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New release roundup
Home Movies "I get cynical" Sharps & Flats American Squirm The original regular Sharps & Flats |
BY CHRIS LEHMAN | "If You're Feeling Sinister," the de facto debut offering from Scottish Wunderkinder Belle and Sebastian, was a bracing but exhilarating primer in long-neglected pop fundamentals. Unassuming front man Stuart Murdoch delivered closely observed, sly and morose songs; the rest of the band supplied spare but hypnotically tuneful backing. It was the kind of seamless folk-inflected pop that the word "winsome" was invented to describe. Now, of course, the eminently justified critical embrace of "If You're Feeling Sinister" casts a long and almost certainly unfair shadow on the band's new disc, "The Boy With the Arab Strap." And just as understandably, the new disc finds the band in a restless, experimental mood. The short opening character study, "It Could Have Been a Brilliant Career," segues briskly into the insistent, synth-heavy rhythms of "Sleeping the Clock Around," only to lurch back to folkie introspection in a listless ode to clotted affect, "Is It Wicked Not to Care?" But it's also around here that the listener starts getting suspicious: The tag line of the song's outro chorus is "Would you love me till I'm dead?" a direct lift from the outro chorus of "Northern Sky," by the ethereal '70s folkie Nick Drake, one of Belle and Sebastian's most frequently cited musical ancestors. It seems that Murdoch and company are starting to tire of their own sense of youthful self-discovery and have set about indulging in the postmodern game of cataloging influences. Indeed, many of the new disc's songs seem like little more than involuted studies in pop allusion: The supremely ill-advised venture into Glaswegian trip-hop, "Spaceboy Dream," for example, sounds like a shotgun wedding between John Cale and A Tribe Called Quest. "Seymour Stein," a labored depiction of an uncool record company executive, sounds like Love's Arthur Lee on a particularly smug day. Even the more musically robust and interesting tracks, such as "The Roller Coaster Ride" and "Dirty Dream #2," don't stir themselves lyrically to address anything more than an assortment of ill-defined "troubles" and the band's own chronic sense of aimlessness. You certainly don't want to give up on a band as promising and as abundantly gifted as Belle and Sebastian. But too much of "The Boy With the Arab Strap" defies you to do just that.
BY SAM HURWITT | Kevin Moore is a frustrating guy: Better known under the truncated moniker Keb' Mo', he proved on his eponymous 1994 debut to be a slide guitar prodigy with a natural affinity for acoustic country blues, at his best conversing with the elders the way Taj Mahal does. But ever since then he seems to prefer playing slick, overproduced Quiet Storm blues. On "Slow Down," the South Central Los Angeles-bred bluesman doesn't milk the lite-sounds teat quite as tenaciously as he did on his sophomore disc, "Just Like You." Still, he starts off with lightweight fare, including two catchy but wafer-thin tributes to blues masters of yore -- "Muddy Water" and "Henry" -- burying lovely slide guitar in clean but samey studio saccharine. When he sings, "Won't you take me back in time/An' free me from this crime/I have no shame/An' I have no blame" on "Henry," you wish you could oblige him. "I Was Wrong" and "Rainmaker" are lazy R&B fare, too smooth for their own good. One of the better numbers, "Soon as I Get Paid" opens in a sweet acoustic tangle but quickly kicks into standard B.B. King-style electric territory. Moore squeezes out some amazing bottleneck guitar in "A Letter to Tracy" and breezes through the requisite solo acoustic Robert Johnson cover, "Love in Vain," which sounds crisp and lovely but packs little of the oomph of the Johnson numbers on his other albums. Much more lively are the kickin' gospel-flavored "A Better Man" and "God's Trying to Get Your Attention," which add some jubilant spirit to the proceedings. The tender acoustic love psalm "I'm Telling You Now" ends the rocky album on a hopeful note -- not so much hope for the future, but hope for the past.
BY SETH MNOOKIN | Juliana Hatfield has always been driven by a curious combination of dysfunction, insecurities and a belief that what she has to say deserves to be heard. It's a combination that's resulted in a string of good, but never great, albums stretching back to her work with Boston's Blake Babies. "Bed," Hatfield's fourth solo album (not counting a couple of EPs), is typical fare, which is to say it has some wonderful turns of phrase that are surprisingly, and deceivingly, obvious, a handful of catchy riffs and a dud or two. "You Are the Camera," with its fuzz-tone guitars, churning rhythm and great references (Man Ray being just one of them) is "Bed's" best track, with the album-opening, hard-crunching "Down on Me" and the acoustic "Running Out" close behind. Even "Swan Song" -- a suicide tale that stays just this side of melodramatic -- has a jangly, upbeat refrain ("Dear Jack, I hate you. Love Diane") that ends up occupying space in your head long after you'd expect it to go the way of countless other catchy but eminently forgettable songs. Propelling and incessant, Hatfield avoids sinking in delusional self-pity and ends up sounding defiant even in death. Devoid of any clear-cut hit singles, "Bed" probably won't get half the attention it should, which is too bad: I'd be happy if half the albums I buy were as honest, unafraid and ultimately satisfying as this one.
BY JOHN MILWARD | Willie Nelson's "Teatro" was produced by Daniel Lanois, who used the same live-band approach he employed on Bob Dylan's "Time out of Mind." But where the Dylan collection marked a bold creative rebound, "Teatro" is the third great album Nelson's made in the last six years, following 1993's "Across the Borderline" and 1996's "Spirit." "Borderline" (plushly produced by Don Was) found Nelson interpreting songwriters like Dylan, Lyle Lovett and Paul Simon. "Spirit" was an intimate, self-produced recording rooted in the jazz-inflected flavor of Nelson's acoustic guitar and the plainspoken poetry of his songs. "Teatro" retains that confidential tone while broadening the sonic palette, with Lanois adding percussionists, his own electric guitar and the always heavenly Emmylou Harris on harmony vocals. "Teatro" is a stark meditation on love that mixes new Nelson songs with tunes drawn from his early-'60s catalog. But instead of pointlessly reviving classics like "Crazy" or "Funny How Time Slips Away," Nelson revisits such unabashedly dark songs as "Home Motel" ("What used to be my home has changed to just a place to stay") and "I've Just Destroyed the World" ("I broke her heart so many times, that now at last I've broken mine"). "I Just Can't Let You Say Good-Bye" is enough to give Marilyn Manson the willies, with the singer murdering his lover and concluding, "Death is a friend to love and I, 'Cause now you'll never say good-bye." Nelson picks up those old threads in new songs like "Pick Up the Pieces" ("Don't follow my footsteps, step over my trail") and "Everywhere I Go" ("Until then in my pocket you must go, I'll take you with me everywhere I go"). The mixing of tunes from distant decades is as seamless as it is appropriate, for there is a world-weary wisdom in Nelson's performance that artfully reflects not just his 65 years, but the pains and pleasures that come with the passing of time.
BY JOE GROSS | First and foremost, in spite of the synths, in spite of the Devo and Kraftwerk comparisons and the synths, in spite of the matching suits onstage and, oh yeah, the synths, Six Finger Satellite (6FS among friends and the lazy) are a Rock Band, dig? In their eight-year history, they've moved from Seattle-by-numbers sludge to a precision-tuned emulsion of stun guitar and electronic revelry, a mix they've come amazingly close to perfecting on "Law of Ruins." They are a physical, shuddering thing, transmitting a weight, a bulk, a power even when in the throes of the twiddle and wheeze of "Sea of Tranquility Pt. II." The subtler pieces are
the highlights of this rewarding but frustratingly uneven album; they're
at their most powerful when most restrained. "Fall to Pieces" is a
mesmerizing stunner, the best make-out throb this side of Girls Against
Boys, while "New Kind of Rat" is little more than generic thunder-screaming.
But hey, they'd probably punch you if you called them "post-rock," so let
'em scream a little. You'll be hard pressed to figure out what the hell J. Ryan is ranting about, but you'll also be hard pressed to care (it'll take more than one pass before you notice the grinding "Fur Immer Liebe" is sung in German). The pleasures of "Law of Ruins" are derived from full-tilt beat surrender; the best way to get down is to hop in with both feet.
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