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The only disks taken on in this issue that found their way to my collection are the two Best of the Month selections. My interest is piqued by what I’m reading now about a few other albums from thirty-eight years ago, though. |
Article
Alanna Nash Talks to Nanci Griffith
We get the typical arc-of-the-career-to-date summary—in this case, a progression from having recorded her first four folk-oriented LPs on indie-label Philo/Rounder to a move to MCA with an accompanying modest swing toward country. At this moment, she’d released two albums on MCA, with the live One Fair Summer Evening to be recorded later in the summer, and the poppier Storms (where I would first encounter her) the following year. “I don’t really have a desire to be a big country star. I just want to play honest, unmanufactured music, and I have this base support group around the country that’s already there. So if it doesn’t work out, I can always go back.” |
One side note: Nash mentions Griffith also aspires to be a novelist, noting that Two of a Kind Heart “recently found a publisher.” I’m finding today that it was actually published posthumously, three years ago. |
This month’s reviewers are Chris Albertson, Phyl Garland, Ron Givens, Roy Hemming, Alanna Nash, Mark Peel, and Steve Simels. |
Best of the Month
–Jane Siberry, The Walking (AN) “Her songs are not so much musical offerings as they are interlocking pastiches, some of her lyrics diving off into conversational aside but not incorporated into the performance…a totally unorthodox, pleasantly bewildering experience.” I learned about this album from Rolling Stone; like Nash, I couldn’t quite get into all of its songs, but the highlights are very, very high.
–Talking Heads, Naked (SS) “…one of the most fascinating, if initially rather conservative-sounding, records of this fascinating band’s career…If anything, Naked suggests that the Heads, for all their vaunted stylistic foraging, have reached the point at which they can be said to have created their own genre, much as has happened to, say, Bob Dylan.” |
Featured Reviews
–The Byrds, Never Before (SS) “…the very model of how this kind of archival project should be done…providing convincing evidence that at their peak (1965-67), the Byrds were not only the premier American band of the day but one of the most innovative and influential bands ever (just ask Tom Petty or R.E.M).”
–Nick Lowe, Pinker and Prouder than Previous (SS) “There’s an unfinished feel to many of the tracks, and the lyrics seem mundane, devoid of irony, tossed off. Anyet…and yet, something here stays with you…Just when we’d least expect it, and with supreme understatement, he’s made his best record in years.”
–Danny Wilde, Any Man’s Hunger (MP) “Wilde just doesn’t seem to be able to write a dull song. The verses unfold easily against chunking guitar riffs, then choruses unlease their monster hooks—two- and three-part harmonies, cascading rhythm-guitar chords, and a churning bass-and-drum back beat…They go so far with just the basic tools of rock-and-roll that you wonder why more bands haven’t figured out how to do it.” |
Other Disks Reviewed
–AC/DC, Blow Up Your Video (MP) “…recycles Lynyrd Skynyrd-style electric blues, a point of departure that makes the album seem lazier than it really is.”
–Clannad, Sirius (RG) “Unfortunately, the production itself overpowers the five-piece band’s ethnic purity with dense arrangements played by a bunch of additional, hyperactive musicians.”
–Rosemary Clooney, The Lyrics of Johnny Mercer (CA) “Rosemary Clooney is in great shape, the band consists of some of today’s brightest young jazz stars, and the lyrics are all by Johnny Mercer. Is there any need to say more?”
–Lita Ford, Lita (RG) “Lita Ford is the kind of woman that male hard rockers sing about: blonde, attractive, shapely, barely dressed…The material itself sounds like it could have been written and performed by just such a group of guys.”
–Maureen Forrester, From Kern to Sondheim—Great American Theater Songs (RH) “…may help give crossover a good name again after some of the recent fiascos by other concert artists.”
–Johnny Hates Jazz, Turn Back the Clock (RG) “Along with some of the same commercial qualities as (George) Michael, but without his forced, almost desperate intensity, the trio has some of the cool restraint of such faux-jazz pop groups as Everything But the Girl, A]Sade, and Swing Out Sister.”
–George Jones, Too Wild Too Long (AN) “In concept alone…an exemplary commercial country album—entertaining, touching, memorably amusing, and nicely paced. The fact that it also has George Jones makes it nearly perfect.”
–The Kinks, Live/The Road (MP) “The performances in this album are so energized, so driven, they make the mediocre material seem good and the good stuff seem legendary.”
–Bonnie Koloc, With You on My Side (AN) “In the early Seventies Bonnie Koloc was, by some estimates, as integral to the Chicago folk scene as John Prine and Steve Goodman…an album of quiet power and sophistication that should earn Koloc a whole new set of fans without alienating the old ones.”
–Ted Nugent, If You Can’t Lick ‘Em…Lick ‘Em (MP) “Nugent’s guitar has been in hibernation for ten years, but his playing sounds exactly the same now as it did on Cat Scratch Fever—and it was stale then.”
–View from the Hill, In Time (PG) “Its music is being touted as a blend of soul and pop, but the style is more reminiscent of the sort of airy, folk-flavored music prevalent in the Sixties.” |
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