Coming next week: Alice Cooper, Rick Springfield, various artists
- 11:28 AM CDT
Due in stores Tuesday:
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Due in stores Tuesday:
It was more than 50 years ago but Ry Cooder remembers it like it could have been last week; he was 8 years old and Johnny Cash came on the radio singing "Hey Porter."
It might strike some as odd that a jazz standard bearer like Wynton Marsalis would team up with a country legend like Willie Nelson, but the charming results achieved on "Two Men with the Blues" (3 stars, Blue Note), taped live at Jazz at Lincoln Center in 2007, prove it's not really that far-fetched.
"Man, we make our own movies," Craig Finn sings in "Slapped Actress," the nod to filmmaker John Cassavetes that comes just before the house lights go on at the close of "Stay Positive," the fourth album by the Brooklyn-based bar band par excellence.
Beck, "Modern Guilt" - By the time of "Sea Change" it was clear, by now it's just plain obvious: Beck is impervious to production. No matter who he selects to enhance his surroundings - it's been the Dust Brothers, it's been Nigel Godrich, now it's Gnarls Barkley mastermind and mash-up master Danger Mouse (aka Brian Burton) - the coats of paint slapped on Mr. Hansen's creations only amount to so much attractive but transparent window dressing. Nothing can obscure the thrust of his songs - the increasing melancholia and tragic-romantic yearning, the doom-filled prophesying and excursions into ecological surrealism.
As the title indicates, this is John Mellencamp at his most serious. Not to mention his most forlorn: "Life is an abstraction, and it tries to fool us all, and it's working so far, it seems," the normally feisty Hoosier sings on "Young Without Lovers." On "A Ride Back Home," the 56-year-old former Johnny Cougar is ready to lie down in a pine box: "I was showin' some promise once upon a time/But it's gone now, and it ain't comin' back."
Jennifer Nettles' in-your-face performing style is akin to the sensation of diving into a chilly swimming pool. Even if you know what to expect, her nasal twang still feels like a full-body slap. Thing is, she's got a terrific voice once you get used to it.
It was more than 50 years ago but Ry Cooder remembers it like it could have been last week; he was 8 years old and Johnny Cash came on the radio singing "Hey Porter."
ABBA's music is so infectious that it can make a musical plot in which beautiful people live on an even more beautiful Greek isle and just break out into ABBA songs instead of normal conversation like "Pass the tanning oil, please" seem perfectly natural.
If Bill Monroe, the daddy of bluegrass, had had an affair with a wild mountain woman, the Blind Corn Liquor Pickers would be the illegitimate offspring. That's a compliment, by the way.
We've graduated to the second half of 2008, which has made me reflect on the music that has kept me occupied this year.
It wasn't even close. Wednesday night, when "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest announced Tuesday night's vote total -- 97.5 million -- and the winning margin (12 million ), things looked brighter for David Archuleta, the teen idol wiith a man's voice.
