Album Reviews

Bacharach and David walked a fine line between brilliance and kitsch during their collaborations with Dionne Warwick, creating for her a musical persona that was the original “desperate housewife,” though of a much more helpless and vulnerable variety.

(This review, originally written back in 1995, appeared in Volume 1, issue 2 of The Tracking Angle as a review of Sony Legacy Gold CD ZK 66220, produced by Bob Irwin. It was an amazing sounding CD).

If you’re not familiar with Modest Mouse’s brand of jumpy/shouty, guitar driven music, if you’re a fan of XTC or The Talking Heads, you actually are.

Low’s latest begins on a somber, fatalistic note with the dirge-like “Pretty People,” in which we’re reminded that along with the soldiers fighting today, and all the little babies, and all the lions and “..all the pretty people…,” we’re all gonna die.

Slinky “world music” with a distinctly American desert underpinning, yet incorporating Arabic tonal modes, Another Green World Eno-esque rhythms and an eclectic, dizzying array of instruments, acoustic and electronic, Califone’s latest album will literally leave you gasping for air as you vainly attempt to absorb even a pathetically small percentage of what’s thrown at you musically and sonically on what is a stupendous production and an even more remarkable recording.

I don’t know about you, but back in the winter of 1969, big band music was not exactly my “go to” musical genre. At 22 I was listening to Abbey Road which had just come out, and Tommy and Simon and Garfunkel and The Kinks, and Frank Zappa, not Duke Ellington, though I was into Monk, Coltrane, Miles and Cannonball. I drew the line at big band music.

Let’s get right to the point of this reissue, which is the sound, since anyone shelling out big bucks for it is doing so because he or she is familiar with the music and loves it to death.