album reviews
T. Rex
Electric Warrior
So elegant, so fey (check the cover of T. Rex, his first on Reprise), Marc Bolan is a stripling, a sylph. Too old to be innocent in today's world, though his years number 23, he plays to the post-J.F.K. set, yet with enough decadence and sarcasm for any war baby to hum along. He's been rewarded with three No. One singles in England, where their sense of youth is less pristine (and besides, how old is the average singles consumer anyway?). Marc is one of the eternally precoc... | More »
Alice Cooper
Killer
Like all the true rock superstars to rise in the Sixties, Alice Cooper is a consummate master of imagemanipulation. He continually sees to it that new configurations are born in his studiedly outrageous stage persona and the spirit-force of his sound, with the end in mind of putting both himself and his audience through a steeplechase of changes and keeping everybody alert at gut-level. Whether the myth has much at all to do with Alice Cooper the man behind the role is highly debatable, but e... | More »
Carly Simon
Anticipation
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 stands in one of Hyde Park's gates, leonine and regal in her characteristic, spreadout stance, looking tall and powerful in her well-heeled boots and diaphanous dress–the epitome of what some people like to think of as the New Woman. But because of the widespread success last summer... | More »
John Prine
John Prine
This is a very good first album by a very good songwriter. Good songwriters are on the rise, but John Prine is differently good. His work demands some time and thought from the listener — he's not out to write pleasant tunes, he wants to arrest the cursory listener and get attention for some important things he has to say and, thankfully, he says them without fallinginto the common trap of writing with overtones of self-importance or smugness. His melodies are excellent. If Prine ... | More »
Etta James
The Sweetest Peaches Part 2
You can dig Peaches as a catalogue of rhythm-and-blues styles from the Fifties to the present. You can enjoy it as the most varied and satisfying "greatest hits" collection of the year. You can stand off and admire it as a monument to a soulful queen of the blues who just won't quit. Better yet, put the record on and listen to the woman sing. Compared to Etta James, Aretha is an ornamentalist. While Aretha decorates and elaborates each song to fit her own personality. Etta simply become... | More »
Led Zeppelin
Led Zeppelin IV
It might seem a bit incongruous to say that Led Zeppelin — a band never particularly known for its tendency to understate matters — has produced an album which is remarkable for its low-keyed and tasteful subtlety, but that's just the case here. The march of the dinosaurs that broke the ground for their first epic release has apparently vanished, taking along with it the splattering electronics of their second effort and the leaden acoustic moves that seemed to weigh down the... | More »
The Rolling Stones
Hot Rocks, 1964-1971 London
It would be nice to be able to call it something like The Rolling Stones' Golden Decade, for the Stones have been the most enduringly prolific highwire act of their time, both reflecting and surpassing the era with a deadly accuracy that can make them seem more dangerous than they really are. But somehow this album merely falls into that venerable Stones tradition of supra-throwaway albums, collections like December's Children and Flowers that by their very slapdash cynicism validat... | More »
Jimi Hendrix
Rainbow Bridge Reprise
Ahh, a surprise – more Hendrix in the studio. Of late a lot of in-concert Hendrix has surfaced; the full-side each on the Woodstock sets, the Isle of Wight performance on Columbia's Rock Festivals set, the in-concert movie of Hendrix at Berkeley, as well as an English in-concert film with an accompanying soundtrack LP. But Hendrix on stage and Hendrix in the studio are two animals of pretty divergent cellular structure. His later concerts involved a lot of extended instrumental ja... | More »
Yoko Ono
Fly
Yoko's new offering, unlike her husband's, is a two-record set. I admit to a bias against double albums, which often seem to represent only an inadequate solution to the problem of what to leave out. That prejudice declared, I have to say that I found it impossible to listen attentively to this whole album more than once. It's hard to guess why Yoko found it necessary to take up so much vinyl to state her case. The title song, "Fly," which originally accompanied the perambulat... | More »
Fleetwood Mac
Future Games Reprise
Back in the Bar-Mitzvah days of the drug culture the British music scene was shaken by what came to be known as The Blues Boom. Beginning with a small corps of dedicated musicians in the early Sixties, blues bands proliferated at a feverish pace until by 1968 nearly every person in the British Isles between the ages of 16 and 35 was in a blues band. But by its very popularity the blues boom insured its own destruction. After all with so many people in unsuccessful blues bands how could anyone... | More »
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