<< >>
Album Reviews
page:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
(166 reviews)
Date: 1973
Release: Hi Records #1650
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
If Al Green was the king of ’70s Southern Soul, then Ann Peebles was his queen. A righteous feminist singer in the tradition of Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday, Peebles made a name for herself singing and writing about women’s all too familiar knowledge of the darker side of love. Her ferocious hit “I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down” served notice on all cheating men that some sisters weren’t going to always turn the other cheek. Sung in a voice menacing in its restraint, this vengeful opus delivers in overtly angrier tones the feminine message of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”: treat us good or watch out! But Peebles wasn’t only concerned with giving men the big payback. Written in partnership with her husband Don Bryant and Memphis deejay Bernard Miller, “Until You Came Into My Life” features Peebles softly singing of a happier kind of love to be shared with the right man. Fortunately for us, her contentment with love is brief. Peebles is at her gritty best when singing bittersweet songs on love’s blues–a fact made amply clear in her riveting masterpiece of heartbreak, “I Can’t Stand The Rain.” Called the “greatest record ever” by John Lennon, I Can’t Stand The Rain deliciously blends blues, gospel and pop into an incomparable Memphis soul stew. Understandably her biggest hit, the song peaked at #6 on the R&B charts in 1974.
Read more »
Date: Jan 19, 1980 (release)
Release: Warner Brothers #6083
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
When I was in junior high, I really, really wanted to be Chrissie Hynde. A regular American heartland chick from Akron, Ohio, she lived out the rock ‘n’ roll fantasy of every early-’80s, MTV-addicted, suburban girl like myself. She moved to swinging London, where she landed a job at Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s SEX boutique, rubbed safety-pinned shoulders with the Sex Pistols, wrote for NME under the tutelage of demi-legendary rock scribe Nick Kent, and even won the heart of her long-admired teenhood heartthrob, Ray Davies of the Kinks (this is the equivalent of me bagging Duran Duran’s John Taylor now). Oh yeah–and she also formed a totally fierce, foxy, all-around fearsomely great band with three Brit gents and, in 1980, released one of the most kickass debut albums in rock history: the Pretenders I.
Read more »
Date: 1969
Release: Prestige #7765
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
I was first exposed to the irresistible music of Pucho & His Latin Soul Brothers in the mid 1990s, when he was in the midst of his UK inspired resurgence. But it wasn’t a British DJ that turned me on to Pucho, it was my old friend Steve. Steve and I had a strangely competitive friendship, built around a mutual love of music. Our dysfunctional dynamic led us on an out of control CD buying spree, a musical arms race of sorts, with both of us vying to accumulate more wonderfully obscure music than the other…more music, that is, than either of us could afford or digest. This irresponsible form of male bonding through competitive consumption was a direct by-product of our short-lived second adolescence, courtesy of the University of California, where we had found a temporary reprieve from the working world to live high on the hog of student loans (me) and parental largess (‘shaking the money tree,’ as Steve put it). But instead of hitting the books, we spent hours of our not so free time scouring the used record bins, each trying to surpass the other.
Read more »
Date: 1971
Release: Prestige #24176
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Bernard “Pretty” Purdie’s impeccable beats have dominated hundreds of great soul, R&B, funk, jazz, and pop records. A legendary and versatile drummer, he began pounding on pots and pans at the age of six, graduating to drums a few years later. By the time he was 21, he had firmly established himself at the top of the New York studio scene. Always in demand, he recorded with such masters as James Brown, King Curtis, and George Benson during the ‘60s, and toured with Aretha Franklin through the mid-‘70s, eventually becoming the Queen of Soul’s musical director. By the time he recorded Purdie Good! & Shaft in 1971, his popularity was so tremendous that he was taking 15-20 studio calls per week. These two solo albums capture Purdie in the heyday of his funky drumming style, thumping his way through a high-energy instrumental set of originals and covers.
Read more »
Date: 1997
Release: Capitol #55229
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
April 2, 1998. Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, California. Radiohead perform in support of their latest album, OK Computer. After the concert, standing outside in the chilly San Francisco air, a man cries softly as a woman comforts him. The music’s impact is evident in the lost, vacant faces of those emerging from the arena. Today I need only listen to one song for my body to surge with indescribable longing and emotion.
Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar), Jonny Greenwood (guitar), Colin Greenwood (bass), Ed O’Brien (vocals, guitar) and Phil Selway (drums) were boyhood friends in Oxford, England. They originally formed the group On A Friday, quickly renaming it Radiohead (after a Talking Heads song).
Read more »
Date: 1967
Release: Reprise #MS-2029
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Otis Redding is to soul singing what Jimi Hendrix is to guitar. Without realizing it, Redding and Hendrix were black America’s greatest weapons in the culture wars of the 1960s. At the Monterey Pop Festival, they set the stage on fire, forever changing the nation’s music scene by infusing it with a powerful dose of pure soul. Their performances pulled out all the stops, blowing the minds of an LSD-laden audience fortunate enough to experience the decade’s musical peak. Countless “what if” questions continue to haunt us as we ponder the musical directions they might have taken had they not died young. Vastly influential, no two artists could be better suited to sharing space on an album together.
Read more »
Date: 1970 (recording)
Release: Dunhill #50089
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
One of the great mysteries in pop music remains how, given two hypothetical artists of equal talent, one can prosper while the other fails dismally. For every rich rock star convinced that “talent will tell out” is an absolute truism, there’s another poor one banging his head against the wall complaining about his incredible bad luck. It’s a common scenario, brought up here only to illustrate that album and singles charts can only tell one side of the story. Whether Emitt Rhodes (b. 1949) was ever the sort of artist inclined to head-banging is another mystery. But one thing’s for sure: in the six-year span of 1967 to 1973, he mad some of the best pop records that nobody ever heard.
Read more »
Date: 1972
Release: Virgin #47864
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Rock & roll has been around for over a half a century; it’s now part of history. And as part of the historical record, it is open to interpretation and debate, especially among musicians. Mos Def, has his own opinion in Black on Both Sides. Now, I love that album, and Def is a great talent, but its narrowness leaves something to be desired. One particular song, entitled, “Rock N Roll,” argues that “the Rolling Stones didn’t come up with that sound on their own.” Black people started rock & roll; white people have simply appropriated–adulterated– the music, and Mos Def is going to take it back.
Read more »
Date: 1956-1958
Release: Varese Sarabande #061077
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Stevie Ray Vaughan named his band after one of his songs. Michael Bloomfield was so moved by his music that he produced him. Eric Clapton imitated his vocal style. Led Zeppelin covered his music. For what he managed to achieve throughout his long illustrious career, Otis Rush is perhaps the most underrated bluesman in the history of the genre. For decades he was one of the great movers and shakers of the blues. It was he, along with fellow singer/guitarists Buddy Guy and Magic Sam, who in the 1950s invented what was coined the “West Side” blues sound. Each musician had his own distinct style that set him apart from his peers and recorded music that influenced a generation of bluesmen. But song for song it is arguably Otis Rush who has made the biggest impact of the three.
Read more »
Date: 1971-1972
Release: BGP #107
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
In 1971-1972, a handful of long-haired brothers representing Sounds of Unity and Love asked the world two simple questions: “What Is IT?” and “Can You Feel IT?” Miles Davis provided the perfect answer in his autobiography, which begins with an authoritative command to “LISTEN!” Duke Ellington had a deep understanding of what IT is, insisting that “IT Don’t Mean A Thing, If IT Ain’t Got That Swing.” And James Brown let everybody feel IT when he proclaimed, “Say IT Louder, I’m Black And I’m Proud.” While IT may have also been the sinister brain in Madeline L’Engle’s science-fiction masterpiece, A Wrinkle In Time, in the hands of S.O.U.L., IT was just that.
Read more »
