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Tom Jones is an easy man to envy. On the basis of 24 Hours, it’s obvious he had--is still having!--the time of his life. Regrets? Sure, he’s had a few. But Sir Tom swaggers through the album like a Knights Bachelor half his age, his voice--an oversized well-grained baritone--almost undiminished.
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Carlene Carter, Stronger
There is always a warm glow
around a survivor drawing us closer. It's as if their new good fortune
might rub off on us. Of course it's a lot more complicated than that,
but Johnny Cash's stepdaughter Carlene Carter definitely has an
alluring aura about her.
I love year-end 10-best lists. I love getting tips on albums I had ignored or never heard of. I love watching my colleagues forced out of the comfort zone of easy generalizations such as "This is good" and "That is bad" and compelled to make the finer, more difficult distinctions between the "good," the "really good" and "the really, really good."
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The musical road for Neil Young was nothing if not uncertain in the days following the disbandment of Buffalo Springfield in May of 1968. This is all at once an impossible notion and obvious reality to behold today, some forty years later.
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At the very end of the hidden "bonus" track that concludes this album, there's a short bit of the voice of Sir Paul McCartney, played backwards. Now, if you were able to turn it around, it wouldn't be surprising if it said, "Paul is NOT dead."
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Not many artists have been given access to American folk hero Woody Guthrie's hallowed Archives of unreleased lyrics since his passing in 1967. In fact that number is exactly three: Billy, Jeff and Jonatha.
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When the country-blues revival swept through Northern folk-music circles in the mid-‘60s, most of the aging bluesmen coaxed out of retirement played a variation on one of two themes--the gritty Delta blues of Son House or the lilting ragtime of Mississippi John Hurt.
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For decades now, double-bassist Edgar Meyer has been rearranging the molecules of various musical forms -- classical, bluegrass, folk, jazz -- bending them into some elusive admixture sometimes called "neo-bluegrass;" a sort of American vernacular music redux.
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Whether you choose to hear it as a victory-lap soundtrack or simply a chorus inviting all Americans to embrace "the audacity of hope," this compilation works--if not always, then often enough, as a compelling, occasionally very moving listen.
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Ryan Adams has finally found a focused musical stride with the release of his tenth pseudo-solo album Cardinology. Pseudo-solo because this release is not a solo effort what-so-ever, as it is credited to Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, his beloved--and incredibly tight--backing band who started recording with Adams back in 2005 on both Cold Roses and Jacksonville City Nights albums, and then again in 2007 on his Easy Tiger LP and Follow The Lights EP.
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When you hear artists such as Joss Stone, Sharon Jones or Ryan Shaw sing a love song on a retro-soul album (or, for that matter, Dale Watson on a retro-country album), they often sound as if they're professing their feelings not for an actual human being but for a favorite old record.
More | 0 CommentsBENTLEY'S BANDSTAND
TODAY'S BOOM TUNE
SHELF LIFE
