Other Disks Reviewed
–Nat “King” Cole, Birth of the Cole, 1938-1939 (CA) “These 1938 and 1939 recordings also show us how much of a singer Cole was as he stood on the threshold of his career. While the ballads put him on top, it was the rhythmic jive song that gave Cole his original musical identity…”
–The Cult, Sonic Temple (PP) “It’s enough to make a deaf person grimace, yet there’s something perversely addictive about this music, with its upfront aggression and its slow-motion orgasms of drums and guitars building to a raunchy climax.”
–The Cure, Disintegration (PP) “This is an album meant for solitary listening in the wee hours, after everyone else has gone to sleep. It actually sounds more ghostly and surreal at low volume.”
–Dion, Yo Frankie (RG) “Dion’s return to secular music is good news, but (this album) shows that he has yet to regain his stride.”
–Great White, Twice Shy (RG) “…sounds like a band that’s been on the road too long.”
–Howard Jones, Cross That Line (PP) “The draggy tempos and enervated music here suggest a crisis of the spirit for the normally chipper Jones.”
–The Judds, River of Time (AN) “…surpasses any of the Judds’ previous albums in its range of styles, musical inventiveness, and vocal integrity. If one of its selling points is that producer Brent Maher has reigned (sic) in Wynonna’s free-for-all vocal gibberish, the trade-off seems to be a dearth of memorable songs…”
–Gisela May, Brecht-Weill Songs (RH) “…essentially an actress who sings—but on pitch and with innate musicality. She brings fire and bite to Brecht’s texts, but she also knows just when to soften a word or a tone for telling effect…”
–Sarah McLachlan, Vox (AN) “The password here is ‘feeling,’ and in McLachlan’s ‘wish I’d been born in time for the Sixties’ world, feeling is everything. Unfortunately for those of us who were around the first time those years spun by, listening to her album is like being sentenced to relive the most insipid parts of the decade.”
–Buck Owens, Hot Dog! (AN) “It’s still the kind of stuff I would have hated twenty-five years ago, but the trick is that while Owens hasn’t changed that much in twenty-five years, I have, and I like it.”
–Mica Paris, So Good (PG) “It seems that every few months a talented new soul singer comes out of England to challenge stateside artists…(w)ith her kind of talent, Paris will be a welcome visitor on these shores anytime.”
–Dolly Parton, White Limozeen (AN) “…to long-time Parton fans who have watched the deterioration of her expressive musical gifts, the album is also the mournful cry of a woman who has strayed so far from the path that she is apparently unable to find her way home again.”
–Roachford, S/T (PG) “But what’s really special is that the music is an arresting, original amalgam of blues, rock, and rhythm-and-blues—the original styles, not the hybrids of recent fusion.”
–The Swimming Pool Q’s, World War Two Point Five (PP) “The songs are disarmingly coherent vignettes of a society possessing immense wealth but no solid moral core, and the frustration of trying to cope with things that make no sense any way they’re looked at.” |
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