While four-letter words like “road” and “town” have never strayed far from Steve Earle’s songbook, his latest trip veers from the familiar to the expected. On The Low Highway, Earle sounds strained, even gruffer than usual, on predictable travel themes that otherwise serve up welcome surprises from his wife Allison Moorer and longtime live band, The Dukes.
True to its title, The Terror is indeed a woozy fright of a record, one long song in nine parts, like a padlocked dream with no beginning or end. Yet where 2009’s elaborate Embryonic offered the occasional break and variation, The Terror provides no such escape. Its tempo creeps along at little more than a crawl, underscoring a level of unsettlement never quite felt from a Flaming Lips record, and that’s saying something. Imagine a venomous cousin of The Soft Bulletin’s “Spiderbite Song,” and you’re getting close.
Billy Bragg calls this latest set the follow-up to Mermaid Avenue he never made, and he’s right: a single listen confirms Tooth & Nail tops anything he’s recorded since those 1997 sessions with Wilco, which drew from Woody Guthrie’s poetry archive and yielded 47 songs and a trio of exceptional albums. The difference this time lies in the words, which belong to Bragg and not Woody, though his spirit turns up in a cover of “I Ain’t Got No Home” from Tooth & Nail, interpreted in the way only Bragg has mastered.
On paper the pairing appears unlikely — one was born in ’69, the other turns 69 next week — but Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite bridge their age gap with a proper album that traces their bond to the late ’90s. Blues great John Lee Hooker recruited them for a session, and that first meeting inspired another in 2003, when Harper backed Musselwhite on his Grammy-nominated Sanctuary. Get Up! reunites these old souls a decade later, with Harper leading the effort on his twelfth album and first for Stax.
Camper Van Beethoven’s eighth album and first in eight years revives the character study of American oddities the band’s reunion record, New Roman Times, hatched way back in 2004. On La Costa Perdida, Camper keeps the crazies confined to small-town California in this second ode to scandal and scoundrels, among them a fugitive speaking broken Spanish and harboring a secret he can’t outrun. This “half-aware-o caballero” of the album’s upbeat title track kills off his woman and goes on the lam, all the while snarling a half-sinister warning: “You don’t wanna know.”
This stripped-down, mostly acoustic affair captures friends Caetano Veloso and David Byrne collaborating on each other’s catalog of songs, during the Brazilian musician’s week-long Carnegie residency in 2004.
While "Trouble" celebrated being saved by a woman, Ray LaMontagne's God Willin' kicks that no good lyin' lady to the curb. But it doesn't take long for this pariah dog to beg her back, let her go again, then finally stroll on toward the sunset, head held high.
It’s always impressive when a band can reproduce its studio trickery before an audience. Seattle prog-rockers Minus the Bear prove as muchfrom the stage—the five-man machine operates live just as tightly as it does in the studio—but it wouldn’t hurt MtB to forget about recreating its songs note for note.
This record, on its surface, may sound like another '80s throwback, synthesizer-spiced space jam, but Minus the Bear's equation comes off more measured than, say, the last great album from Seattle peersModest Mouse. While OMNI's title might imply MtB's desire to be everything to everyone, there's no posturing, no faking it from these composers
While one might pinpoint The Slackers' signature sound somewhere between the Jamaican essence of The Maytals and the English beat of The Specials, it would only prove futile to casually categorize this band. Since 1991 The Slackers have done more than marry ska's upbeat shuffle with its sluggish reggae counterpart. And they still possess the power to push even the biggest prude to dance in public.
