The second album from this Chicago outfit is a gale of fresh air. How can you resist a powerful but melodic rock band that kicks rump but then picks you up, dusts you off and sends you on your merry way?
Listen to "Heaven or Hell" and "Missing You" for primers on the band's ability to play it both rugged and coy. Derek Frigo's stormy guitar throws up flotsam and jetsam all around the infectious tunes. Lead singer Donnie Vie's pinched, passionate voice is reminiscent of Elvis Costello's.
The band doesn't lack for musical ideas, including such touches as a chiming music box on "Mothers Eyes," a reedy Mellotron on "The Way Home" and a violin on the title track, played by Frigo's father, John.
The band's strong suit, heard on such tracks as "In Crowd," is to blitz like a Chicago Bears linebacker on a kamikaze mission and still sound pretty while doing it. Not all the songs hit the mark by any means, but when they do, Enuff Z'Nuff will convert you to happy musical masochism, making you plead, "Smack me again, please." (Atco)
Vince Gill
Gill's presence as a backup singer on so many country records in recent years isn't because of coincidence or because he works cheap. He has a rarity of a voice—a sweet, smooth tenor that couldn't be better suited to harmonizing if his name were Everly.
When he's out front, it's clear that his voice is also strong enough to carry a song. This fifth Gill album does include some pretty harmonizing with Patty Loveless and Andrea Zonn (especially with Zonn on the romantic Gill-Jim Weatherly tune "If I Didn't Have You in My World").
But the Oklahoma-born Pure Prairie League alumnus also carries the load quite effectively by himself on such tracks as the rollicking "Liza Jane" (Gill-Reed Nielsen) and his own painful, let's-get-this-over-with weeper, "Take Your Memory with You."
Despite a smattering of hit singles before his 1990 smash, "When I Call Your Name" (with Loveless's harmonies), Gill, 33, has probably been known almost as much for the facts that (1) he is one of the few younger male country vocalists who doesn't sound at all like Merle Haggard and (2) his wife, Janis, is half of the Sweethearts of the Rodeo. Now, though, he's deservedly past the breakthrough stage, passing rapidly through breakout and headed for breakaway. (MCA)
Julio Iglesias
The voice has a throb that is clearly designed to make impressionable female fans tingle. The phrasing is clumsy; the enunciation sloppy; the voice is thin; the sound is caramelized.
All of which can only mean one thing: The world's most celebrated lounge iguana, Julio Iglesias, has a new album. It doesn't matter what he sings—here the roster includes "Can't Help Falling in Love," which is full of pregnant pauses. ("I can't help falling in love [pause, pause, pause] with you.") "And I Love Her," "Cryin' Time," "If You Go Away"—in Julio's hands, they all sound like songs that belong in a roller rink or in an offering of songs that cannot, repeat, cannot be found in any store.
It doesn't much help matters that Julio is immune to the message of lyrics. There isn't an iota of urgency in the underheard "99 Miles from L.A.," or a touch of wistfulness in "Mona Lisa." Iglesias is best suited to lush ballads like "Yesterday When I Was Young," songs that are so lyrically and melodically overblown to start with that he would be hard put to inflict additional harm on them. (Columbia)
Paris
Rap music reaches new heights of political invective on Paris's jolting debut recording. His deep, rich voice trembling with apparent rage, he sometimes seems to be gasping for air as he calls for revolution in the style of his role models the Black Panthers. He spits out strings of rhyming accusations, covering everything from police brutality to what he sees as hypocrisy in middle-class blacks: "Go to school, maybe join a frat/...Made a little money, now your skin ain't black."
Whatever you think of his politics, it's hard to deny that Paris boosts his message with unique, sleek music. A buzzing synthesizer bass melody underlies many tracks, adding a primal beast-on-the-hunt quality. This is most explicit in "On the Prowl," an instrumental number that mixes a big cat's roar with blaring sirens.
Paris also teases listeners with a raw contradiction, giving an alluring dance beat to "This Is a Test" and adding lyrics that berate rappers who create vapid dance music.
Paris (real name, more or less: O. Jackson) produced, wrote and performs all of his new songs, with effects by deejay Mad Mike. While his University of California, Davis, degree is in economics, Paris, 23, seems like a history teacher. He weaves speeches by black leaders into his songs, and his liner notes discuss Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and other figures (Martin Luther King Jr. is noticeably absent).
Paris is too serious to succeed at the clever wordplay many rappers rely on. But by blending a fascinating beat into a message delivered with a frightening snarl, he keeps himself on the showbiz side of the line that divides pop music and polemics. (Tommy Boy/Scarface)
Shirley Horn
To say that there are hints of Carmen McRae and Maxine Sullivan in Horn's voice, that there are shades of Billie Holiday in her presentation, is to take nothing away from this fine jazz singer and pianist.
There is a dead-on directness to her delivery and an intensity that builds with every turn, making every song a story with beginning, middle and end. She opens this album with "The Music That Makes Me Dance," the ravishing, too seldom heard closing ballad from Funny Girl, and with each verse adds power and pathos to the lyric line.
She weaves a similar spell around the Alan Jay Lerner-Burton Lane tune "Too Late Now" and adds a wonderful, easy humor to "Come Dance with Me." Need more reasons to listen? Horn is joined by Wynton Marsalis on "Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'," by Wynton's brother Branford on "It Had to Be You" and by Miles Davis on the title cut. (Verve)
- Contributors:
- David Hiltbrand,
- Ralph Novak,
- Joanne Kaufman,
- 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!
