Posts by Doug Collette

It's little wonder that M Ward has collected so many favorable associations (Bright Eyes, MMJ’s Jim James) and even more au courant accolades. As displayed on his new album Hold Time, he writes sings and plays as if inhabiting his own peculiar universe.    

It’s a tribute to U2’s bond as a band that they manage to sidestep their celebrity status and non-musical public persona, at least when they’re in the studio. On the child-like balladry of “White As Snow,” and virtually all the rest of No Line on the Horizon, these four Irishmen sound as human as the rest of us.

Joshua Redman returned to the acoustic realm of modern jazz in 2007 with Back East where his playing carried a definite sense of breaking free from preconceptions, self-imposed and otherwise. The saxophonist’s new album Compass extends that sensation of abandon in no uncertain terms.

Tommy Keene is one of America's two great practitioners of power pop along with Matthew Sweet. Yet while the latter, as befits his name, anticipates the best is yet to come, there's an ironic contrast with Keene’s moniker: his tunes carry an ever so slight but nevertheless palpable air of melancholy.

Through an endless string of personnel shifts in the early to mid-Seventies, the Welsh band Man grafted progressive elements onto their earthy pub-rock roots that, combined with their penchant for extended improvisation, inspired rabid devotion in their fans.

The Collector’s Edition of Warren Zevon's debut album has all the pristine clarity of most 70's California rock. But the shadowy blue tones of the front-cover photograph suggest how deceptively arresting the music is inside.

Time Out Take Five lets Glide contributor Doug Collette takes a pick at five recent jazz releases,

Recorded in the informal atmosphere of a home studio, Already Free effectively extends the sound of The Derek Trucks Band on stage without a conscious attempt to replicate the live experience. While the album doesn't focus on the instrumental aspect of the group’s music like 2003's Soul Serenade, it never for once ignoresTrucks' exquisite guitar work.  

Because Boulderado: Live at the Fox 2008 comes so closely on the heels of 2007's splendid live document Keep on Marchin', both casual listeners and died-in-the-wool fans may question the validity of another double-CD live set from The North Mississippi Allstars.

Approximately a month after returning from the historic adventure to the Great Pyramid (captured on Rocking the Cradle Egypt 1978), the Grateful Dead staged a grand gesture of homecoming in the form of a three-night run at Winterland Arena. Little did they know at the time, these shows would be their last at the venue until they closed it at the end of the year or that these recordings of the October performances, thirty years later, would form the basis for the fourth installment of Road Trips.

When is a reinvention not a reinvention? It can happen when you are Tom Petty and you act on the impulse to reform the band you fronted prior to becoming the rock icon you are now.

Hard as it is to imagine, when Sugar Mountain Live was recorded in 1968, Neil Young was no more or less than a virtual unknown anxious to gauge the acceptance of both his music and performance  months after leaving Buffalo Springfield.Live At Canterbury House is a seventy-minute composite of stereo recordings taken from both nights of solo acoustic performances that constitutes a declaration of purpose and an artistic statement that resonates to this day.

If you heard Rose Hill Drive tear their vicious way through “Communications Breakdown,” you’d be convinced there is no need whatsoever for a Led Zeppelin reunion. 

Long considered (and often stereotyped) as the conscience of California singer/songwriters, Jackson Browne has swung back and forth between the personal and political during the course of his career. He achieved a fine, if precarious, balance between the two schools of thought on his last studio recording, The Naked Ride Home, and on this, his first album of original material for his own record label, is almost equally artful.

Bob Dylan has long taken a decidedly unconventional stance toward his recordings so it should come as no surprise he’s demonstrated the same non-traditional tendency for his archive project. Notwithstanding the significance of landmark recordings such as The Royal Albert Hall Concert and Live 1964 Concert at Philharmonic Hall, the highlights of “The Bootleg Series” consist of Volumes 1-3 released in 1991 and now Volume 8, both of which are subtitled “Rare and Unreleased.”

Arguably one of the architects of alternative rock, Matthew Sweet is nevertheless a pop traditionalist of the highest order. His watershed 1991 album Girlfriend, like more diverse productions such as In Reverse and Living Things, is centered on the work of a compact rock and roll combo and so too is Sunshine Lies.

The Black Crowes sounded like a truly great rock and roll band in their first of two nights at Higher Ground. The new members of the band, especially guitarist Luther Dickinson, sounded fully integrated into the lineup, while Chris and Rich Robinson appeared as creative complements rather than the combatants of years past.

Like The Joshua Tree, the inaugural title of the U2 reissue series begun last year, the recently released double disc sets of the band’s first three albums and their initial live release are truly deluxe packages. Bound like books and enclosed in slipcases, the CD graphics of the archival sets, replete with historical detail, expand on the originals. The liner note essays can be a bit melodramatic, yet The Edge’s own recollections on the recordings, original sessions and B-sides, live shows and alternate takes are the epitome of informality.

If ever a Grateful Dead adventure deserved comprehensive documentation, it’s the 1978 trip to Egypt. Rocking the Cradle Egypt 1978 only manages to scratch the surface of the experience on some fronts, but that’s indicative of how expansive the experience actually was.

Dr. Dog didn’t decorate the stage of Higher Ground as they have on some stops of their current tour – but they didn’t have to. Dr. Dog’s music that night was sufficiently a world unto itself.