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19 items by Stephen Davis
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Good Old Boys | ALBUM REVIEW
The Ambrose Bierce of rock & roll has released another selection of his bitter and desperately sardonic fantasies. Good Old Boys has a conceptually "Southern" atmosphere; it also has drunkenness and depression, fun celebrations of political figures,...
January 21, 1997 12:00 AM ET -
Presence | ALBUM REVIEW
Led Zeppelin's seventh album confirms this quartet's status as heavy-metal champions of the known universe. Presence takes up where last season's monumentally molten Physical Graffiti left off — few melodies, a preoccupation with hard-rock rhythm, lengthy echoing...
May 20, 1976 12:00 AM ET -
Made in the Shade | ALBUM REVIEW
Metamorphosis is both interesting and embarrassing, a curio and an outrage. Its 14 tracks consist of jams, outtakes, alternate takes and primitive versions of songs the Rolling Stones later revised into more polished numbers, all recorded...
June 6, 1975 12:00 AM ET -
Metamorphosis | ALBUM REVIEW
Metamorphosis is both interesting and embarrassing, a curio and an outrage. Its 14 tracks consist of jams, outtakes, alternate takes and primitive versions of songs the Rolling Stones later revised into more polished numbers, all recorded...
June 6, 1975 12:00 AM ET -
Get Up With It | ALBUM REVIEW
Miles's longtime audience will without doubt find this a bizarre set. Within the space of this double album Miles plays organ on half the tracks, marking the first time in a 30-year recording career that he has...
April 10, 1975 12:00 AM ET -
Miles of Aisles | ALBUM REVIEW
Miles of Aisles is a four-sided live album with a greatest-hits feel to it that collects 18 numbers from Mitchell's successful concert tour of last winter. It's a strong album of her best songs performed mostly informally,...
February 13, 1975 12:00 AM ET -
Smiler | ALBUM REVIEW
The magnificent catarrh has a new album, Smiler, and it contains what by now you would expect: several energetic new examples of the Stewart/Wood world view, a couple of boozy renditions of classic R&B standards, a sentimental...
December 5, 1974 12:00 AM ET -
Berlin | ALBUM REVIEW
Lou Reed's Berlin is a disaster, taking the listener into a distorted and degenerate demimonde of paranoia, schizophrenia, degradation, pill-induced violence and suicide. There are certain records that are so patently offensive that one wishes to take...
December 20, 1973 12:00 AM ET -
Goodbye Yellow Brick Road | ALBUM REVIEW
These boys — singer/piano player Elton John, librettist Bernie Taupin and producer Gus Dudgeon sure do relish their fantasy. One evening last summer I found myself in a screening room in Los Angeles with all of the...
November 22, 1973 12:00 AM ET -
History of the Grateful Dead, Vol. 1 (Bear's Choice) | ALBUM REVIEW
I can't say too much for old Bear's taste, considering the wealth that must exist in the library of Dead concert tapes. But Volume One of The History of the Grateful Dead consists of selections from a...
September 27, 1973 12:00 AM ET -
Fresh | ALBUM REVIEW
In conversation Miles Davis says the name real slow — "Sslaaa" — with the same intonation of awe and macho respect that a young kid on a street corner in North Philadelphia would use to describe Mister...
August 2, 1973 12:00 AM ET -
Back To The World | ALBUM REVIEW
An engaging and paradoxic (at least in uptight Western terms), intensely masculine falsetto; a canny feeling of the confluence of handsome R&B melody with the realities and myths of black life in the Seventies; the 'fly and...
July 19, 1973 12:00 AM ET -
Ooh La La | ALBUM REVIEW
Hey, not all that bad if you consider that most consumers will fork over for a Faces album with rather low preliminary expectations: Two or at most three tracks will usually soak up the energy and style...
June 21, 1973 12:00 AM ET -
For The Roses | ALBUM REVIEW
Her appeal is in the subtle texture of her toughness, and her readiness to tell secrets and make obscure and difficult feelings lucid and vocal. She breaks your heart and makes you tentatively smile. She is the...
January 4, 1973 12:00 AM ET -
Carl And The Passions: So Tough | ALBUM REVIEW
So Tough is the first and maybe last album by Carl and the Passions, the aptly-named once and future Beach Boys. The myserious, reclusive Brian (having endured another aesthetic triumph with the last album, Surf's Up) seems...
June 22, 1972 12:00 AM ET -
Pet Sounds | ALBUM REVIEW
Recorded and released in 1966, not long after the sunny, textural experiments of California Girls, Pet Sounds, aside from its importance as Brian Wilson's evolutionary compositional masterpiece, was the first rock record that can be considered a...
June 22, 1972 12:00 AM ET -
Hendrix In The West | ALBUM REVIEW
Scrape, Scrape. That sound you hear is Eddie Kramer, the proprietor of the late Jimi Hendrix's New York recording studio, Electric Ladyland, scraping...
March 30, 1972 12:55 PM ET -
Anticipation | ALBUM REVIEW
Consider if you will the striking nature of the photograph of Carly Simon on the jacket of her second album, Anticipation, and you will have a clue to the equally striking nature of the music. There she...
December 23, 1971 12:00 AM ET -
Rough And Ready | ALBUM REVIEW
Let's get a little perspective on this one. In 1968 ex-Yardbird Jeff Beck combined the hitherto unmined talents of vocalist-extraordinaire Rod Stewart with the powerful rhythm section of Ron Wood and Mick Waller and came up with what...
November 25, 1971 12:00 AM ET
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