Month: June 2010 (Page 2 of 9)

The Dixie Chicks: Playlist: The Very Best of the Dixie Chicks

June 28, 2010 /


RIYL: Keith Urban, Faith Hill, Sheryl Crow, The Eagles

A cynic might say that this best-of collection by the Dixie Chicks was thrown together so that the group (which consists of sisters Martie Maguire and Emily Robison, and lead singer Natalie Maines) would have something to sell fans during their tour with the Eagles this summer. However, the press release assures us that these songs were handpicked by the Chicks, implying that they were deeply involved with the collection.

I suppose. I get the feeling that by “handpicked,” the record label means that the ladies used their hands to text “yes” when the list of songs popped up in their email boxes from their record company reps. Despite the green packaging (liner notes and song credits only appear in PDF form as extras on the CD), Playlist (which is actually a line of “best of” collections that Sony BMG releases for veteran artists) is more or less the same as one of those cheap cassette collections you find at every truck strop across our great nation.  Still, as this is the first major collection of hits by the Dixie Chicks, it’s worth looking at.

Playlist is arranged chronologically, pulling tracks from the Dixie Chicks’ four studio albums featuring Maines at the front of the band (there were two earlier incarnations of the band before her).  Two tracks from Wide Open Spaces, including the lovely “You Were Mine;” three songs from their excellent sophomore album, Fly, including  Patty Griffin’s painful “Let Him Fly;” three songs from the multi-platinum Home, including the superb, shuffling “Truth No. 2” (also penned by Griffin); and four from the 2007 Grammy-winning Album of the Year, Taking the Long Way, most notably “Not Ready to Make Nice,” their angry response to the backlash they received for comments made at the build-up of the Iraq invasion.

Each track is crisp, clean and slickly produced. Each production is so flawless, it’s difficult to distinguish which album any of these tracks come from. Whatever growth these ladies display comes through in their lyrics rather than fiery studio performances. Nonetheless, all of the songs are excellent, except maybe their rather bland cover of Fleetwood Mac’s classic “Landslide,” however, that just may be my personal preference for the sparse Buckingham/Nicks version.

At 12 songs, the only surprises here are the omissions of several of their top ten country hits like “I Can Love You Better,” the group’s first top ten hit from 1997, “Without You,” which was a number one hit, and “Travelin’ Soldier,” also a number one hit song, and perhaps one of their finest recordings.

Still, the casual Dixie Chicks fan uninterested in downloading individual tracks can get the entire MP3 album for just $5 at Amazon, leaving plenty of money left over to round out the collection of missing songs. Playlist definitely offers a taste of the impeccably played and sung music of the Dixie Chicks, a reminder of why they’re one of the best country acts around. Hopefully a new album is coming soon. If not, one would hope  a more genuine greatest hits collection, one that includes all of their hits, as well as some samples of their wildly popular live act. (2010 Sony/BMG)

Official Dixie Chicks webpage
Click to buy Playlist: The Very Best of the Dixie Chicks from Amazon

CD Reviews, Country, Pop

Summerfest: Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers w/ZZ Top

June 26, 2010 /

Virtually every summer, my wife and I make the trek from our home in California to Wisconsin for Milwaukee’s Summerfest. I grew up in a nearby suburb and the 11-day Summerfest is an institution. With 11 stages, 700 bands and around a million visitors, it’s one of the largest, if not the largest music fest in the world.

Kicking off our 2010 Summerfest was Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers with special guest ZZ Top. Tom Petty has always been a ‘safe bet’ in terms of an entertaining concert experience. His set list is consistently loaded with familiar hits and with his 35 years and 15 albums, he has a large oeuvre to draw from. Last night, he started off strong with “Listen to Her Heart,” “You Don’t Know How It Feels,” “I Won’t Back Down,” and “Free Fallin'” before covering Fleetwood Mac’s “Oh Well.” The band played two more big hits — “Mary Jane’s Last Dance” and “Breakdown” — before moving through four tracks from their new album, Mojo. From a pure concertgoer standpoint, this setup gave attendees an opportunity to head to the concession stand without missing any major songs. Some artists will try to keep fans in their seats by sprinkling in new music with old hits, and it can make it difficult to know when to hit the proverbial head.

After the Mojo interlude, the band closed the main set with an acoustic version of “Learning to Fly,” a blistering rendition of “Don’t Come Around Here No More” and the tried but true “Refugee.” As an encore, they played “Running Down a Dream,” “Mystic Eyes” (Them cover) and “American Girl.”

ZZ Top opened, and while they’re getting on in years, they still sound great. The underrated “Waitin’ for the Bus / Jesus Just Left Chicago” medley was a personal highlight, but all of their ’80s singles (“Legs,” “Sharp Dressed Man,” “Cheap Sunglasses,” etc.) sound better in person without all the crappy production so prevalent in that era. They closed with “La Grange” and “Tush,” so it turned out to be a very satisfying greatest hits setlist.


Photo from fOTOGLIF

Artists, Concerts

The Divine Comedy: Bang Goes the Knighthood

June 24, 2010 /


RIYL: Scott Walker, Pulp, Belle & Sebastian

After a three-year silence, Neil Hannon has suddenly reached Jack White levels of productivity. He and fellow Irishman Thomas Walsh made last year’s dead-brilliant, ELO-riffing Duckworth Lewis Method (the only concept album about cricket you’ll ever need), and a mere ten months later, Hannon has returned with yet another album, this one under his day job the Divine Comedy. It should surprise no one familiar with Hannon’s work that he has once again made a superb record.

Bang Goes the Knighthood boasts the same chipper tone as his last album, 2006’s Victory for the Comic Muse, though the first step out of the gate is a measured one. “Down in the Street Below” is half-ballad, half-baroque pop, exploring people’s tendencies to lose themselves in the hustle and bustle. Walsh delivers his trademark honey-dipped backing vocals on the scathing “Complete Banker” (“Maybe this recession is a blessing in disguise / We can build a much much bigger bubble the next time”), but the song that will have Gen X alt-rockers chuckling is “At the Indie Disco,” Hannon’s love letter to the Stone Roses and Wannadies, which finishes with one of his best couplets ever: “She makes my heart beat the same way / As at the start of ‘Blue Monday’ / Always the last song that they play.”

The one song that might have people scratching their heads – and will give Anglophobes a scrorching case of hives – is “Can You Stand on One Leg,” which is what “Mack the Knife” might have sounded like had it been written by Monty Python, and ends with Hannon holding an obscenely high falsetto note for 28 seconds. (You read that right.) It’s a tough one to swallow, trying just a bit to hard to be silly. He redeems himself on the next, and final track “I Like,” a driving love letter to his wife about the things he, yes, likes about her. It’s all just another day at the office for Hannon; pristine ork pop with smarts for days. Even better are the extra tracks that come with the download version, where Hannon engages in some oddball electronic experimentation and Kraftwerk sampling clearly borne from the Duckworth Lewis Method sessions. He’s great the way he is, but if Hannon chose to go in that direction next time around, he would get no argument here. (101 Distribution 2010)

Divine Comedy MySpace page
Click to buy Bang Goes the Knighthood from Amazon

Adult Contemporary, Artists, CD Reviews, Melodramatic, Pop

N.A.S.A.: The Big Bang

June 24, 2010 /


RIYL: Gorillaz, Afrika Bambaataa, The Neptunes

N.A.S.A.’s 2009 debut, The Spirit of Apollo, was one of the freshest, most creative hip-hop records to come out in years, a high-proof blend of booty-shaking beats (courtesy of partners DJ Zegon and Sam Spiegel), dizzying rhymes (from an astounding list of guest MCs that included Kanye West, Chuck D, Chali 2na, Gift of Gab, and Del tha Funkee Homosapien), and sharp pop hooks (with help from guests like David Byrne, Tom Waits, Lykke Li, Karen O, Santigold, M.I.A., and George Clinton). Those are some stuffed parentheses, but they only touch the surface of what Apollo has to offer; in the post-mashup era, it illuminates the fertile possibilities of cross-pollination and a healthy disregard for genre boundaries.

It’s therefore unsurprising – though still disappointing – that N.A.S.A.’s follow-up represents such a substantial comedown. The Big Bang is a remix project, and as such, it presented all kinds of strong possibilities; after all, we’re talking about a subgenre whose best-selling titles include Bobby Brown’s Dance!…Ya Know It! and Paula Abdul’s Shut Up and Dance, so the bar is set pretty low. Unfortunately, although The Big Bang is every bit as danceable as anyone could hope, it’s crippled by a narrow focus: Rather than remixing all (or even most) of Apollo, Bang‘s 17 tracks include four versions of “Gifted” and three of “Whachadoin?” – and it completely skips some of Apollo‘s strongest songs, like the David Byrne/Chali 2na/Gift of Gab collision “The People Tree.”

Still, it’s worth noting that all the songs being remixed here are solid; if you’re going to chew up most of an album with different versions of the same stuff, it’s definitely better to start with strong raw material. And of the two new tracks, the Maximum Hedrum/Barbie Hatch collaboration “I Wanna Be Your Lover,” with its breathy vocals and Tom Tom Club synths, is nearly worth the price of admission by itself. During the lead-up to The Big Bang‘s release, Squeak E. Clean has been in Ethiopia, recording traditional music for the next N.A.S.A. project, which suggests that even if this curious piece of between-album project represents a creative lull, they haven’t run out of barriers to ignore. (Spectrophonic Sound 2010)

N.A.S.A. MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Hip Hop

Rooney: Eureka

June 23, 2010 /


RIYL: Weezer, Butch Walker, Fountains of Wayne

It’s pretty rare these days that a band on a major label or an offshoot of a major has free reign to make the record they want. But that’s just what we have on our hands with Los Angeles-based rock band Rooney on their third album, Eureka. They wrote the material and produced it, and the result is a stunning set that is as catchy as anything out there today. The arrangements and production on Eureka are such that the melodies jump out of speakers – and while there is a distinct resemblance to Weezer, for the most part there are no formulaic songs on this album.

Rooney_01

You know how they used to call Budweiser a good drinking beer? Eureka is a good listening album. Seriously. And Rooney shines equally on upbeat pop numbers like “Holdin’ On” or “All or Nothing;” on funky ear candy like “I Can’t Get Enough;” or even darker, melodic, piano-driven tracks such as “Only Friend” and “Stars and Stripes.” In fact, try to find a bad track on Eureka. It makes you wonder why bands are forced to write with the Kara DioGuardis of the world or to be produced by label hires that make everything sound the same. It’s sometimes best to just let them be a band, just like Rooney. (California Dreaming/Warner Bros.)

Rooney MySpace Page

Alternative, Artists, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, News, Pop, Power Pop, Rock

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