Circumstances can call forth a deeper response from a person, from an artist. Irma Thomas takes the traditional song “Another Man Done Gone” and adapts it to life in hurricane country, giving it a rustling beat, and with new words turning it into a news report and a lament.
Category: Music reviews
A Young Man’s Tenderness: Sam Cooke’s Portrait of A Legend and Nightbeat
Cooke’s songs—whether an affirmation of dance, a wistful call for help, a humble declaration of love, a recognition of prison as a fact, or an expression of sexual assurance—were a young man’s testament and they often carried a young man’s tenderness. Cooke’s phrasing bears traces of the sung spiritual, but his is obviously not a voice that could ever be anonymous, buried within a tradition.
Between Grief and Nothing I Will Take Grief: Black Bayou Construkt, Kingdoms of Folly
Kingdoms of Folly, it is easy to conclude that Dege Legg is a musician who writes, rather than a writer who makes music, and he has an instinct for creating something both attractive and significant, and a firm control of musical dynamics.
This Great Society Is Going Smash: The Books, Lost and Safe
On the album Lost and Safe by The Books, we hear isolated notes and then a whispery voice begins to issue brainy observations in the piece entitled “A Little Longing Goes Away”: “Yes and no are just distinguished by distinction, so we choose the in-between” and “Everybody’s busy waiting for the go-ahead, but by then their heads are gone.”
Conjuring Consciousness, Conjuring Change: Cassandra Wilson, Blue Light ‘Til Dawn
Cassandra Wilson uses the range of her voice in unexpected ways in that song, and in Ann Peebles’s “I Can’t Stand the Rain” in which Wilson is partnered by Chris Whitley’s guitar (I loved Chris Whitley’s album Living with the Law). Throughout her album Blue Light ‘Til Dawn, Cassandra Wilson reveals the individual psyche, and the human spirit: we hear tenderness, worry, and anger as part of a consciousness of turmoil and change.
Art and Craft: Richard Shindell, Not Far Now
Richard Shindell’s song collection Not Far Now has songs of craft, imagination, and thought, and while it is a thing of beauty, it comes to us as one more in a long line of singer-songwriter works, and thus one is compelled to understand how and why it is to be valued as special. What’s new, unique?
Sexy Similarities: Van Hunt, Use in Case of Emergency
So much of popular musical art is concerned with expressing behavior and flaunting speech rather than the examination of impulse and thought; and if Van Hunt’s thematic focus is too narrow that is not an anomaly: love is his subject and it is, very typically, a contemporary entertainer’s subject as much as the traditional subject of a serious poet. Are Van Hunt’s declarations and observations supported, in his songs, by the particularities of daily or public life as evidence? (I do not think so.)
Sounds and Spaces: Grizzly Bear, Veckatimest
Listening to “Fine for Now,” a song that may be about time, conformity, and insecurity, I am inclined to describe the singer’s voice as mellow and expressive, but what does it express? The voice, while unique, does not seem particularly personal: the emotions and ideas suggested could belong to anyone. The jazz-influenced percussion, with each beat (or group of beats) seeming to exist on its own (or their own), rather than the linear, pounding beat prevalent in much of rock music, adds to the sense of flexibility, of a lack of confinement to a particular perspective.
Restorations: Oumou Sangare, Seya
The compositions “Iyo Djeli” and “Mogo Kele” and “Koroko” conclude the collection, and the small tumbling beats in “Mogo Kele” suggest the movements of daily life as much as music and “Koroko” seems both celebratory and deeply authoritative, as if offering advice and correction.
Sensuality and Trouble: Marshall Crenshaw, Jaggedland
The fragile, shifting aspects of existence have found an eloquent chronicler in Crenshaw, although his voice may be too pretty for the crashing rhythms that surround it in “Someone Told Me.” “I sadly wondered, could we ever be on common ground?” he wonders after being told something disturbing, noting “so many worlds colliding” (“Someone Told Me”).