How long have I been waiting for a good-sounding version of this mysterious and magical music? Since way back before I knew anything about Good Sound as we formally know it, that's for sure!
Death Cab For Cutie's Benjamin Gibbard probably reads “Romeo and Juliet” as light comedy. Calling him a “hopeless romantic” would be an understatement of Grand Canyon-like proportions. If Bryan Ferry wears his heart on his sleeve, Gibbard wears it on a Times Square billboard with a seriousness I can't recall hearing expressed outside of opera.
“If you follow every dream, you might get lost,” Neil Young admonishes lovingly on “The Painter,” the opener to his new, excruciatingly personal album—his first since Old Ways to be recorded in Nashville. Young isn’t advising against following every dream, just to be prepared for unexpected turns in the road and to take it as it comes.
If compact discs are so damned dynamic and vinyl is so dynamically limited, why do they sound just the opposite? Why do LPs sound so "live," so explosive, so "there," and CDs so dead? Even the best CDs usually sink to second-rate when you switch to their vinyl versions. I've heard it, you've heard it. Only those in deep denial, those who refuse to listen, don't. They'd rather read the published specs and consider the actual listening some kind of mass delusion among Luddite LP fans.
For sound adventurers in the early days of stereo, no one’s musical arrangements fit the bill like Esquivel’s. They make Enoch Light’s close-miked percussive stuff on Command sound like punk-rock.
As on Money Jungle, a United Artists release recently reissued by Classic and reviewed on this site, this record puts Duke Ellington in a rare trio setting, this time with the percussive anchor Sam Woodyard on drums and Aaron Bell on bass—the Ellington orchestra’s rhythm section.
Analogue Productions’ third series of limited edition 45rpm 180 gram “twofers” will surely be as popular as the first two sets, with key titles selling out and fetching big bucks on the used market. The musically well-balanced offerings from the Riverside, Pablo and Prestige catalogs controlled by Fantasy Records include The Tony Bennett Bill Evans Album, Bill Evans’ How My Heart Sings and Interplay, Miles Davis’s Workin’ and many other long sought after jazz and blues titles.
Daniel Lanois begins this instrumental excursion with a great wash of flanged psychedelic backwash, ribbed with pedal steel guitar in an upward thrust of musical birth that oozes from the speakers like sonic Cool-Whip.
For some reason, audio enthusiasts have a need to latch onto female vocalists with a passion that borders on the fanatical. Once they find her, they never let go. The careers of Amanda McBroom, Jennifer Warnes, Diana Krall and Janis Ian have all benefited from this compulsive/obsessive behavior. I have nothing against it. I just find it fascinating.
Sad but true: a generation of white Americans first came to know the blues—a black American art form—by hearing it played second-hand thanks to the dedication of die-hard British blues enthusiasts like Long John Baldry, John Mayall, Eric Clapton, and of course, Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green. The list goes on.