Album Reviews

Before getting to the audiofool controversy surrounding the release of a 3M digital recording on expensive vinyl, there's the music. You're smacked in the face on the side openers "I.G.Y." and "New Frontier" (on the original single LP) by the exuberance and sunlit optimism of the "certain fantasies" entertained by "a young man growing up in the remote suburbs" back when science was venerated and not denigrated as it is today in certain circles as a "liberal plot".

What always felt like it would be a nasty bump in the Dylan Bootleg Series road turns out to be a smooth walk on the water thanks to a concept the Dylan boot team perfectly executes by covering the mutable artist's evangelical period with highly charged live performances, outtakes and rehearsals that will turn you into a believer, if not in Christ, then in Dylan's absolute commitment to what he then preached and in the power of the songs and especially the supercharged performances he delivered.

After the messy "supergroup" hype surrounding Blind Faith—more a one-off money maker than a group formed to last—Eric Clapton decided to downplay his fame and so was born in 1970 Derek and the Dominoes and the Layla... double LP that initially flopped. Many people today forget that, but flop it did. It didn't help that it was a costly double LP by an "unknown" group.

Pianist Jamie Saft's trio recorded a well-received, sonically superb 2014 album called New Standard. If you need a group or individual backgrounder, please hit that hyperlink.

The turbulent and tragic Judee Sill story provides the ingredients from which musical cult followings are made: two critically acclaimed Asylum albums (she was the first artist David Geffen signed to the label) that despite great expectations sold poorly, a fight with Geffen over lack of support after which the label dropped her, a return to heroin addiction, and a drug overdose death in 1979 at age 35.

Originally released on CD in 2011 this recorded-to-tape Gillian Welch gem finally has an AAA vinyl release. Welch explains the motivation for the vinyl version in a Washington Post profile .

Bassist, group leader and composer Stephan Crump assembled Rhombal, a two-horn, bass and drums quartet to explore a series of compositions he’d written for his late brother. “…it’s a commemoration of a death well-confronted, of a spiritual evolution I witnessed in my brother during out last days together, and of how close we left each other after what had been, for many years, a very troubled relationship.”