Teenage Fanclub – Man Made (Merge)
Another favorite from the past year, and another fine showing by a Glasgow band. Not putting out lots of albums has had the effect of letting them concentrate on only the highest-quality songs in their best album in eight years. Plenty of chiming, Byrdsian guitar propels a bunch of perfect riffs and aching melodies in yet another power-pop classic.
Willie Nelson – Countryman (Lost Highway)
This hasn’t gotten very good press, with most comments focusing on the shared marijuanaphilia of Nelson and Jamaican musicians (well, duh). Is it a great album? No. But is it enjoyable? Definitely. Mostly it’s Nelson songs (I think they’ve all been previously recorded, but I’m not sure – he’s got so many songs) done reggae style, though still with country touches (especially pedal steel guitar). Not everything works, and the album gets off to a slow start, but “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” sounds absolutely apocalyptic in this context. The two covers of real reggae songs, Jimmy Cliff’s “Sitting in Limbo” and “The Harder They Come,” work spectacularly well, and Johnny Cash’s “I’m a Worried Man” as a duet with Toots Hibbert is another touch of genius.
Que Verde – The Most Important Thing (Petticoat)
From last year, by a Brooklyn musician named Christine Back whom I met when she came into the store a few months ago. I took it on consignment and it’s one of my favorite local releases. Her songs seem fragile as delivered with her small, intimate voice (often with jewel-like harmonies overdubbed) and minimal, shimmering electric guitar (piano instead on the last track), but there’s a tensile strength inside their wistfulness. The title track is positively brilliant, slowly building to a touching close. Find it at
Sound Fix or on the
Que Verde website.
Ruby on the Vine – This World of Days (Ruby on the Vine)
Myrna Marcarian’s current band. Rock aficionados will remember her from new-wavers Human Switchboard (somebody really ought to reissue their classic
Who’s Landing in My Hanger?). This is more polished: classic guitar-powered-pop that swings from darkly moody to sunnily celebratory to uptempo rock with an edge. The songwriting’s great, her singing is better than ever, and this deserves to be heard. Also on consignment at Sound Fix, and available at
the band’s website.
Iron and Wine & Calexico – In the Reins (Overcoat)
Sam Beam can do no wrong in my book, but a little variety is nice too, and Calexico provides that in spades. A favorite of the year. I hope I can find time to make it to one of their upcoming shows.
Motorhead – King Bisquit Flower Hour Presents (King Bisquit Flower Hour/BMG)
I found this CD used while in Philadelphia back in October and finally listened to it today (old discs from 1997 weren’t a priority when I had 80 albums to review for the new issue of The Big Takeover!). This concert at the infamous L’Amour East in Queens, NY on 8/10/83 comes from the tour supporting Another Perfect Day, the first album after original guitarist “Fast” Eddie Clarke quit and the only one with former Thin Lizzy six-stringer Brian “Robbo” Robertson, who stayed for 18 months. The only track here not drawn from that album (Lemmy intros the title tune as “Another Perfect Hangover”) is “Iron Horse/Born to Lose”; Robertson refused to play a lot of old Motorhead songs. Another Perfect Day outraged diehard fans with synthesizers; there’s none of that “live,” and in fact no keyboards at all, so even thought the sound is cavernous, this is a good way to hear six of the LP’s ten songs sounding more like Motorhead than on the studio disc. There’s an interview at the end with Lemmy, from years later (apparently 1996), and Lemmy rips Robertson a new one and, in a chat running over 20 minutes, delivers such insights as “Americans have their heads up their ass,” “We are Eddie Cochran 30 years later,” and “You can’t have safe rock ‘n’ roll.” Definitely only for fans, but I’m one.
Cooper-Moore – Outtakes 1978 (Hopscotch)
Fans of avant-garde jazz in New York know they’ve got a treasure in multi-instrumentalist Cooper-Moore, who’s been way too underrepresented on record. We take everything we can get, and it’s always interesting to hear his musical mind at work in any context. As this album’s title proclaims, this is a bit of an odds-and-sods collection on saxophonist Assif Tsahar’s label, which has done as good a job as anyone of documenting Cooper-Moore’s work. A fair amount of this album – and the most stimulating part – is a quartet with trumpeter Mark Gould, tenor saxophonist David S. Ware, and drummer Kenwood Dennard; Cooper-Moore plays piano, diddley-bow, clay fife, slap pipe, ashimba, and twanger. Some tracks are duets or trios, subtler and with less explosive energy. The final track, using the Biblical story of creation for lyrics, features Abigail Goldman and Cooper-Moore singing. This is a record whose seams show proudly.
The Daily Show (Monday-Thursday, Comedy Central)
Maybe not quite as good as it used to be, and Lewis Black seems to no longer be a weekly feature, alas. Nonetheless, this is still the most intelligent political show on TV, even when host Jon Stewart goes for yuks with low-brow humor (and I’m not complaining!).
The Colbert Report (Monday-Thursday, Comedy Central)
Former Daily Show correspondent Stephen Colbert (don’t pronounce the “t” in his last name or in “Report” – “it’s French, bitch”) hilariously parodies right-wing talk shows four nights a week following his former outlet’s broadcast – in fact, one of the high points every night is the transition between the two, in which Colbert in his egomaniacally self-absorbed persona disses Stewart when he checks in. But the best bit almost every time is “The Word,” in which Colbert doggedly pursues some topic on his mind with a running written commentary on the right of the screen.
Billy Wagner signs with the Mets
If it’s really pitching that wins pennants, then the Mets – who already finished third in the National League in ERA in 2005, behind St. Louis and Houston – are getting closer with this signing.
