Recent Album Purchases Reviewed
Thought I'd take a moment to share what I've been listening to lately, good and bad.
Carl Allen and Rodney Whitaker, Work To Do: Nominally speaking, this is sort of "Christian jazz" in the sense that the Almighty figures heavily in the liner notes and perhaps the best cover tune on the album is of a contemporary Christian song ("Speak To My Heart"). However, there are no vocals to be found anywhere so it shouldn't offend the sensibilities of your average new-to-atheism Generation Y-er. This is just a superbly planned and executed jazz album that is short on flourishes and drop-dead "blowing" but long on melody and enjoyment. Recommended.
John Scofield, Uberjam Deux: This is at least as good as the first Uberjam, which is to say that it's pretty good if you're a Scofield fan. Conceptually it's halfway between the aforementioned predecessor album and Scofield's Bump. It's great background music for writing or doing other creative work, but every once in a while you'll hear Sco do something pretty amazing and/or brave, like deliberately bending out of tune, which I suppose is a trademark of his now. This is not the album I'd use to introduce someone to Scofield... probably choose "Up All Night" or "Quiet", depending on where that person's coming from musically.
Pat Metheny, Tap: The Book of Angels, Vol. 20 If you've been waiting for Pat Metheny to play Jewish scales and music with a guitar synthesizer, wait no longer! I buy every single thing Metheny records or serves as a sideman on, just as a matter of principle, but I wasn't expecting to enjoy this album very much. How wrong I was. This is easily in the top quartile of Pat's efforts across his career: as with "New Chautauqua", he plays all instruments except the drums. Simply brilliant. Recommended for John Zorn fans, for Metheny fans, for anyone looking for something interesting.
Rodriguez, Cold Fact. This was actually bought by V. McB, who has a South African hair client, but since it was on my Amazon account it was added to my Cloud Player. This fellow, Rodriguez, is the subject of the "Searching for Sugar Man" documentary, which deliberately obscures and mangles a few facts to make his story seem slightly more dramatic than it actually is. Much of this relatively short record reveals the all-pervasive influence of Bob Dylan in the early Seventies; it sounds like Dylan with a better voice and fewer ideas. The track that made him famous in South Africa, "I Wonder", is completely forgettable. Many of Cold Fact's lyrics are plainly juvenile and others are painfully inept. The "mystery" of why Rodriguez never made it big in the States is easily solved; he wasn't that good.
Iron and Wine, The Creek Drank The Cradle. Discussed in these pages last month, this one came at the recommendation of D. McH, who has a unique ability to find depressing music. Truly an album that is greater than the sum of its parts: the music is simple in the extreme, the instrumentation is sparse, the lyrics are deliberately vague, but it's brilliant when you put it all together. Whenever I hear a great album like this, it depresses me because there's no reason I couldn't have done it first. I'm never going to write and perform something like Bright Size Life or Night Passage, but "three chords and a cloud of sorrow" is well within my range, to put it mildly. Recommended for anyone who enjoys feeling sad about things.
John Mayer, Paradise Valley. The obvious follow-up to Born and Raised and perhaps a more satisfying album overall. Mayer's command of his reputation, his fanbase, and his talent is such that he nonchalantly begins the thing with two straight blues tunes in a row, with "Dear Marie" being even more formulaic than "Wildfire". You can't be angry because they're great tunes. The rest of the album is similarly accomplished, and if Mayer seems a little, um, eager to mope and worry about the rest of his life, the final track, "On The Way Home", makes it palatable. I'm currently ranking the JM studio albums like so, worst to first:
Continuum ties with Heavier Things Room For Squares Try! Paradise Valley Battle Studies Inside Wants Out Born And Raised
Alright, time to go to the dentist... Wish me luck!