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Real Life Rock Top 10
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1. The Best News of the Week: Denver Post, Aug. 22 "Universal Records has confirmed that Spin Doctors lead singer Chris Barron ['Little Miss Can't Be Wrong' etc.] has been diagnosed with a rare paralysis of his vocal cords. Barron is meeting with doctors who have indicated that he may never regain the full use of his voice. He now cannot speak above a whisper. All promotional activities for the band's new CD, 'Here Comes the Bride,' are on hold." 2. Trailer Bride "Whine de Lune" (Bloodshot) A small cowboy combo that plays as if it's not expecting more than the 10 people in the audience to show up, fronted by a woman who sings like she's wondering who she has to fuck to get out of going through everything twice. As if anybody knows. 3. Alison Krauss "Forget About It" (Rounder) For the title song, built around the way they say it and mean it not in mob-movie New York but in the rest of the country -- not far from the way Bob Dylan said "Don't think twice," a whole lost world in three words. As always with Krauss, whose voice has the unsatisfiable yearning of her own bluegrass fiddle -- unsatisfiable because the sound remembers a land of milk and honey -- she needs hills and valleys in the melody to come to life, to pull away from the music and the listener, to get lost, then to come back just far enough to pull your string: to pull it right out of you. Songs on an even plain defeat her every time. Greil Marcus Greil's column appears every other Monday in Salon Media 4. Marine Research "Sounds from the Gulf Stream" (K) and "Parallel Horizontal"/"Angel in the Snow"/"I Confess" (K single) Moving from Talulah Gosh to Heavenly to her new five-piece, Amelia Fletcher of Oxford, England, has lost a step each time. The fatigue now drawing her voice back still doesn't hide what makes that voice, all sweetness and worry, one of a kind. 5. Aspen Festival Orchestra, Kyoko Takezawa, soloist Elgar's "Violin Concerto in B Minor" (Aspen Music Festival, Aug. 15) In "Allegro" -- deliriously romantic and ominous -- the whole first movement seemed to resolve itself into chase, run. The piece was the apparent source of all the high-class, high-gloss film noir music of the '40s ("Gilda," "The Lady from Shanghai," "Double Indemnity," any production that could afford a real score) -- so much so that the music, played now, isn't merely familiar, it's fabulously generic. You cannot attach, say, a certain gesture by Rita Hayworth or Orson Welles or Barbara Stanwyck to a given lift in the music, a particular door opening into a darkened room to a threatening slide on Takezawa's special "Hammer" Strat -- I mean, Strad, her 1707 "Hammer" Stradivarius. But moment to moment the piece, read back on the films that plundered it, gives up near-images that stop the soundtracks as they play in your head. The plot rushes forward, breaking over the hesitations of the actors, smearing all of them into one.
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