album reviews
Donny Hathaway
Donny Hathaway
Donny Hathaway is one of the most important black performers to emerge in recent years. Important in the sense that Isaac Hayes, Sly Stone, Funkadelic/Parliament or the Last Poets are important: influential (for better or worse), far-ranging and possessed of a unique, new style. Hathaway had already completed brilliant work as producer, arranger, composer, musician (choose one or any combination of the above) with Roberta Flack, Jerry Butler, Curtis Mayfield & the Impressions and others b... | More »
The Doors
L.A. Woman
Besides being heavy in their early days the Doors were funny too. Funnier than a fish. Who can ever forget those great Morrison ad libs like the one he once did during a lull in "Gloria" ("Little girl how old are you. little girl what school do you go to, little girl suck my cock")? He was an earnest drinker, which of course helped. Now he's drinking more than ever, hence there's some material basis for all the laughs. And since heaviness has been kicked in the ass of late all the k... | More »
John Lee Hooker
Endless Boogie [Beat Goes On]
The black blues legends playing with the white up-and-comers. I guess Sonny Boy Williamson II started it all about six years ago with his Live With the Yardbirds album. Successive years have seen a record-rack full of similar efforts ... from Muddy Waters, Lowell Fulsom, Furry Lewis and Otis Spann .. all resulting in quasi-successful albums that at times effectively blended the old urban, Texas/Chicago post-war Fifties sounds with the post-wah-wah generation. The best of them allowed the old ... | More »
Carole King
Tapestry Ode
Carole King's second album, Tapestry, has fulfilled the promise of her first and confirmed the fact that she is one of the most creative figures in all of pop music. It is an album of surpassing personal-intimacy and musical accomplishment and a work infused with a sense of artistic purpose. It is also easy to listen to and easy to enjoy. Miss King's past accomplishments have become something of a pop music legend. She and her former husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, were one of ... | More »
Carole King
Writer
Carole King's second album, Tapestry, has fulfilled the promise of her first and confirmed the fact that she is one of the most creative figures in all of pop music. It is an album of surpassing personal-intimacy and musical accomplishment and a work infused with a sense of artistic purpose. It is also easy to listen to and easy to enjoy. Miss King's past accomplishments have become something of a pop music legend. She and her former husband and lyricist, Gerry Goffin, were one of ... | More »
The Rolling Stones
Sticky Fingers Rolling Stones Records
SIDE ONE "Brown Sugar": It begins with some magical raunch chords on the right channel. In the tradition of great guitar intros ("All Day and All of the Night," "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown," and "Satisfaction" itself) it transfixes you: instant recognition, instant connection. Suddenly the electric guitar is joined by an acoustic guitar on the left channel, an acoustic that is merely strumming the chords that the electric is spitting out with such fury. It washes over the electric to no app... | More »
Black Sabbath
Paranoid Vertigo
A young girl's voice. She is dressed in a nun's habit. The boy turns and faces her. She proffers a chalice of cervical exudate and he drinks from it. She gets down on her knees and elbows, como peros, and tosses the nun's hem above her posterior. On each naked buttock is the scrawled sign of Ashirikas; "Fuck me, Rolf." The boy whips out a 10" personal vibrator, adorned in waterproof acrylics with the image of the Nazarene. He intones the words "nuk Khensu tenten nebu" and appro... | More »
Alice Cooper
Love It To Death
[It came on the radio in the late afternoon and from the first note it was right: Alice Cooper bringing it all back home again. God it's beautiful it is the most reassuring thing that has happened in this year of the Taylor Family...] Ever since they ceased to be the Nazz, a fairly normal Yardbirds/Who derivation in the manner of Count V, and became instead Frank Zappa's vision of American youth's sexual uncertainties gone berserk, Alice Cooper have endured more than their fai... | More »
Carly Simon
Carly Simon
If you are prone to scouting Woolworth's 89¢ record sales, you may someday come across a remaindered early Sixties minor masterpiece called The Simon Sisters (Kapp KS-3359). It's well worth buying. Lucy and Carly Simon had clear, almost identical madrigal club voices which they applied to folk songs, producing exquisite harmonies. After that first album, nothing was hear of the Simons except for a feeble rumor that Albert Grossman was planning to market Carly, the younger siste... | More »
Captain Beefheart
Mirror Man
Captain Beefheart still plays to a relatively minor following, but most of them believe, as I do, that he's one of the four or five unqualified geniuses to rise from the hothouses of American music in the Sixties, an innovator whose instinctive idiomatic syntheses and wildly original approach to composition and improvisation preview an era of profound changes in popular music. Statements like that would be extreme anywhere else, but only Cap has managed to fuse the loose ends of rock, ja... | More »
Music Reviews
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star ratingModern Vampires of the City -
star ratingRandom Access Memories -
star ratingLSXX: Last Splash: 20th Anniversary Edition
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star ratingThe Great Gatsby: Music From Baz Luhrmann’s Film -
star ratingMother -
star ratingTime
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