Give Hawkins credit: The New York City native sure is getting in touch with her feelings. If only she didn't indulge in Alanis Morissette-style navel-gazing.
Here are some examples of her relentless agonizing from this, her third album: "I never knew I was unkind until I met you/ So how can I believe you will suffer with me?" "I am your death/ You are my wrath." "Open my heart, I'll tell you stories/ Open my legs, I'll read your mind."
And she is doing all this while playing the cello, which adds a dirgelike quality to her funereal lyrics. Vocally frail, she sounds like a depressed Rickie Lee Jones. In this dreary context the mere appearance of a banjo in "Lose Your Way" sounds explosively bright.
Still, in an era where singers have hits with whiny psychotherapy disguised as philosophy, Hawkins may find a market for this kind of thing.
Bottom Line: Gloomy worldview with strings attached
Smash Mouth (Interscope)
If these smart-alecky San Jose, Calif., rockers aren't careful, they could be accused of fashioning a concept album. On the opening track ("Who's There") the new-wave retro rockers spin a cool conceit, comparing the quest for life on distant planets to the search for love on this one. Luckily, beyond offering the CD's eye-candy cover art (an intergalactic cocktail lounge more Jetsons than Star Wars), some nifty sound effects and lyric allusions, the band pretty much jettisons the lost-in-space theme, sparing listeners the fullblown concept-album histrionics. Otherwise, Smash Mouth—vocalist Steve Harwell, 32, writer-guitarist Greg Camp, 32, bassist Paul DeLisle, 36, and drummer Kevin Coleman, 33 (plus a studio full of guest keyboardists and effects artists)—seems serious only about not taking themselves too seriously. With amusing images of planets aligning with a Hollywood disco ball ("Satellite"), Astro Lounge is full of free-floating whimsy and smart pop-rock hooks lifted from sources as diverse as Phil Spector, and ? and the Mysterians. But the band's deepest debt is to British pop groups of the '80s and '90s. Smash Mouth sounds variously like Madness ("Road Man"), Elvis Costello ("Radio") and those contemporary masters of derivation, Oasis ("Stoned").
Bottom Line: Cuisinarting pop styles into a tasty blend
Marty Stuart (MCA Nashville)
Fortunately, a reader's guide is included with this album. Its 20 tracks tell an otherwise hard-to-decipher tale about a Mississippi man (Stuart says that the person was real) who gets involved with a married woman, is rejected and then wanders off cross-country looking for a poetic place to kill himself before finding redemption.
If you aren't trying to figure out how to fit them into a story, though, many of the songs on the album are eminently enjoyable. And Stuart enlisted the aid of such talent as Emmylou Harris (who almost sells the story by herself, singing as a waitress on "Truckstop"), all-star picker Earl Scruggs and Pam Tillis, among others. Stuart himself brings his usual energy and rough-hewn appeal to his tunes, especially on "The Observations of a Crow," a strikingly original and rhythmically infectious song about life in a small town as seen from a high perch.
Bottom Line: Terrific album, in spite of itself
Bob Marley & the Wailers (Heartbeat)
Album of the week
Yah, mon, that low, mannered vocal on Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" belongs to none other than Bob Marley. And the future reggae supernova joins his fellow founding Wailers—Peter Tosh and Bunny "Wailer" Livingston—on an even more unlikely cover of "What's New, Pussycat." This 19-track album reprises tunes recorded between 1963 and 1966, a full decade before Marley rode his reggae beat to world stardom. In those days, as a group of clean-cut, fresh-faced teens performing a lilting Jamaican hybrid of pop, gospel, rock and soul music known as ska, the future Rasta men were out to score pop hits, not change the world. Marley, who would die of cancer at age 36 in 1981, and his mates (joined on some tracks by Junior Braithwaite and Beverley Kelso) sing simply about love and loss in voices of pure, sweet yearning.
Bottom Line: Unburied treasure with a bouncing, pre-reggae beat
The Donnas (Lookout!)
Teenage garage bands have been around since the dawn of rock and roll. But they have traditionally been boys creating three-chord cacophony. Now come the Donnas, four female garage rockers from the San Francisco Bay area, raising a Ramones-style ruckus with 14 three-minute punk-rock party tunes. A misfit quartet of former Palo Alto High School students who banded together in 1992, the Donnas—billed simply as Donna A. (vocals), Donna R. (guitar), Donna C. (drums) and Donna F. (bass)—follow up last year's American Teenage Rock n' Roll Machine with another blast of good-humored exuberance. It's hard not to like the title song lyrics ("I saw you standin' by the Slurpee machine/ White studded belt and skintight jeans") or "You Don't Wanna Call" ("Hey Howie, where you been?...Am I not old enough; am I too young?/ You think I don't know how to eat dim sum?"). Half the Donnas have already crossed the postadolescent line—Donnas A. and R. are 19; their sistas are 20—but their music is a timeless burst of renegade teen spirit.
Bottom Line: Girl power chording to teen nirvana
- Contributors:
- Ralph Novak,
- Steve Dougherty.
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!
