country lounge of "Jesus, etc." recalls some mythical seventies in true love and cigarettes. The sharp, stuttering guitar solo that rips open "I'm the Man Who Loves You" could have come directly out of Neil Young's hollow body electric circa Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere. For all its aural depth and layering, Yankee Hotel tends to come off as earnest as yesteryear's FM radio. Wilco gets the benefit of O'Rourke's gift for cutting straight to the guts of every style, without the burden of his trademark contempt for the subject matter at hand. And Tweedy seems to be coming into his own as a lyricist. I still wince when I hear him sing, "I know you don't talk much but you're such a good talker," on Being There. The brooding introspection of Summerteeth made for a handful of elegant lyrics, most notably the skeletal beauty of "She's a Jar," where "she begs me not to miss her" returns as the stinging "she begs me not to hit her," transforming a wistful love song into something gently bruising. But on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Tweedy becomes what I think he always was: an optimist and a romantic. His declaration of wanting to salute "the ashes of American flags," is less cynicism than, perhaps, the devoted liberal's nostalgia for an honest patriotism (check out the array of properly lefty links at wilcoworld.com if you don't believe me). "All my lies are always wishes," he sings, "I know I would die if I could come back new." In "Jesus, etc.," there's a cascading simplicity when he sings, "Tall buildings shake, voices escape, singing sad, sad songs to two chords/ Strung down your cheeks, bitter melodies turning your orbit around." Sad, celestial and lovely. The final declaration on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is one of abiding dedication: "I've got reservations 'bout so many things but not about you." There isn't a truer word to be had. On Summerteeth, Tweedy yowled about "speakers speaking in code" and I thought of that refrain from "I Can't Stand It" when I first heard the words "yankee-hotel-foxtrot" uttered by the disembodied English woman on the sublimely creepy box-set of shortwave radio transmissions, The Conet Project, which is sampled sporadically throughout this record. And in a deeper, more deliberate world, perhaps we could trace that thread to unravel the secret wonder of Wilco's new album. But I don't think there's any secret; and I don't think there's any code. Beneath the great story of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, there are all the tropes and symbols and coincidences of a little mythology; but under that is a fantastic rock record. And why tell you? You all already knew this.</p><p>— <strong>Brent S. Sirota, Pitchfork</strong></p> |
| Hank Williams | The Legendary Hank Williams | |
| John Williams | Collection | |
| John Williams | Live With Julian Bream | |
| John Williams | Echoes Of Spain | |
| John Williams | Portrait |
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