Album Reviews

Neil Young and Crazy Horse is either one of your life's great musical pleasures, or you just can't take the slop. Me? Beginning with Everybody Knows This is Nowhere I have eaten it up. If you haven't liked the combo before, this sprawling, loose-fitting “concept” album isn't likely to pull the trigger for you. Critical reaction was decidedly mixed, but who cares what critics think? Myself included.

The cover art, a Rasta remake of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home painted by Eric White, hits all the right notes and promises a good time. Bob's rolling a number, pout-faced into the camera, a bottle of Red-Stripe's on the mantle along with a portrait of the other Bob, and the LP's splayed out on the couch are the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, Bob Marley Live and Desmond Dekker and the Aces's Israelites, containing the hit single which was the first ska/reggae tune heard by most Americans, along with Peter Tosh's Wanted and one additional LP I don't know. There are images of Haile Sellasie on magazine covers, and even a Wailers poster from Wolf and Rissmiller's Country Club a Reseda, CA night spot.

Even if you generally find Jones's voice too nasal, too cat-like, too small, too thin, too whiney and especially too nasal, her cool, slinky and smartly laid-back vibe on this impeccably arranged and played double LP set will surely win you over.

Lennon's primal scream of a first solo album was, in addition to being a personal catharsis caught on tape, a grow up call to a generation of Beatles fans.

This famous 1957 “Living Stereo” three-track recording (originally LSC-2201, issued in 1958) was among the first series of bargain-priced BMG SACD's issued last year. A second set has recently been released. By focusing on the “audiophile community,” doubling up the content (two full LP's worth) and selling them for 12 bucks, BMG hit all the right notes, and apparently these are selling well-in the context of what that means in today's shrunken record biz.

The Libertines, on their debut album Up the Bracket album (issued in the UK, October, 2002, and March, 2003 in America), deliver well-written punk-pop in a ragged-but-right style that teases with echoes of The Clash, The New York Dolls and Pavement. Avoiding the polar pitfalls of Green Day's predictability and Modest Mouse's endless demands on the listener's patience, they thread the skinny needle of superb garage rock, coming out the other side grinning, sweaty, and deserving of your buying them a Guinness.

Having licked his wounds and moped us into a melancholic swoon on the sumptuous sounding break-up album Sea Change, Beck casts off his blues and self absorbed ballads, puts his ears to the ground and, reunited with Mike Simpson and John King (a/k/a The Dust Brothers), comes up with an Odelay style, beat based musical mélange sure to please fans.