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Gettin' In Over My Head
For the Brian Wilson faithful, the hard part is over when the wizard of SoCal releases an album. For those who need more than cheery, expert melodies and arrangements from on high to be satisfied, for skeptics not satisfied with agreeable guest spots from Eric Clapton, Elton John and Paul McCartney, and for hardheads who […]
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Streetcore
When Joe Strummer was around to take for granted, most of his solo projects seemed sadly desultory: Strummer's passion was never in question, but his band the Mescaleros suggested a toy Clash with more world-music spice. In his unexpected absence, however, their 2001 second album, Global A Go-Go, sounds stronger, more plugged into current conundrums, […]
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Radiohead Uplift Rapturous Crowd at the Tweeter Center
Thom Yorke and Co. deliver all the paranoia their fans could hope for, and much more
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Tour De France Soundtracks
No question that Kraftwerk are shackled to the past. Their original "Tour de France" single came out twenty years ago, and four of the twelve tracks on their first new album in a dozen years are (clever) versions of it. But on records such as Trans-Europe Express, masterminds Ralf HŸtter and Florian Schneider mapped out […]
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Greendale
Neil Young's long, rambling road of a career has one constant: Compelled to try something new, he impulsively sidetracks into unknown territory, which is never as unknown as he thinks it is. Greendale offers ten songs with interlocking characters and story lines and comes as a CD, a DVD movie and a live performance. The […]
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Comes A Time
This review originally ran in Rolling Stone as part of a series that looked back at classic albums. Quiet and sweetly melodic, Neil Young's Comes a Time felt like folly in punk-drunk 1978 but has since become one of his most timeless and easy-to-love works, a brief but immaculate CD. It's a magic fluke in […]
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Greatest Hits
You got questions? ? This collection's got answers. Why were Blondie the only hitmakers to come from the original CBGB punk scene? Were they a mere catchy-tune factory with hip aspirations, or something more? Greatest Hits shows that, first, Blondie delivered a cool rush of pleasure that other Seventies underground types couldn't match. The group's […]
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Sean-Nos Nua
Sinead O'Connor decided to be true to the title (which means "old style but new") of her collection of traditional Irish tunes by trying "to 'sexy' them up" with bits of Jamaican rhythm and electronic tweaks. But Sean-N-s Nua gets plenty sexy just when she wraps her warm-blooded voice around a fine old melody. Fiddles […]
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Live at the Star Club, Hamburg [Bear Family]
Live At The Star Club, Hamburg is not an album, it's a crime scene: Jerry Lee Lewis slaughters his rivals in a thirteen-song set that feels like one long convulsion. Recorded April 5th, 1964, this is the earliest and most feral of Lewis' concert releases from his wilderness years, after he was banished from the […]
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Night and Day
An all-instrumental album by Willie Nelson and his road band? Sounds strange — but it's just traditionalism. When Nelson was just another Nashville songwriter in the early 1960s, instrumental country albums were not uncommon, done by studio hotshots like Chet Atkins or sometimes crack backup bands like Buck Owens' Buckaroos. The hippest collections offered country-toned […]
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