Month: December 2015

Great Album: Bob Dylan – Shadows in the Night

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Q: Why did you make this record now?
A: Now is the right time. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I heard Willie [Nelson]’s Stardust record in the late 1970s. All through the years, I’ve heard these songs being recorded by other people and I’ve always wanted to do that. And I wondered if anybody else saw it the way I did.
~Bob Dylan (AARP interview – Feb 2015)

I love these songs, and I’m not going to bring any disrespect to them. To trash those songs would be sacrilegious. And we’ve all heard those songs being trashed, and we’re used to it. In some kind of ways you want to right the wrong.
~Bob Dylan (AARP interview – Feb 2015)

The great shock here, then, is Dylan’s singing. Dylan’s focus and his diction, after years of drowning in sandpaper, evoke his late-Sixties poise and clarity on John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline — also records of deceptive restraint and retrospect — with an eccentric rhythmic patience in the way he holds words and notes across the faint suggestions of tempo. It is not crooning. It is suspense: Dylan, at 73, keeping fate at arm’s length as he looks for new lessons, nuance and solace in well-told tales.
~David Fricke (rollingstone.com – Feb 2015)

..But while Shadows In The Night is nostalgic, it is not sentimental. As a celebration of classic songcraft, it is as sincere as any of Dylan’s many forays into traditional American roots idioms. But how does Sinatra measure up to Dylan’s other early heroes? “Right from the beginning he was there with the truth of things in his voice,” Dylan wrote in the days after Sinatra’s death. “His music had a profound influence on me, whether I knew it or not. He was one of the very few singers who sang without a mask.” Shadows In The Night, then, is Dylan’s way of saying thank you.
~Michael Bonner (uncut.co.uk – Jan 2015)

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Great Album: Leon Bridges – Coming Home

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

Coming Home is the debut studio album by American gospel and soul singer Leon Bridges, it was released on June 23, 2015, under Columbia Records. The album was written by Leon Bridges, Austin Michael Jenkins, Joshua Block, Chris Vivion and produced by Niles City Sound.

Leon Bridges is reminiscent of Sam Cooke, Otis Redding and other pioneering soul legends, but he is a unique talent in his own right and this album is more than a throwback to an earlier era. Good songs and smooth soul singing.

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Great Album: Father John Misty – I love you, Honeybear

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

I Love You, Honeybear is the second studio album released by American folk musician Josh Tillman under his pseudonym Father John Misty. It was released on February 9, 2015 in the UK and Europe on Bella Union, and in the rest of the world on February 10, 2015 on Sub Pop. Produced by both Tillman and Jonathan Wilson, this is Tillman’s second studio album since his departure from Fleet Foxes. The album was also mixed by Phil Ek, and mastered by Greg Calbi at Sterling Sound. According to Tillman, the release is a concept album.

“It achieves beauty without ever forgetting the complications that come with that beauty. Tillman can sing about sex and anxiety and death-fear with sweeping cinematic panache. He can make low feelings sound high, and he can make high feelings sound like grand romantic visions. “
– Stereogum

Ok, so it is a performance, a theatrical act, but that doesn’t make it less honest. Sometimes we see truth through art and make belive, and the melodies, man, the melodies are wonderful!

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Great Album: Wilco – Star Wars

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

wilco star wars 2

It’s kind of an extension of the thought process behind, I don’t know, staying in touch with some sort of wild energy as much as possible and some sort of an irreverence. But that painting of that cat hangs in the kitchen at the [Wilco] loft, and every day I’d look at it and go, “You know, that should just be the album cover.” Then I started thinking about the phrase “Star Wars” recontextualized against that painting — it was beautiful and jarring. The album has nothing to do with Star Wars. It just makes me feel good. It makes me feel limitless and like there’s still possibilities and still surprise in the world, you know?
~Jeff Tweedy (rollingstone.com)

In the album’s most carefree moments, of which there are many, he sounds at home in himself — never an easy move for one of rock’s top chroniclers of midlife man-malaise. “I belong to the stars in the sky,” he sings on “Random Name Generator,” making a blues boast out of spacey poesy and totally pulling it off. Give it up for the man. He’s got the Force by the spaceballs.
~Jon Dolan (rollingstone.com)

Random Name Generator (Live on KEXP):

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Great Album: Kendrick Lamar – To Pimp A Butterfly

Posted on by Hallgeir Olsen

“Now that we are older, I hear people my own age (I’m in my early 50s) putting down the music of today. Sure, like any other age, there is no shortage of crap that sells, and with the easy availability of literally thousands of releases and a certain crashing of the once-prevalent gatekeepers, it might be harder to know what to look for, but I would like to go on record as saying that some of the finest songwriting I’ve ever heard is occurring right now.
…
To Pimp a Butterfly is the long-awaited follow-up album by Kendrick and it certainly does not disappoint. From the provocative cover shot to the opening song, it’s clear that he intends to build on his already formidable reputation at the front line of our social consciousness with his raps on the current state of affairs, especially regarding our country’s stilted attempts to own up to its racial legacy and where it stands in this era of “we’ve come so far but still have so far to go.” Many people on both sides of the spectrum are discussing it and a few are trying to address it in their art or writing but, to me, no one is addressing it all with so clear a voice and such literary eloquence as Kendrick Lamar.”
– Patterson Hood (Drive-By Truckers)

I couldn’t say it better, so I let Mr. Hood tell us.

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Great Album: Keith Richards – Crosseyed Heart

Posted on by Egil Mosbron

keith richards crosseyed heart

I love the title “Crosseyed Heart,” and I still can’t explain quite what it means. I wanted to make a record that gave thanks and praises to everybody that influenced me. So in a way, “Crosseyed Heart” was to Robert Johnson. And later on, I realized without realizing it that I was tipping my hat in a lot of directions: to Gregory Isaacs for “Love is Overdue,” and to Otis Redding, and to a whole lot of people. I was paying my dues!
~Keith Richards (Jim McGuinn interview @ thecurrent.org)

Naturally, there’s a dip into roots reggae: Gregory Isaacs’ 1974 lovers’ rock signature, “Love Overdue,” complete with brass and Neville’s sweet backing vocals. There’s also a straight read of “Goodnight Irene,” a folk standard that Richards likely heard as a kid when the Weavers’ version charted in 1950. Two originals are as strong as any Stones songs of recent decades: “Robbed Blind,” a “Dead Flowers”-scented outlaw-country ballad that echoes Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home,” and “Trouble,” all hiccup-riff swagger with a slide-guitar mash note from Wachtel to ex-Stone Mick Taylor. There’s a charmingly cheeky duet with Norah Jones (“Illusion”), and some beautifully telling moments (see “Amnesia”) where Keith’s guitar is nearly everything — his sublime grooves sprouting melodic blooms and thorny leads. It’s proof that, at core, dude’s an army of one.
~Will Hermes (review @ rollingstone.com)

Keith Richards on the Andrew Marr Show (Clips from Crosseyed Heart) Sept 2015:

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