Album Reviews

At first, the lingering melodies and stick-to-the-synapses catch phrases don’t seem to reach out and grab you like they do on older Steely Dan albums, but the grooves are deeper and more elastic here than ever and Fagen’s arranging abilities remain crisp, inventive and instantly recognizable even if you don’t take time out to analyze what’s going on to make them seem so familiar.

Veteran blues guitarist Walter Trout is obviously well known within blues circles and among blues fans I asked, but the name doesn’t elicit much of a response outside the blues core.

The merger of Sony Music and BMG combined two of the world’s great film music catalogs, offering the potential for a truly exceptional film score compilation. This isn’t it. Instead this piece of shit excuse for an “essential” film score package is indicative of everything that’s wrong with the music business today. It lists for $25.00.

These songs will be familiar to you if you attended a “socialist” summer camp during the 1950’s and/or 1960’s. I did. What’s a “socialist” summer camp? It’s roughly defined as one that had an on staff guitar and banjo-playing Pete Seeger following pre-Hippie collegiate or “long hair.”

Better late than never to discover this family of fanciful, faith-based music makers living in Clarksburg, New Jersey, a small hamlet located between Trenton and Point Pleasant on the New Jersey shore.

I think there’s a recent interview with these guys online but I don’t want to read it. The less I know the better.

“She brushes off comparisons to Billie Holiday,” according to Mobile Fidelity’s online blurb. Why? That’s like denying the elephant in the room. Peyroux’s squooshy vibrato and top of the throat delivery produce sly vocal timbres that just about channel Billie Holiday between your speakers. Even the miking and equalization have been carefully chosen to sustain the Holiday allusion and almost mimic the mellow recording quality of the time, just as the inner gatefold photography and Peyroux’s outfits reprise the visuals of the ‘40s. It’s canny but I find it distracting and mannered.