Two years ago this rock quintet stormed out of nowhere (all right, Atlanta) to widespread acclaim with Shake Your Money Maker, a tough, tequila-and-no-chaser debut that placed the band squarely on the Stones/Faces/Georgia Satellites blues-rock axis.
Not much has changed on this highly anticipated follow-up, except that Marc Ford has replaced Jeff Cease on lead guitar. It's obvious from Ford's sizzling solo on "Sting Me," the barnstorming boogie that opens the album, that he's another high-flying Crowe.
Put these birds together and it's murder, from the shouter "Sometime Salvation" to the slammer "Hotel Illness" to the drop-kick rocker "Remedy," which shows off the Nicky Hopkins—like piano of Ed Hawrysch.
The album title, which singer Chris Robinson took from an old hymnal, is apt because the prominent use of female backup singers—particularly on "Sting Me," "Thorn in My Pride" and "My Morning Song"—does make the band sound strongly Southern, in the tradition of Dixie rockers like Wet Willie and Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Robinson's wailing, left-out-in-the-rain vocals are much more impressive this time around. But it's the slower, bluesier numbers like "Bad Luck Blue Eyes" that show off Robinson's alley-cat instrument to best effect.
The traditional rock genre that the Crowes work in has been farmed to exhaustion over the last three decades, yet the band manages to freshen and energize the style. Rock-and-roll spirit is all about hunger, and the Crowes still sound pretty famished. (Def American)
Sophie B. Hawkins
When a record opens with a song called "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover," you realize immediately you're not dealing with some delicate flower. Hawkins knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it. Still in her mid-20s, she honed her songwriting skills through five years of studying and working with Nigerian musicians in New York City, during which she also learned to play the traditional African djambe drum.
Tongues and Tails is a wildly varying collection, from tracks that can be described as pretty little playthings to the truly mind-blowing "Listen," a breathy outpouring of desire that makes Madonna's "Justify My Love" sound like Nana Mouskouri. While you can discern Motown influences and the combined shadows of Bob Dylan and Rickie Lee Jones, Hawkins's vocal gymnastics permeate Tongues and Tails. In a debut that mixes the foreign with the familiar, the mundane with the sublime, this album has enough sing-alongs and stings in its tail to mark the arrival of a precocious new talent. (Columbia)
Lawrence Welk
Thanks to his band's niblet-style music and his own over-ingratiating stage personality, as well as the efforts of such master parodists as Stan Freberg, Welk became the living definition of corniness.
But as this 69-track, three-CD set shows, his band often included splendid musicians turning out pleasant, if uninspired, pop music (the span here is 1957 to 1981). Welk, who died last month at 89, started out in North Dakota in the '20s with local bands, mostly playing polkas. He and his longtime musical director, George Cates, always favored plinky-dink, lowest-common-denominator arrangements. Yet such people as Pete Fountain, the fluid, melodically inventive New Orleans clarinetist; the facile guitarist Buddy Merrill; and the flamboyant accordionist Myron Floren, appeared on TV with Welk, heightening the band's musicality. They are here along with vocals by the Lennon Sisters, who fared better when they could use their sweetie-pie looks than when they had to rely, as they do on record, on sound alone.
The set doesn't include such early hits as the novelty nonsense classic "Mairzy Doats." There are, though, Welkian versions of such pop tunes as "Tie a Yellow Ribbon," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" and, in a florid but tasteful arrangement, "The Song Is You." Welk's distinctive and contagiously fox-trotty theme song, "Bubbles in the Wine," written by Welk himself, is still fun too.
If nothing else, Welk nobly outlasted his contemporaries among the Swing Era's fringe bands. Where is that boxed set devoted to Shep Fields and his Rippling Rhythm, not to mention the Ish Kabibble greatest hits package? (Ranwood)
Ringo Starr
It's been nearly a decade since Ringo's last studio record, and the Fab Former returns with a new wrinkle: message songs. The single "Weight of the World" is a Byrdsian chimer that counsels a woman to clear the slate of yesterday's personal resentments and get on with her life. "Don't Go Where the Road Don't Go" is about Ringo's recovery from alcoholism: "I don't remember many yesterdays, I left a lot of things undone/ Now I'm back and I'm here to say I'm looking after number one." Come to think of it, the album title sounds suspiciously like a slogan from the Betty Ford Clinic.
Does this mean the most cartoonish of the Beatles has gone ponderous on us? Not to worry. The best thing about Ringo is how utterly free of pretension he has always been. Some of the lyrics may be thoughtful, but the music, created with the assistance of veterans Benmont Tench, Waddy Wachtel, Michael Landau, James Hutchinson and others, is admirably relaxed. Unfortunately it's also exasperatingly bland.
Some time after most listeners will have lost all hope and patience, Ringo does kick into gear on three consecutive songs: the goofy rocker "After All These Years," the countrified stroll of "I Don't Believe You" and the locomotive-driven "Runaways." (Hey, that stint as the conductor on PBS's Shining Time Station may have come in handy.) Maybe Time Takes More Time. Maybe next time. (Private Music)
Olivia Newton-John
There's a hint of desperation to this album. Like her countrymen, the brothers Gibb, Newton-John never quite commuted out of the '70s, and these rereleases of such old hits as "Sam," "Please Mr. Please," "I Honestly Love You," "Physical" and "Magic" only raise unfortunate what-has-she-done-for-us-lately questions.
These were and are pleasant pop songs. On the four new tunes, Olivia sounds as plaintively sweet as ever. This is certainly not an offensive album, as were her attempts to become the Queen of Kink in the mid-'80s. It's just not very interesting. (Geffen)
- Contributors:
- David Hiltbrand,
- Barry Divola,
- Ralph Novak.
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!
