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Indigo Girls: Staring Down the Brilliant Dream

June 29, 2010 /


RIYL: Brandi Carlisle, Shawn Colvin, Patty Griffin

Throughout their 20-plus-year career, the Indigo Girls have maintained not only their integrity as songwriters, but they have managed to consistently produce music that pierces the hearts of their listeners. While the music industry may have forgotten about Emily Sailers and Amy Ray, their loyal fans have stuck with them as they’ve branched out from an indie folk act to incorporate blues, Americana and straight-up rock and roll into their sound. While the sound may have changed, one thing that has remained intact after all of these years is the Girls’ immaculate harmonies. They still sound pitch perfect and as beautiful as they did the first time we all heard “Closer to Fine” back in 1989.

On Staring Down the Brilliant Dream, the group’s new double-CD live album, those famous harmonies are front and center. Recorded during their 2006-2009 tours, there are 31 songs on this album, each hand-selected by the Grammy-winning duo. Those of you thinking that you could never sit through two CDs of the Indigo Girls, their acoustic guitars, and a concert hall full of their adoring fans, fear not; the Indigo Girls are accompanied by their killer band, with the band members filtering in as needed. Full band arrangements of “Shame on you” and “Fill It Up Again” are lovely examples of Ray and Sailers acting as expert bandleaders, while “Fly Away” and “Watershed” show that the Indigo Girls can still captivate a crowd with just two instruments.

Highlights on Disc One include the haunting “Ozilline,” a rousing cover of Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, “ featuring guest vocals by Brandi Carlisle, and a superb rendition of “Kid Fears,” with Three5Human lead singer, Trina Meade, taking the Michael Stipe solo. This version of the song from their debut album rivals the original recording in it power. Disc Two highlights are the rollicking “Rock and Roll Heaven’s Gate,” the breathtaking “Fugitive,” and the great ‘fuck off’ song, “Become You.” Sound quality on Staring Down the Brilliant Dream is outstanding. The clarity of the vocals and the separation between the instruments gives you the full effect of being at the venue and hearing the Indigo Girls live.

Fans of the Indigo Girls are going to buy this album regardless of this review, but for those of you who’ve never experienced one of the Girls’ concerts, or for those of you who stopped listening to the group after their early ’90s heyday, Staring Down the Brilliant Dream is a fine way to become (re)acquainted with the band. (IG Recordings/Vanguard Records, 2010)

Official Indigo Girls website
Click to buy Staring Down the Brilliant Dream at Amazon


Alternative, Americana, CD Reviews, Concert CDs, Folk, Vocal

Scissor Sisters: Night Work

June 28, 2010 /


RIYL: The Bee Gees, Hercules and Love Affair, Giorgio Moroder

The Scissor Sisters were putting the finishing touches on their third album when a funny thing happened – they realized they hated it. So they scrapped it and started from scratch. The Beatles did this once; the end result was Abbey Road. Then again, Duran Duran did this too, and the end result was Red Carpet Massacre. Results, as you can see, may vary.

Scissor_Sisters_06

Thankfully, this is no massacre. Night Work contains all of the band’s trademarks – the discotastic bass lines, the finest falsetto work since the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack – but it comes with an extra dose of sleaze. This is easily the randiest album the Sisters have made to date (“Take me in front of my parents,” singer Ana Matronic begs at one point), yet strangely it also contains some of their most conservative songs. It’s as if the band has recognized that they will not achieve the superstar status in the States that they enjoy in the UK and Australia and decided to let their freak flag fly – for all the advancements we’ve made as a society in terms of gay rights, the Hot 100 is downright hostile to openly gay acts, certain American Idol winners excepted – but still gave it one last shot by writing a couple songs that sounded “less gay.” It should surprise no one that those are the album’s weakest moments.

That’s right, anthemic Killers wannabe “Fire with Fire,” we’re looking in your direction. Besides containing one of the laziest choruses singer Jake Shears has ever written (it basically repeats ‘fire’ and ‘desire’ over again), the song is like a rented tux, with the band getting dressed up for an event they’d rather not attend. Even odder is the title track, which sounds like a standard Scissor Sisters song but tries a little too hard to sound like a standard Scissor Sisters song. With those two songs out of the way by track three, the album takes off from there, from the ultra-funky “Any Which Way” to the Kraftwerk-riffing “Something Like This.” Shears even does a remarkably effective Chris Difford impression on the rockin’ “Harder You Get,” but the album’s final two tracks are its finest. “Nightlife” is fast but moody and sports the album’s best chorus, while “Invisible Light,” which features a spoken-word interlude from Sir Ian McKellen, builds into a dizzying, Trevor Horn-style climax like a next-gen “Welcome to the Pleasuredome.”

Night Work is a lean, mean dancing machine of an album, eschewing the theatrical element from their earlier work in favor of full-on disco bliss. All bands should be required by law to nearly implode if it results in more albums like this. (Downtown 2010)

Scissor Sisters MySpace page
Click to buy Night Work from Amazon

Artists, CD Reviews, Dance, Funk, Pop

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

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