Author: Jeff Giles (Page 10 of 41)

Was (Not Was): Pick of the Litter 1980-2010

February 18, 2010 / Jeff Giles

RIYL: Tom Tom Club, Kid Creole & the Coconuts, the Boneshakers

In a perfect world, Was (Not Was) would be celebrating its 30th anniversary with something other than a vault-polishing compilation on a label known for reissuing old K-Tel records and The Best of the Five Man Electrical Band – but then, this is a band that has always reveled in the odd and inappropriate, so it’s only fitting that the band is celebrating its most recent milestone by giving us Pick of the Litter 1980-2010. It isn’t as good as a new album, but as far as reheated leftovers go, Litter ain’t bad, either in terms of breadth (19 tracks, culled from across the band’s entire catalog) or selection (five non-album mixes, including the 12” version of “Wheel Me Out” and the 7” version of “Out Come the Freaks”). Was (Not Was) has also never received a proper anthology, so this set actually fills a need for that small subset of the population that has warped enough taste to appreciate the band’s cracked dance music, but has somehow never bought any of its albums. A microscopic market, maybe, but Pick of the Litter still hangs together better than it has any right to, considering it contains vocal performances from Mel Torme, Leonard Cohen, Kim Basinger, and Ozzy Osbourne – and still makes plenty of room for the peerless Sir Harry Bowens and Sweet Pea Atkinson, whose dash of grit was always the cornerstone of the band’s appeal. Novelty tracks aside, Was (Not Was) helped keep soul music alive in the ‘80s. If you’ve ever wanted to know more about those “Walk the Dinosaur” guys, here’s the perfect place to start learning. (Micro Werks 2010)

Was (Not Was) MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock, Soul

K-Tel Pick of the Litter Sir Harry Bowens Sweet Pea Atkinson Was (Not Was)Was (Not Was) review

Kelley Ryan: Twist

February 10, 2010 / Jeff Giles

RIYL: astroPuppees, Nina Gordon, Juliana Hatfield

As slight and pretty as a sundress on the first day of June, Kelley Ryan’s Twist finds the astroPuppees frontwoman making a deliberate shift away from what she calls “the rock boy way” of doing things, and toward a gentler sound, driven largely by acoustic guitars and layers of lush harmonies. Ryan’s in good company here, too: She recorded Twist with Don Dixon and Marti Jones, drafted Van Dyke Parks to lend string arrangements to a pair of tracks, and dug into the Beck songbook for a cover of “Lost Cause.” All solid marks in Twist’s favor, to be certain, and when the album lives up to its pedigree – as on the shimmering, gently descending opening track, “About a Girl” – it feels like a long-lost artifact from the golden mid ‘80s era of jingle-jangly singer-songwriter pop. Too often, though, Ryan uses her stylistic shift as a license to hide behind arrangements that don’t do much besides lie there and look pretty, or rhyme “love” with “above.” The end result is an album that might leave you feeling like you’ve just woken up from a pleasant dream – it’s soft, and warm, and no more than five minutes after it’s over, you won’t remember a thing. It’ll add an interesting wrinkle for astroPuppees fans, but there’s no shortage of similar-sounding records, and for anyone who isn’t already familiar with Ryan’s work, this really isn’t enough of a Twist. (Manatee Records 2010)

Kelley Ryan MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Pop

astroPuppees Don Dixon Headlines Kelley Ryan Marti Jones Van Dyke Parks

Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds: Live in Las Vegas

February 9, 2010 / Jeff Giles

RIYL: Dave Matthews, Dave Matthews Band, owning multiple versions of the same song

Record labels have always been eager to sell music fans repackaged goods, and since the dawn of the CD era, the marketplace has been more flooded than ever with remixes, so-called “deluxe” versions, remasters, and all manner of different versions of the same thing. Still, even during a century that has brought us three different iterations of The Essential REO Speedwagon, Dave Matthews stands out as a mighty king of the leftover; since 1997, he’s released approximately 375 live albums, not counting the interminable Live Trax series, whose volumes now outnumber the population of Guam.

Adding to this towering stack of repetition is Live in Las Vegas, Matthews’ third double-disc live collaboration with guitarist Tim Reynolds. When the duo released Live at Luther College in 1999, it actually represented a bit of a nice departure for Matthews; the acoustic setting, while not altogether unfamiliar for his songs, added something different to tracks like “What Would You Say” and “Ants Marching.” But then came 2007’s Live at Radio City, which was essentially two more discs of the same thing, right down to the inclusion of four tracks that had been covered on Luther – and because Matthews’ fans will apparently never stop buying this stuff, he and Reynolds have returned for a third go-round.

Matthews is a prolific guy, but if you’ve already guessed that he’s running out of songs that he and Reynolds haven’t already covered, you’re correct: Just about half of Live in Las Vegas consists of songs that popped up on Luther or Radio City (or both). They toss in a few cuts from the Dave Matthews Band’s last studio album, Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King, as well as a “Kashmir” cover that starts off nifty before dissolving into masturbatory guitar noodling, but on the whole, this is two and a half hours of music you can hear on other albums – and much of it in a musical setting that isn’t appreciably different from what’s on offer here. Unless you’re a hardcore fan, you’ll be hard pressed to tell the difference.

But it’s the hardcore fans that keep lapping this stuff up, of course, which begs the question of at which point Matthews crosses over from dedicated live anthologist to crass exploiter. Really, the only truly interesting thing about Live in Las Vegas is that it exists – that Matthews knows he has plenty of fans who will be willing to buy it, or anything else he releases, no matter how many times they’ve heard it before. Given the extraordinary difficulty the industry has had selling records over the last decade, the RIAA should probably just pack it in and let Dave Matthews run the whole show. If he can sell people Live in Las Vegas, he can sell them anything. (RCA 2010)

Dave Matthews Band MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Rock

Dave Mattews & Tim Reynolds Dave Matthews Dave Matthews Band Headlines Tim Reynolds

Sade: Soldier of Love

February 5, 2010 / Jeff Giles

RIYL: Everything But the Girl, Basia, Anita Baker

Sade’s been releasing babymaking music for so long that the kids who were conceived to the strains of their first single, “Your Love Is King,” are old enough to have children of their own. You’d think they’d have run out of ideas by now – or, at the very least, run out of people willing to purchase their albums – but Sade’s last release, 2000’s Lovers Rock, actually sold more than its predecessor, 1992’s Love Deluxe.

That kind of longevity has always been exceedingly rare in pop music, especially for acts who, like Sade, tend to take a decade or so between releases – but then again, most artists don’t enjoy the kind of cool consistency Sade has displayed over the course of its career. From a certain point of view, you could say that if you’ve heard one Sade album you’ve heard them all; it’s probably more accurate, though, to say that the members of the band know exactly which kind of music they were born to make, and they simply play to their artistic strengths more strongly than most.

Whichever way you look at it, Sade’s sixth studio album is a lot like the five that came before it: Plenty of languid R&B, heavy on the machine-driven beats and moody synths, topped off with a little sax, a little guitar, and a whole lot of Sade Adu’s coolly smoky vocals. She doesn’t look or sound like she’s aged a day since 1984, which is exactly what Sade fans want to hear – you don’t listen to this music looking for radical change, you turn to it for comfort, and to hear the sound of impeccably crafted, grown-up lust. (Seriously, Adu is 51? This woman cannot be human.)

That said, there is a bit of change afoot on Soldier of Love – but just a bit, and it’s most noticeable on the strutting title track, which finds Adu’s lithesome vocals wafting above a booming beat, stabbing rhythm guitars, and martial percussion samples. Though still recognizably Sade, it’s the equivalent of a more restless band changing genres completely, which might be why the rest of the album is much more in line with the group’s previous work. For most other artists, this would sound like creative drought; for Sade, it’s as comfortable as falling back into the sheets. Long may she moan. (Epic 2010)

Sade MySpace page

Adult Contemporary, CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, R&B

Sade Sade Adu Sade review Sade Soldier of Love

David Sanborn: Only Everything

January 29, 2010 / Jeff Giles

RIYL: Hank Crawford, David “Fathead” Newman, Kirk Whalum

David Sanborn has used his recent move to Decca as an excuse to renew his focus on the music that inspired him as a kid: Only Everything, like 2008’s Here & Gone, functions as a sort of loose tribute to the Ray Charles blues axis, with particular emphasis on the work of sax players Hank Crawford and David “Fathead” Newman. It’s certainly a step in the right direction, given Sanborn’s history of burying his formidable talent under synth-powered smooth jazz (listen to most of his ‘80s output – or better yet, don’t) or just aimless, albeit impeccably performed, noodling (most of the ‘90s). But this is still David Sanborn we’re talking about, and although Only Everything is billed as a Hammond-heavy, rootsy jazz record, it really only lives up to that description in the context of Sanborn’s exceedingly polite discography. (It’s certainly a good deal more mannered than 1992’s Upfront, Sanborn’s last foray into Hammond territory.) The end result, for the most part, is an album of well-played covers that will leave you with an itch to dig out the originals – with the exception of the two vocal numbers, which are sure to be singles on every smooth jazz station around the country. It’s hard to understand why anyone thought it would be a good idea to have Joss Stone step up to the microphone for “Let the Good Times Roll,” or why you’d ask James Taylor to sing “Hallelujah I Love Her So,” but all parties responsible should be horsewhipped: Stone’s showoff performance is stuffed with unnecessary melisma, and Taylor’s about as ill-suited a vocalist as you could imagine for the Ray Charles songbook. Skip over those tracks, though, and you’ve got a fine, if frustratingly mild, addition to Sanborn’s catalog – and if you’re at all familiar with his work, “mild” is probably exactly what you’re looking for. (Decca 2010)

David Sanborn MySpace page

CD QuickTakes, CD Reviews, Jazz

David Fathead Newman David Sanborn David Sanborn Only Everything Hank Crawford Ray Charles