Although Mary Chapin Carpenter has acquired quite a collection of country-music accolades during her seven-year recording career, her style has had as much in common with Carole King as with Loretta Lynn. Her fifth album, Stones in the Road, is more of the same: yet another thoughtful and meticulous concoction of country, rock, folk and bluegrass.
Her alto never cracks, her simple melodies are fastidious, and her painstaking lyrics are as literate as any Willa Cather novel. Still, Stones in the Road is nearly a stone-cold bore. Carpenter's biggest critical and commercial successes—and, ultimately, best songs—have been loose, mindless foot-tappers like "Down at the Twist & Shout" and "I Feel Lucky," but there are few of those here. Instead the album is bogged down with too many slow, brooding tunes like "The End of My Pirate Days" and "John Doe No. 24," the numbing tale of a blind deaf-mute that features Branford Marsalis on sax. By far the best moment comes midway through the album when Carpenter kicks into cheeky high gear with "Shut Up and Kiss Me." More of such flirtatious frolics might have made Carpenter's Road more fun to travel. (Columbia)
Bryan Ferry
The former front man for Roxy Music returns with his evocative and ambiguous style intact. Ferry has always embodied a very British brand of tortured reserve. His manner in turn gives his music a distinctive stamp, that of sophisticated, drawing-room soul, of starchy, formal funk.
That paradoxical formula is best displayed on this album's guitar crunchers—"Don't Want to Know," "The 39 Steps" and the "Shaft"-like shuffle of the title track—songs in which there is a palpable tension between Ferry's quirkily elegant delivery and the music's robust, simmering grooves. Ferry's weepy, quavering voice also lends a couple of the slower songs, "Your Painted Smile" and "Which Way to Turn," an oddly hypnotic quality.
As deliciously idiosyncratic as ever, Bryan Ferry is one wan romantic. (Virgin)
Robert Earl Keen
Vocally this Texas singer-songwriter bears an unfortunate similarity to guitarist Leo Kottke, who once ruthlessly compared his own voice to "geese farts on a muggy day." But Keen's less-than-sonorous baritone is surprisingly easy to overlook—he writes memorable, occasionally unforgettable country-folk tunes (since recorded by Nanci Griffith and Keen's old buddy Lyle Lovett, among others), and he unfailingly surrounds himself with a first-rate bunch of pickers.
Keen knows how to rock a Saturday-night beer joint, and he can cast a hush over the crowd too—"Think It Over One Time" is an easy-flowing ballad with an addictive chorus, and "Lynnville Train" is a genuine heartbreaker. (Sugar Hill)
Roberta Flack
Roberta Flack's best music has always been her most melancholy. Her early '70s hits, such as "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" and "Killing Me Softly with His Song," were the sort of gloomily romantic ballads that got under listeners' skins in a way her lighter collaborations with the late Donny Hathaway never could.
Roberta, her first new album in three years, finds the songstress veering between up-tempo, cocktail-funk workouts and moody torch songs, and again the glum stuff wins. One wonders why Flack even bothered with overarranged fluff like "Sweet Georgia Brown" when with just voice, piano and bass, she breathes new life into a jazz-era chestnut like "My Romance." Likewise her oddly cheery take on B.B. King's "The Thrill Is Gone" sounds downright anachronistic next to her lovely, spare interpretation of Al Green's "Let's Stay Together."
Luckily the mood-indigo tunes outnumber the wrongheaded feel-good songs. Program your CD player judiciously, and you can turn Roberta into an even more gratifying album. (Atlantic)
The Cranberries
Like a wild thrush singing to the treetops, lead singer Dolores O'Riordan opens her mouth and pours out flute-like sounds, sometimes seeming to release two notes at once as she leaps between octaves. Her gentle but dramatic voice is the focal point of the second album by her Irish pop-rock group.
As on the quartet's double-platinum-selling 1993 debut, these new songs are mellow, feet-up-after-work music with lyrics, mostly about troubled love, that float on the gentle pulse of drums and guitars. But on a few songs, such as "Zombie," an edgy lament about the long-running Irish-English conflict, O'Riordan drops her usual restraint. "It's the same old theme since 1916," she spits out bitterly as the band's guitars work up an angry grind. O'Riordan's intense delivery brings out a slight tartness—which, of course, is the mark of a truly good cranberry. (Island)
- Contributors:
- Jeremy Helligar,
- David Hiltbrand,
- Tony Scherman,
- Tom Sinclair,
- Michael Small.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
