Category: Music reviews

One More Listen: U2, No Line on the Horizon

The lyrics of “Breathe” blend reflections and observations, personal details and social events, and there is something surprisingly, pleasingly, Asian in some of the music. “Spent the night trying to make a deadline, squeezing complicated lives into a simple headline,” Bono sings in the song “Cedars of Lebanon,” an admission which seems less an ideal than a compromise to me, and part of the song’s Dylanesque rambling.

Woman as Center: Jill Sobule, California Years

It is impressive how much of the world Sobule gets into her songs, how easily she creates or documents characters. “Spiderman” could be the rantings of a mad man, but it is more likely the ruminations of one more person in California trying to make a little money off Hollywood by impersonating a movie figure. California Years ends with “The Donor Song,” a song made up of the names of people who contributed funds allowing Jill Sobule to create the album California Years.

American Masters, Southern Artists: Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi, Buckwheat Zydeco’s Lay Your Burden Down, and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys’ Best

The pianist, songwriter, and singer Allen Toussaint’s collection of song standards The Bright Mississippi is elegant, haunting, pleasing. Is that what is expected of music made by a musician in Louisiana? If anyone wants to know what music in Louisiana is like, they can listen to Allen Toussaint’s The Bright Mississippi, Buckwheat Zydeco’s Lay Your Burden Down, and Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys’ Best of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys. This is American music by American masters.

Beautiful Sadness, Bright Rhythms: Death Cab for Cutie, The Open Door

Gibbard has noted that liking interesting things doesn’t make a person interesting—well, that may be true, but it certainly gives you something interesting to think about, as with The Open Door, making us glad that the band values its own artistry as much as it does, and has had the talent, luck, and commitment to fulfill its own goals.

The Return of Irreverent Favorites: Cracker’s Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey

The band of musical boasters, herders, and nut-breakers known as Cracker are singer and guitarist David Lowery, guitarist and keyboardist Johnny Hickman, drummer Frank Funaro, and bassist Sal Maida; and their influences include British rock and America’s southern music. Listening to Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey, one can hear musicians ready to claim any sound that appeals to them, whether it’s the roughness of punk or the slickness of new wave.

The Persistence of Memory: Streisand’s The Way We Were/All In Love Is Fair album and the television program “Live in Concert”

Streisand is bitterly ironic (sad, frightening, funny) in “The Best Thing You’ve Ever Done,” in which she uses an actress’s sense of drama, and offers the most ageless singing imaginable. “The Way We Were,” a song of contemplation and remembrance, may contain too many strings, and drumming that lacks conviction, but Streisand’s voice saves what might otherwise be nothing more than deplorable nostalgia, and she emphasizes a fact: we often remember and wonder if our lives might have been different.

A Bristling Exuberance: Shirley Horn, You Won’t Forget Me

Shirley Horn’s way with a song does much that I love in different arts: it expresses and interprets, it goes beyond eloquence and creates elegance, and it gives pleasure. Shirley Horn (1934-2005) had a long career, but she is one of the singers—along with Abbey Lincoln, to name another— whose work many could hear more clearly in the last years (rather than the prime years) of Sarah Vaughan and Ella Fitzgerald, singers whose reputations did not leave a lot of oxygen for the breath of others.

The Power of Musical Rhetoric: The Decemberists, The Hazards of Love

The album The Hazards of Love begins with ominous organ tones—are they serious or merely melodramatic? Yet, the music that follows is sturdy, formidable, although some of the songs may be only fragments, parts of a larger story and theme, a story of love and separation. It is notable that the voices we hear are not connected to the blues, which has influenced much American and English rock.

The Crazy Pride of a Free Man of Color: K’naan, Troubadour

In light of hip-hop’s materialism, narrow perspectives, prejudices, violence and vulgarity, it can be hard to know whether hip-hop is worth critical attention (and many rappers reject the value of critics).  Who is paying (perceptive, thoughtful) attention, to artists, to critics?  It is fascinating, if not perplexing, that the blackest of genres—hip-hop—has found acolytes around the world, in places such as France and Israel and Russia and Japan—and Somalia.  I suspect that what many hear in it is self-affirmation, a toughness of sensibility equal to the toughness of the world.