album reviews
Bob Dylan
New Morning Columbia
Well, friends, Bob Dylan is back with us again. I don't know how long he intends to stay, but I didn't ask him. Didn't figure it was any of my business. Put simply, New Morning is a superb album. It is everything that every Dylan fan prayed for after Self Portrait. The portrait on the cover peers out boldly, just daring you to find fault with it, and I must admit that if there is a major fault on the album, I haven't found it. Nor do I care to. This one comes easy, and th... | More »
Wilson Pickett
Wilson Pickett In Philadelphia
Wilson Pickett meets Gamble & Huff, the Philadelphia-based soulwriting and production consortium, and the results are mixed. Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff and their musical staff (including Bunny Sigler and Ugene Dozier) wrote, arranged and produced all the tunes on the album. They also did all the studio instrumental work save the horns and strings. The album's mighty consistently funky — Pickett and the rhythm section work well together — but the horns and strings aren'... | More »
Mott the Hoople
Mad Shadows
The cover of this album, which is a photograph of something resembling a Rorschach ink blot, is highly symbolic of the music inside and of the listener's response to it. The point of such an ink blot, after all, is its deliberate ambiguity, which allows (or forces) the viewer to see it in whatever he wants to see. Mott the Hoople is itself something of an ink blot, this time around: possibly the reason I haven't been able to decide whether or not I really like this album is that the... | More »
Aretha Franklin
Spirit in the Dark
When I was an innocent 17-year-old freshman, a black grad student I met invited me to play guitar at this "discussion group" he "chaired" at a downtown Pittsburgh "hall." Well, that sounded good enough, so one evening I went to the address he gave me and found myself the only white person — youngest to boot — in the middle of a Pittsburgh-ghetto-preaching and shouting non-denominational-holy rollering one-preacher-30-parishoner-store-front church. My grad student friend was the o... | More »
Elton John
Elton John Uni
Given that his voice combines the nasal sonority of James Taylor with the rasp of Van Morrison with the slurry intonation of M. Jagger with the exaggerated twang of Leon Russell; that, in this age during which most everyone seems content to sing unison with moronic little guitar riffs, he writes attractive melodies; that the lyrics devised by his songwriting partner appear on first glance to be Genuine Poetry; that, while the standard procedure for the modern singing songwriter is to either p... | More »
The Stooges
Funhouse Elektra
Ah, good evening my good friend. Good evening and welcome to the Stooges' Funhouse. We are so glad you could come. Oh, do not be alarmed, dear one, if things should seem a trifle unusual ... or, as the natives say, "oh-mind" ... at first. You'll doubtless get used to it. Perhaps, you may even begin to ... like the things you see. Why do you look so pale, my friend? Why, that's only tenor saxophonist Steve Mackay vigorously fucking drummer Scott Asheton, dog-style. Steve is a n... | More »
Otis Redding and the Jimi Hendrix Experience
Historic Performances Recorded at the Monterey International Pop Festival Reprise
This album has to be judged as three-year-old music or simply as a most welcome souvenir. If you were there, you'll probably like it more than if you weren't. But even if you weren't, you'll find some very satisfying music by two of our most gifted artists. I'm not going to go into why you'll probably like it more if you were there; see the movie. I was there, and I like it a lot. Starting with the best, the side with Hendrix is devastating. What's so devas... | More »
Neil Young
After The Gold Rush WEA
Neil Young devotees will probably spend the next few weeks trying desperately to convince themselves that After The Gold Rush is good music. But they'll be kidding themselves. For despite the fact that the album contains some potentially first rate material, none of the songs here rise above the uniformly dull surface. In my listening, the problem appears to be that most of this music was simply not ready to be recorded at the time of the sessions. It needed time to mature. On the album ... | More »
Quicksilver Messenger Service
Just for Love
The rock and roll drought of 1970 shows no signs of letting up as summer comes to a close. A few good records have been released here and there but on the whole things have been pretty bad. These two albums show the problems even the best established bands are having. Quicksilver and the Steve Miller Band have been two of the most consistent groups in the country over the past couple of years but these two new releases don't come near the excellence of either group's past work. On ... | More »
The Beach Boys
Sunflower Brother/Reprise
After a long period of recovery, mediocrity, and general disaster, the Beach Boys have finally produced an album that can stand with Pet Sounds: the old vocal and instrumental complexity has returned and the result largely justifies the absurd faith some of us have had that the Beach Boys were actually still capable of producing a superb rock album — or, more precisely, a suberb rock muzak album. "Add Some Music to Your Day"; hip supermarkets might program this album for contented brows... | More »
Music Reviews
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