Album Reviews

Recorded at L.A.’s famed United Recorders June 6th and 12th 1963 and arranged by Gerald Wilson (Anthony’s dad) for the spare and daring combo of organ, trumpet, tenor sax and drums, this Sarah Vaughan set of mostly familiar standards will confound your expectations with every note.

Lee Morgan’s 1959 solo debut recorded when he was just 19 is aptly named. It’s an album of standards in a quartet setting designed to show off the prodigy’s ability to wrap his big, warm tone around familiar melodies.

Only in retrospect does the “high concept” of Marshall Crenshaw’s remarkable 1982 debut assert itself: marry infectious ‘50s and ‘60’s-like rock’n’roll tunes with the then modern chorus guitar effects popularized by The Police’s Andy Summers. Maybe that wasn’t the plan, but that’s sure what it sounds like! That, or what a vintage Seeburg or Wurlitzer juke box would sound like heard from outside of the malt shop teen hang out.

The Fleet Foxes are a new band from Seattle. Put aside any associations you might have with grungy histrionics. Imagine instead a small band of Blue Ridge mountain refugees spending a good long while in remote, lush forests where they smoothed away the rough edges and filigree notes of their musical forefathers while gathering up ideas from key times (the 60’s) and places (Laurel Canyon, rural England) to create their own, incantatory sound.

Leave it to Pure Pleasure to unearth great, but obscure titles like this, but more importantly, kudos to the label for having the nerve to put their money where their eclectic musical tastes reside and release it! And this one’s a double, making the enterprise twice as risky.

I know people who actually think that The Ramones were a “joke” band&#151sort of a punk version of Sha Na Na. I’m not kidding. I know people who thought The Ramones were a sloppy outfit goofing around on stage. I know people who think Joey Ramone was a screamer. But then I live in the suburbs.

One of the first “concept” albums, Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely invited listeners back in 1958 to pull up a chair and share the singer’s misery exquisitely expressed in a carefully collected set of tunes given sensitive, sumptuous backdrops by the late, great Nelson Riddle.