Music Reviews
A random selection of my CD reviews. From 1991-2001, I wrote well over 1,500 reviews for The Record, Canada’s weekly music industry magazine, and edited three times as many. My critiques, which generally lean towards generous praise and rarely go for the jugular, have also appeared in (among others) Vancouver Magazine, Teen Generation, Music Express, The Ottawa Revue and deep within the virtual pages of Amazon.com.
WESTERN LIVING
Sarah McLachlan Afterglow (Nettwerk/2003)
Our fair lady of Lilith surfaces with her first album of new songs in six years. No surprises, no major departures, and that’s just fine: The lush, richly detailed production is the stuff of a pre-Raphaelite fever dream and the lyrics are aflame with her favorite “into the fire” metaphors. As for The Voice, it remains an instrument of singular purity.
Nelly Furtado Folklore (DreamWorks/2004)
There’s a trace of her Cadboro Bay, B.C. roots here, notably one song (Saturdays) that references a teenage job at a Victoria motel. But Furtado, 25, is now a global star redefining worldbeat in her own likeness with this mature, thrillingly buoyant second album. Guest turns from New York’s classical moderne Kronos Quartet and banjo maestro Bela Fleck hint at Furtado’s ambition.
The Be Good Tanyas Chinatown (Nettwerk/2003)
The littlest birds still sing the prettiest songs, though on their second album the wonderful Vancouver-based trio is trilling a darker if no less melodious tune. Acclaimed in the U.K., beloved by neo-traditionalist folkies, they belong in your nest, too.
Bottleneck Late Nights, Early Mornings (Black Hen/2003)
Mercifully not another monochrome folk-roots band, this young quartet has a delightful split personality that keeps the music fresh and the listener guessing. Scott Smith’s numbers swing with lilting country and rock accents, while Robyn Kerrigan flashes blues, cabaret and Celtic influences on her equally sublime half of the disc. When the two team up to sing “You’ll Get By,” they even suggest a west coast answer to the classic recordings of Richard and Linda Thompson.
THE RECORD
Ekova Heaven's Dust (Six Degrees/Outside/2001)
One of the more entrancing worldbeat fusions of recent vintage, the Paris-based Ekova mixes the multilingual vocals of transplanted American Dierdre Dubois with the fiery acoustic work of a pair of North African musicians. There's a light dusting of electronic programming, too, but it's much more subtle than is the norm these days. Dubois is a wildly dexterous singer who fires off lightning-quick flurries of words (often in Arabic) that dissolve into chants, wails and sacred testimony. For their part, Mehdi Haddab and Arach Khalatbari bring on the casbah vibes with oud, kalimba, clarinet, cello and percussion.
Diana Krall When I Look in Your Eyes (Verve/Universal/2000)
The five marquee tracks here augment Krall's world-class trio with an orchestra conducted by the legendary Johnny Mandel. And with the Vancouver Island singer/pianist in typically sultry voice, standards like Let's Fall in Love, I've Got You under My Skin and Let's Face the Music and Dance haven't sounded this fresh and seductive in a long time. Krall is smiling on the cover of this elegantly packaged CD, and that's a pleasant about-face from her usual sullen pout. Even better, a similarly upbeat mood infuses a disc that will keep her at the peak of the jazz vocal game.
Steely Dan Two Against Nature (Giant/Warner/1999)
Older, ostensibly wiser and just as cranky, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan slip back into their classic sound without breaking a sweat. The result is an album that sounds like just another day at the office, which is too bad given that it has been 20 years since they last recorded under a name famously borrowed from author William Burroughs. Fagan's voice has held up well, the clinically sleek jazz/pop fusion is consistent with the latterday Aja/Gaucho period, and the lyrics exhibit the pretzel logic that disciples know and love; Cousin Dupree, for example, is a seemingly innocuous pop single, smooth and catchy, until one catches the menace beneath the deadpan vocals (“what's so strange about a down-home family romance?" pleads Dupree). Equally sardonic are What a Shame about Me, Almost Gothic and Gaslighting Abbie, all coolly rendered slices of tuneful black humour.
Radiohead OK Computer (Parlophone/EMI). If Syd had been an existentialist and Rogers Waters a devotee of Nietzsche, then perhaps the generation-spanning compasions with Pink Floyd being made by many at the moment would fit. Instead Radiohead is a force entirely unto itself, and the band’s third album – surely destined to rank as one of the decade’s best – is groundbreaking and flat-out fantastic. Paranoid Android, the first single, is likely too much of a stretch for mainstream rock programmers. But once the album hangs out in the upper reaches of the charts for a few months, radio can get behind Subterranean Homesick Alien or possibly Karma Police. This is tomorrow’s classic rock today, and it’s something rare and wonderful indeed.
Patricia Barber Companion (Blue Note/EMI/2000)
Last year's Modern Cool CD generated hot notices for this Chicago singer/pianist, who inhabits the same turf as Cassandra Wilson and Holly Cole. Now this live set (recorded last summer at the Green Mill, a fabled hometown bar where Al Capone once swilled bootleg whiskey) captures her sass and smarts in winning fashion. In the past she's set music to lyrics by e.e. cummings, Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolfe. Playing piano and Hammond B-3 organ, she retains her drop-dead poise even when remaking less literary fare like The Beat Goes On and Black Magic Woman. Her crack band--guitarist John McLean and percussionist Ruben Alvarez are standouts--shine on the instrumental Like JT, a Barber original dedicated to Jackie Terrasson. And for the woman's sense of humour, check If This Isn't Jazz . . . , where she poses a series of questions: "Is this the real thing, or is it a fake?/Is this smoke in my lungs, or is this a lifestyle mistake?/Will the New York Times say I'm too white or I'm too black?/Shall I complicate the rhythm, shall I give the money back?" Nobody's asking for refunds at this point in her career.
The Rheostatics The Story of Harmelodia (Perimeter/Universal)
Child-like wonders never cease from the Rheostatics. Harry Nilsson's charmingly adult The Point (1971) is an apt reference for a "children's album" that is less for kids than for adults with an active imagination and taste for whimsy. The deluxe package carries the read-along storyline (which concerns the adventures of two characters named Dot and Bug in the Dr. Seussian world of Harmelodia). "It was soft and sad and it soothed her like a warm balm," Dot says at one point, and that sums up the album's mood neatly. The narration weaves through a typically quirky, invariably hummable numbers beginning with Martin Tielli's I Fab Thee--"a happy song," muses Dot, "that doesn't sound like it was dug out of a tomb"; it instantly joins the long list of Rheos tunes playing in high rotation on that great jukebox in the sky (if not commercial radio). Dave Bidini's I Am Drumstein and Tim Vesely's The Music Room end part one in giddy style, while part two is highlighted by the Munchkin-voiced Bee Sky Opus in Magenta and a pair of tracks sung by Sarah Harmer. Leaps of fancy like this are rare indeed, and it's rarer still that the "there's no place like home" conceit is rendered with such vital originality.
Fountains of Wayne Utopia Parkway (Scratchie/Warner)
The concept: A human-scale ode to growing up in suburbia that does for New Jersey what Pet Sounds did for southern California. The band: An acclaimed crew of pop-rock smart guys led by Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger. The songs: Tight, deliriously tuneful, harmony-laden and built for the ages. The likely result: A lost classic that will generate most of its sales as a reissue a decade hence. If you're a Big Star disciple, you'll get it immediately. And if you're not, just try to resist Amity Gardens, The Valley of Malls, A Fine Day for a Paradise (featuring Ron Sexsmith) or lead single Denise.
Len You Can't Stop the Bum Rush (WORK/Sony)
Full of in-jokes, between-song goofs, self-referential lyrics, vocordered vocals, Fat Boys imitations and loving shout-outs to their pals, this packs a lot of fun and games into 44 hip-hopping minutes. CHR is warming up fast to Steal My Sunshine, which rates as an early candidate as one of the summer's definitive tracks. Kraftwerk gets its due on the catchy The Hard Disk Approach, and it along with the riff-rocking Feelin' Alright and the '99 party anthem Cold Chillin' rate as future airplay candidates. Yes, there's as much silliness here as bona fide tunes, but Len is undeniably its own thing--and that's a rare quality that counts for plenty when you're dealing with the same demographic that worships the Beastie Boys.
Music Express
Cocteau Twins, Blue Bell Knoll (4AD/Vertigo)
Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie hail from a quiet town on Scotland's east coast. English is spoken thereabouts, with a porridge-thick accent to be sure, but English nonetheless. You'd never know it from their work as the Cocteau Twins, however. The pair has fashioned a sonic make-believe world highlighted by Fraser's wordless but hugely expressively vocals. There are passages on Blue Bell Knoll where you'd swear she was doing a Michael Stipe and deliberately mumbling the Queen's English. On "kissed out red floatboat" (all the titles share an e.e. cummings-style penchant for the lower case), for instance, she teases strange strings of syllables to life before tripping out to vistas unknown, caught up in her own ecstasies and essentially doing a good imitation of the mystic art of speaking in tongues. Unlike earlier albums, Guthrie has opted for more accessible musical settings that match post-punk rhythms with expertly crafted layers of acoustic and electric guitars. And whereas Fraser has long specialized in confessional, rather downbeat moods, here she delivers spring-morning epipanies on such glorious numbers as "spooning good singing gum" and other titles that are better heard than read.
That Petrol Emotion, End of the Millennium Psychosis Blues (Virgin)
The title speaks volumes. The third album from this Northern Irish quintet is a brutally realistic, state-of-the-weary-idealist address that's very much rooted in the morass of the here and now - not the vague hopes of a halcyon tomorrow nor selective remembrances of yesterday. "In any town I go there's a wreckage of desire, of feelings never hired or sold," sings Steve Mack with an audible sigh on the Pogues-like "Cellophane." "Feels like psychosis closing in, when all the world inspires is fright," he gasps on the album-closer "Under the Sky" as the band's trademark guitar maelstrom pulls the band down into a very dark place indeed. There are moments here - almost entirely musical - when the claustrophobic worldview lets in glorious light: "Candy Love Satellite" recalls TPE's scintillating UK debut, Manic Pop Thrill, while horns and funk guitars make "Grove Check" a likely follow-up to the 1987 club hit "Big Decision." Formed from the ashes of the marvelous Undertones (Ireland's candy coated answer to the Ramones), the band aimed from the start to provoke. Mission accomplished. Like its closest models in terms of dynamics and intent - Sly and the Family Stone's There's A Riot Going On and The Clash's Sandinista! - this is thorny, dangerous and unrelenting in all the right ways.
Teen Generation
Madonna True Blue (Sire, 1986)
Only cro-magnon knuckle-draggers dismiss Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone as a bubble-brain or manipulative tease. Instead, she's evolving into one of the best pop artists of her generation. Her track record to date proves she has class, talent, multi-media smarts and a seemingly endless supply of radio and dancefloor hits. True Blue, like her first two albums, is hits plus filler in the tradition of all chart-oriented pop albums. The keepers here are "Live to Tell," the free-choice anthem "Papa Don't Preach" and the sweaty dance number "White Heat." The title track is a homage to her husband, actor Sean Penn. While some tracks fall flat, nothing here can't be fixed with a remix or sparkling new video.
Split Enz History Never Repeats (A&M, 1987)
Before founding Crowded House, Neil Finn spent a decade with this collection of art-damaged loons from down under. His major contributions in a band led by his older brother Tim were guitar and keening vocals on the band's one major North American hit, "I Got You," a disarming piece of pop whimsy that kicks off this collection of memorable cuts from their five A&M albums. The band was possessed of a rare ability to squeeze innovative melodies into three-minute straight jackets, and then decorate them with subversive quirks and avant-garde twists. Such cleverness was one reason Split Enz never broke though commerically, of course. But if, like so many these days, you've fallen hard for Crowded House, you'll certainly appreciate the craftsmanship and art that shines throughout.
WESTERN LIVING
Sarah McLachlan Afterglow (Nettwerk/2003)
Our fair lady of Lilith surfaces with her first album of new songs in six years. No surprises, no major departures, and that’s just fine: The lush, richly detailed production is the stuff of a pre-Raphaelite fever dream and the lyrics are aflame with her favorite “into the fire” metaphors. As for The Voice, it remains an instrument of singular purity.
Nelly Furtado Folklore (DreamWorks/2004)
There’s a trace of her Cadboro Bay, B.C. roots here, notably one song (Saturdays) that references a teenage job at a Victoria motel. But Furtado, 25, is now a global star redefining worldbeat in her own likeness with this mature, thrillingly buoyant second album. Guest turns from New York’s classical moderne Kronos Quartet and banjo maestro Bela Fleck hint at Furtado’s ambition.
The Be Good Tanyas Chinatown (Nettwerk/2003)
The littlest birds still sing the prettiest songs, though on their second album the wonderful Vancouver-based trio is trilling a darker if no less melodious tune. Acclaimed in the U.K., beloved by neo-traditionalist folkies, they belong in your nest, too.
Bottleneck Late Nights, Early Mornings (Black Hen/2003)
Mercifully not another monochrome folk-roots band, this young quartet has a delightful split personality that keeps the music fresh and the listener guessing. Scott Smith’s numbers swing with lilting country and rock accents, while Robyn Kerrigan flashes blues, cabaret and Celtic influences on her equally sublime half of the disc. When the two team up to sing “You’ll Get By,” they even suggest a west coast answer to the classic recordings of Richard and Linda Thompson.
THE RECORD
Ekova Heaven's Dust (Six Degrees/Outside/2001)
One of the more entrancing worldbeat fusions of recent vintage, the Paris-based Ekova mixes the multilingual vocals of transplanted American Dierdre Dubois with the fiery acoustic work of a pair of North African musicians. There's a light dusting of electronic programming, too, but it's much more subtle than is the norm these days. Dubois is a wildly dexterous singer who fires off lightning-quick flurries of words (often in Arabic) that dissolve into chants, wails and sacred testimony. For their part, Mehdi Haddab and Arach Khalatbari bring on the casbah vibes with oud, kalimba, clarinet, cello and percussion.
Diana Krall When I Look in Your Eyes (Verve/Universal/2000)
The five marquee tracks here augment Krall's world-class trio with an orchestra conducted by the legendary Johnny Mandel. And with the Vancouver Island singer/pianist in typically sultry voice, standards like Let's Fall in Love, I've Got You under My Skin and Let's Face the Music and Dance haven't sounded this fresh and seductive in a long time. Krall is smiling on the cover of this elegantly packaged CD, and that's a pleasant about-face from her usual sullen pout. Even better, a similarly upbeat mood infuses a disc that will keep her at the peak of the jazz vocal game.
Steely Dan Two Against Nature (Giant/Warner/1999)
Older, ostensibly wiser and just as cranky, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan slip back into their classic sound without breaking a sweat. The result is an album that sounds like just another day at the office, which is too bad given that it has been 20 years since they last recorded under a name famously borrowed from author William Burroughs. Fagan's voice has held up well, the clinically sleek jazz/pop fusion is consistent with the latterday Aja/Gaucho period, and the lyrics exhibit the pretzel logic that disciples know and love; Cousin Dupree, for example, is a seemingly innocuous pop single, smooth and catchy, until one catches the menace beneath the deadpan vocals (“what's so strange about a down-home family romance?" pleads Dupree). Equally sardonic are What a Shame about Me, Almost Gothic and Gaslighting Abbie, all coolly rendered slices of tuneful black humour.
Radiohead OK Computer (Parlophone/EMI). If Syd had been an existentialist and Rogers Waters a devotee of Nietzsche, then perhaps the generation-spanning compasions with Pink Floyd being made by many at the moment would fit. Instead Radiohead is a force entirely unto itself, and the band’s third album – surely destined to rank as one of the decade’s best – is groundbreaking and flat-out fantastic. Paranoid Android, the first single, is likely too much of a stretch for mainstream rock programmers. But once the album hangs out in the upper reaches of the charts for a few months, radio can get behind Subterranean Homesick Alien or possibly Karma Police. This is tomorrow’s classic rock today, and it’s something rare and wonderful indeed.
Patricia Barber Companion (Blue Note/EMI/2000)
Last year's Modern Cool CD generated hot notices for this Chicago singer/pianist, who inhabits the same turf as Cassandra Wilson and Holly Cole. Now this live set (recorded last summer at the Green Mill, a fabled hometown bar where Al Capone once swilled bootleg whiskey) captures her sass and smarts in winning fashion. In the past she's set music to lyrics by e.e. cummings, Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolfe. Playing piano and Hammond B-3 organ, she retains her drop-dead poise even when remaking less literary fare like The Beat Goes On and Black Magic Woman. Her crack band--guitarist John McLean and percussionist Ruben Alvarez are standouts--shine on the instrumental Like JT, a Barber original dedicated to Jackie Terrasson. And for the woman's sense of humour, check If This Isn't Jazz . . . , where she poses a series of questions: "Is this the real thing, or is it a fake?/Is this smoke in my lungs, or is this a lifestyle mistake?/Will the New York Times say I'm too white or I'm too black?/Shall I complicate the rhythm, shall I give the money back?" Nobody's asking for refunds at this point in her career.
The Rheostatics The Story of Harmelodia (Perimeter/Universal)
Child-like wonders never cease from the Rheostatics. Harry Nilsson's charmingly adult The Point (1971) is an apt reference for a "children's album" that is less for kids than for adults with an active imagination and taste for whimsy. The deluxe package carries the read-along storyline (which concerns the adventures of two characters named Dot and Bug in the Dr. Seussian world of Harmelodia). "It was soft and sad and it soothed her like a warm balm," Dot says at one point, and that sums up the album's mood neatly. The narration weaves through a typically quirky, invariably hummable numbers beginning with Martin Tielli's I Fab Thee--"a happy song," muses Dot, "that doesn't sound like it was dug out of a tomb"; it instantly joins the long list of Rheos tunes playing in high rotation on that great jukebox in the sky (if not commercial radio). Dave Bidini's I Am Drumstein and Tim Vesely's The Music Room end part one in giddy style, while part two is highlighted by the Munchkin-voiced Bee Sky Opus in Magenta and a pair of tracks sung by Sarah Harmer. Leaps of fancy like this are rare indeed, and it's rarer still that the "there's no place like home" conceit is rendered with such vital originality.
Fountains of Wayne Utopia Parkway (Scratchie/Warner)
The concept: A human-scale ode to growing up in suburbia that does for New Jersey what Pet Sounds did for southern California. The band: An acclaimed crew of pop-rock smart guys led by Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger. The songs: Tight, deliriously tuneful, harmony-laden and built for the ages. The likely result: A lost classic that will generate most of its sales as a reissue a decade hence. If you're a Big Star disciple, you'll get it immediately. And if you're not, just try to resist Amity Gardens, The Valley of Malls, A Fine Day for a Paradise (featuring Ron Sexsmith) or lead single Denise.
Len You Can't Stop the Bum Rush (WORK/Sony)
Full of in-jokes, between-song goofs, self-referential lyrics, vocordered vocals, Fat Boys imitations and loving shout-outs to their pals, this packs a lot of fun and games into 44 hip-hopping minutes. CHR is warming up fast to Steal My Sunshine, which rates as an early candidate as one of the summer's definitive tracks. Kraftwerk gets its due on the catchy The Hard Disk Approach, and it along with the riff-rocking Feelin' Alright and the '99 party anthem Cold Chillin' rate as future airplay candidates. Yes, there's as much silliness here as bona fide tunes, but Len is undeniably its own thing--and that's a rare quality that counts for plenty when you're dealing with the same demographic that worships the Beastie Boys.
Music Express
Cocteau Twins, Blue Bell Knoll (4AD/Vertigo)
Liz Fraser and Robin Guthrie hail from a quiet town on Scotland's east coast. English is spoken thereabouts, with a porridge-thick accent to be sure, but English nonetheless. You'd never know it from their work as the Cocteau Twins, however. The pair has fashioned a sonic make-believe world highlighted by Fraser's wordless but hugely expressively vocals. There are passages on Blue Bell Knoll where you'd swear she was doing a Michael Stipe and deliberately mumbling the Queen's English. On "kissed out red floatboat" (all the titles share an e.e. cummings-style penchant for the lower case), for instance, she teases strange strings of syllables to life before tripping out to vistas unknown, caught up in her own ecstasies and essentially doing a good imitation of the mystic art of speaking in tongues. Unlike earlier albums, Guthrie has opted for more accessible musical settings that match post-punk rhythms with expertly crafted layers of acoustic and electric guitars. And whereas Fraser has long specialized in confessional, rather downbeat moods, here she delivers spring-morning epipanies on such glorious numbers as "spooning good singing gum" and other titles that are better heard than read.
That Petrol Emotion, End of the Millennium Psychosis Blues (Virgin)
The title speaks volumes. The third album from this Northern Irish quintet is a brutally realistic, state-of-the-weary-idealist address that's very much rooted in the morass of the here and now - not the vague hopes of a halcyon tomorrow nor selective remembrances of yesterday. "In any town I go there's a wreckage of desire, of feelings never hired or sold," sings Steve Mack with an audible sigh on the Pogues-like "Cellophane." "Feels like psychosis closing in, when all the world inspires is fright," he gasps on the album-closer "Under the Sky" as the band's trademark guitar maelstrom pulls the band down into a very dark place indeed. There are moments here - almost entirely musical - when the claustrophobic worldview lets in glorious light: "Candy Love Satellite" recalls TPE's scintillating UK debut, Manic Pop Thrill, while horns and funk guitars make "Grove Check" a likely follow-up to the 1987 club hit "Big Decision." Formed from the ashes of the marvelous Undertones (Ireland's candy coated answer to the Ramones), the band aimed from the start to provoke. Mission accomplished. Like its closest models in terms of dynamics and intent - Sly and the Family Stone's There's A Riot Going On and The Clash's Sandinista! - this is thorny, dangerous and unrelenting in all the right ways.
Teen Generation
Madonna True Blue (Sire, 1986)
Only cro-magnon knuckle-draggers dismiss Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone as a bubble-brain or manipulative tease. Instead, she's evolving into one of the best pop artists of her generation. Her track record to date proves she has class, talent, multi-media smarts and a seemingly endless supply of radio and dancefloor hits. True Blue, like her first two albums, is hits plus filler in the tradition of all chart-oriented pop albums. The keepers here are "Live to Tell," the free-choice anthem "Papa Don't Preach" and the sweaty dance number "White Heat." The title track is a homage to her husband, actor Sean Penn. While some tracks fall flat, nothing here can't be fixed with a remix or sparkling new video.
Split Enz History Never Repeats (A&M, 1987)
Before founding Crowded House, Neil Finn spent a decade with this collection of art-damaged loons from down under. His major contributions in a band led by his older brother Tim were guitar and keening vocals on the band's one major North American hit, "I Got You," a disarming piece of pop whimsy that kicks off this collection of memorable cuts from their five A&M albums. The band was possessed of a rare ability to squeeze innovative melodies into three-minute straight jackets, and then decorate them with subversive quirks and avant-garde twists. Such cleverness was one reason Split Enz never broke though commerically, of course. But if, like so many these days, you've fallen hard for Crowded House, you'll certainly appreciate the craftsmanship and art that shines throughout.
