Popular around Denver, where the looming Rockies offer the perfect backdrop for her thunderclap voice, local treasure Storey made herself known to a wider audience last year with performances at Lilith Fair and Woodstock '99. Here, on her first nationally distributed CD, Storey unleashes her force-of-nature pipes on 12 gospel-style rock and jazz-grooved songs. She wrote or cowrote all of them with either her manager and coproducer, Jan Storey (who also doubles as her mom), or her guitarist, former Miles Davis sessions man Randy Hall. At times, Storey gets a bit carried away, filling her wordy songs with Mariah-like melismas and stretching vowels into long ululations that sound like so much caterwauling. But Storey, whose father, Bill, is a sound engineer, needn't work so hard. She is at her best when she shows restraint, as on her first single, the rock anthem "Let Us Walk." With a voice like hers, pyrotechnics are redundant.
Bottom Line: Goes astray but a good start
Various Artists (Columbia/Sony Music Soundtrax)
Each time Bob Dylan comes out with a new album—even an uncharacteristically weak one—the press hails the effort as his best since his wonder boy years. No such hype is appropriate here, not only because this isn't a new album—merely a soundtrack CD with four Dylan tunes, only one of which hasn't appeared elsewhere—but also because "Things Have Changed," the shuffling new composition that opens Wonder Boys, is Dylan's best only since his 1997 masterpiece Time Out of Mind. Using the same husky wheeze of three years ago, he sings lines that, as always, sound like no one else's: "Feel like fallin' in love with the first woman I meet/ Puttin' her in a wheelbarrow and wheelin' her down the street." Even mixed in among terrific tracks by his peers, including '60s soul god Clarence Carter, Neil Young, Tim Hardin, Little Willie John, Leonard Cohen, John Lennon and Van Morrison, Dylan's standout new tune is the one that makes this disc a keeper.
Bottom Line: Hardly boyish but still a wonder
Morphine (DreamWorks)
Album of the week
With his sleepy, hipster's drawl, Mark Sandman sounds like a Beat poet declaiming to a dreamy, jazz-funk beat on this, his avant-garde pop trio's fifth and final studio album. Recorded last spring in his Cambridge, Mass., home studio, The Night was already in the can (as was their still-unreleased live CD) on July 3, 1999, when tragedy struck. While performing with the band at the Giardini del Principe outside Rome, Sandman, 46, suffered a heart attack and collapsed dead onstage, to the horror of all present.
The Night, Morphine's most accessible album, displays Sandman at his creative peak. Augmenting the trio's signature bass-saxophone-drums lineup with organ, strings, guitar and piano, Sandman contributes slide bass and keyboards. He sets his imagery-rich lyrics to jazz-kissed grooves, swinging from dance-party songs ("Top Floor, Bottom Buzzer") and bass-driven funk workouts ("A Good Woman Is Hard to Find") to eerily lush sonic experiments ("Like a Mirror," "Rope on Fire"). On the title song, Sandman seems to address a dark muse without foreboding. "I hope you're waiting for me," he sings, "across your carpet of stars."
Bottom Line: Grace note to a great run
Tracy Lawrence (Atlantic)
With 16 hit country singles to his credit, Lawrence could be forgiven for resting on his laurels. But on this, his fifth studio album, he sounds as if he is trying to impress listeners for the first time—and he's succeeding mightily.
The 32-year-old Lawrence still has, alas, his Fabio manqué pretty-boy look, but his singing is grittier than ever. He has mined his own experience to write four of the album's 12 songs, including the title track, a model country tune about the virtue of learning from mistakes. There is also a contagiously energetic Mark Nesler-Tony Martin song, "Up All Night," that suggests a truckers' anthem but is actually part of the rollicking soundtrack for a popular rodeo video game.
Lawrence has become a complete country singer, capable of shifting smoothly from that kind of uptempo tune to the philosophical "Unforgiven," which is impressively thoughtful. Assisted by coproducers Flip Anderson and Butch Carr, Lawrence, who leaves his guitar in' the case on this outing, has mustered together an exemplary group of backup musicians, notably the inventive steel guitarist Sonny Garrish and drummer Jack Gavin. They all contribute to the complete package, which is one memorable album.
Bottom Line: There are many bigger hats but few better singers
>Tom Mabe
Freelance ad-jingle writer Mabe was working at home one day when he was interrupted by a jingle too many—a telemarketer's call. "When you're self-employed," he says, "you jump to answer the phone because it might be a client." Instead it was a pitch for home security systems. "First I got mad," Mabe says. "Then I got even. I told him, 'I'm robbing the place. Call these folks back tomorrow.' "
Now Mabe—who tapes annoying calls (and his slyly satiric responses) on a $37 answering machine—gets even evener with his sweet Revenge on the Telemarketers, Round One (Virgin Nashville). A compilation of hilarious real-life phone encounters, the CD includes a bit in which a burial-plot pitchman calls and Mabe announces he's about to kill himself. "If I got the paperwork out to you this afternoon," the caller says, "do you think you could maybe hold off until tomorrow?"
"They're so obnoxious," grouses Mabe, 32, who lives in Louisville, Ky., with his wife, Melanie, and their 8-month-old son. "I'd have three or four kids by now if it weren't for those damn telemarketers calling at the most inappropriate times."
- Contributors:
- Joseph V. Tirella,
- Steve Dougherty,
- 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!
