<< >>
Album Reviews
page:
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
(166 reviews)
Date: June 21, 1971
Release: MOTOWN #37463-5339-2
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
"When would the war stop? That’s what I wanted to know… the war inside my soul."
That was the question that inspired Marvin Gaye to create his most deeply realized record, What’s Going On?. This 1971 album went against the grain at Motown, which had become mired by this time in its hit-factory mentality of the ’60s. Berry Gordy even fought with Gaye over releasing the album. Fortunately the artist prevailed over the businessman, and Gaye’s masterpiece reached the masses, generating a stellar response and record sales (three songs went all the way to number one).
Read more »
Date: February 13, 1962
Release: VERVE 341 521 413-2
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Driving music designed for sun-drenched drives in sleek convertables along winding coasts with the one you love by your side. Jazz Samba is the album responsible for importing the Brazilian Bossa Nova craze to America in 1962. What makes this musical genre so infectious is the delicate tension between its intricate rhythms and its deceptively light-handed melodic approach. It’s the music of tropical drinks and lazy afternoons, and of all the Bossa Nova albums to be recorded in the ’60s, this is the definitive one.
Read more »
Date: September 17, 1969 (recording)
Release: Verve #2668
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Heavily accented, hesitantly breathy and child-like, Astrud Gilberto‘s vocals never fail to seduce me. As I play her records (particularly this one), I obsessively pore over the album photos, falling for the sweet faced girl with the adorable voice. An accidental star with no professional training, Astrud was catapulted to fame after singing on the bossa nova crossover hit, “The Girl From Ipanema.” The story is that her then husband, Brazilian singer-songwriter Joao Gilberto, was in the studio with saxophonist Stan Getz, when producer Creed Taylor suggested they record “Ipanema” in English in order to give the song a better chance at cracking the charts. By sheer luck, Astrud was the only Brazilian in the room with a sufficient grasp of the language to give it a shot.
Read more »
Date: Nov 10, 1969 (release)
Release: Warner Brothers #1830
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
They were the longest-running continuous circus on Earth, and in the end, not even the main attraction at the show. They were a touchstone of controversy; an industry of merchandise and a free exchange; a hippie (then neo-hippie) theme park and gypsy caravan all rolled into one. They inspired a new catch-all suffix for obsession. Such is the English language, and such were the Dead.
The party is long over now. I went to my first and only Dead show in 1991 during a break in my freshman year of college. I was never a huge fan, but with the advent of my short-lived pot-smoking days, I had become interested in the scene and decided to check out a show before Jerry checked out permanently. Before I came home from Buffalo for the vacation, I drove out to the Indian reservation and bought a couple cartons of cigarettes. A week later I was hanging out in the parking lot of Giants (as Deadheads called Giants Stadium in New Jersey), trading packs of smokes for beers and joints. It was a good deal, a fine experiment in the Deadhead tradition, and an experience just as I’d hoped for. I got a glimpse into that world and understood the allure.
Read more »
Date: 1972
Release: THE RIGHT STUFF #27627
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
I believe to my soul that the Reverend Al Green has the easy-chair vibe that we all need desperately in our stressed lives. This gem is a true play-it-all-the-way-through album in the old school sense. As the soulful beats caress your troubled mind, Green’s vocals slide on in and get next to you, letting you know that he knows that you know why he sings “Baby, I’m Glad You’re Mine.” Highlights include the hit “Love and Happiness,” as well as a smooth grooving cover of Roy Orbison‘s “Pretty Woman.” But nothing tops the quiet storm of “So Beautiful,” which slowly builds until you feel the light. This is music invented for lazy afternoons and Sunday drives.
Guaranteed to promote mental health!
Read more »
Date: October 3 , 1969
Release: Blue Note #31247
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Having firmly established himself as the 60s jazz guitarist second only to the great Wes Montgomery, Grant Green was willing and able to move into something new and give himself up to the emerging funk wave that would seep across the 70s. Attacked by purists as Grant’s grand selling-out, these recordings have been rediscovered and widely sampled by legions of acid-jazz aficionados. Hypnotically rhythmic and quintessentially grooving, the five tracks on this straight reissue are all exceptionally tasty bursts of authentic funk. Carryin’ On contains two solid covers, the Meters‘ “Ease Back” and James Brown‘s “I Don’t Want Nobody To Give Me Nothing (Open Up The Door I’ll Get It Myself,” which alone make it well worth the money.
Read more »
Date: 1964
Release: Fantasy FCD-8430-2
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Remember those old CBS specials with Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts characters — Linus, Lucy, Peppermint Patty, Freda, Schroeder, Snoopy, Woodstock? The first of the animated specials, A Charlie Brown Christmas, appeared in 1965 and was a huge hit and became a holiday tradition. If you were a kid when CBS aired the Peanuts specials (at least through the 1980s), you remember how excited you got when the word “special” in capital letters would whoosh and spin on the screen leaving colored trails, and that syncopated music would start playing. A generation of kids would curl up on den floors , wrapped in their blankets and watching in bliss.
Read more »
Date: January 28, 2002 (release)
Release: 4AD #72202
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
The soundtrack to my most difficult breakup, Neil Halstead’s Sleeping On Roads will always be entangled in my biography. I’m sure that years from now I’ll happen to hear any one of the album’s failed relationship songs, and instantly I will be back in that parked car by the side of the road, struggling to look into the eyes of my longtime girlfriend to say goodbye.
Neil Halstead played in the car for us when things were ending, and, alone now, he plays just for me.
Like a true singer-songwriter, many of Neil Halstead’s songs deal with the dark dimensions of love gone wrong. And like a true masochist, I’ve been listening to these melancholy songs all the time (I should stick with the Buzzcocks), succumbing to their spare and drifting mood. Written with simple honesty and delivered with passion, Sleeping On Roads is loaded with the kind of brutally heartfelt love laments you’d find on an old Van Morrison or Nick Drake record. In song after song, Halstead pours out a broken heart’s worth of feeling. Left homeless after splitting up with his girlfriend, Halstead started Sleeping On Roads while living (and yes, sleeping) in the studio. Out of that pain, these nine songs were born. When they weren’t included on the last Mojave 3 record (his regular band), the idea for a Halstead solo album emerged and these orphaned songs found a home.
Read more »
Date: Oct 3, 1969 – Dec 8, 1969 (recording)
Release: Warner Brothers #1834
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
Performing Mozart with the Chicago Symphony at the age of 11, Herbie Hancock was a child prodigy who blossomed into one of the most distinct and influential pianists in the history of modern music. His miraculous playing on all the Miles Davis albums recorded between 1963-68 reveal a musical evolution of quantum leaps and bounds. By the time Herbie graduated from Miles’ band in 1968, he left not as a sideman to the great trumpeter, but as an equal.
From the late-‘60s through the mid-‘70s, Herbie’s music moved in parallel evolution to that of Miles, with the pair both deeply immersed in genre blurring electronic experimentation. Leaving Blue Note for Warner Bros, Herbie plugged his instrument in and radically changed his sound.
Read more »
Date: September 18, 1965
Release: Koch 3-7820-2
Cover Art: view / download
Buy the Album
There are certain transcendent moments of live improvisation achieved by only the greatest of musicians, where the sounds they play spontaneously light up unknown nerve endings in the heart of the entire audience. It is an unmistakable event, because when the song is over, there usually follows a long and ecstatic hush, just before the crowd regains self-consciousness and breaks into a sustained applause. Such an unforgettable event took place over 35 years ago at the Monterey Jazz Festival, when master altoist John Handy and his quintet took the stage and launched into a 27-minute version of “If Only We Knew.”
Read more »
