Elwood: The Parlance Of Our Time : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Nothing like trashing a seventies soft-rock standard with some post-Beck white-boy hip-hop -- yes, that's good old Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" you hear under Elwood's furious scratching and other studio effects. But North Carolina native Elwood -- who spent the last ten years engineering records at a Manhattan studio -- is not as opportunistic as his first single would have you believe. He follows it with some seriously hypnotic tracks, on which discovering the hidden references is half the fun. "Slow" sounds like Sugar Ray disrupted by an instrumental bridge that smacks of early-Seventies Yes, while the nostalgic horns of "Red Wagon" seem lifted straight out of an old Chicago LP. By the time you reach "Stockboy," the apocalyptic coda to The Parlance of Our Time, you're still pining for another round of Elwood's flamboyant avant-rap. (RS 841)

ERNESTO LECHNER