You’ve got me down on the floor,” coos Grace Potter on “Paris (Ooh La La),” the sultry opening track on her self-titled third album with the Nocturnals. And just as she’s revealed more leg and less Hammond B-3 with each album, Potter has also courageously taken those bold steps to mingle her sexuality with her soulful pipes.
Lyrics are not Jackie Greene’s strong suit; hooks and harmonics are. How else to explain the way Greene routinely crafts beautiful roots gems, inspired country blues and frayed-edge power pop with smooth, but ultimately featherweight narratives about bad love, weary yearning and wanton soul searching? It’s not meaty stuff, but it’s delivered with grace and gravitas; Greene says “feel it, anyway,” and you do. It’s a formula that’s worked for him and continues to work on Till the Light Comes, his sixth album and, if not a great collection, surely a nourishing one, with buoyant arrangements and the fullness of a well-oiled band fleshing them out.
Due to some keen marketing and a barrage of advance press, most rock fans now know the back story of Mojo, Tom Petty’s long-awaited return to the studio with his legendary band, The Heartbreakers. Recorded live, mostly on the first take with little to no overdub or tweaking, this corps of rock and roll Hall of Famers live up to their billing with a blistering, bluesy, and furious statement of an album designed to cement their legacy to long-time fans and show a new generation how it’s done.
With the incredible success of his recent collaborations on Possibilities and River: The Joni Letters, music legend Herbie Hancock explores world harmony, peace and greater hope on his newest release, The Imagine Project. Just in time for his 70th birthday, Hancock creates another musical masterpiece that was recorded all around the world in the collaborators native lands when possible, sometimes even in simulcast.
John Hiatt's latest release The Open Road is a loose, very spontaneous affair, much like its predecessor Same Old Man. But unlike that prior album, where the focus remained on the songs, the material on this new album is the means to the end of making music, during the course of which Hiatt himself is an integral member of highly-skilled band.
If ever a classic rock album was not suited for a deluxe reissue, it's The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street. The textbook definition of a whole being (far) greater than the sum of its parts, the album works in strange mysterious ways, and the various packages can only go so far to reveal exactly how that process worked.
Mixing up laid back southern charm (“Clinic Cynic”) jazzy instrumentals (“St. Louis”), compositions from old friends (Jerry Joseph’s “North”) and plenty of dynamic song-writing, there’s no arguing the oxymoron that Widespead Panic is the best studio band in the jam scene.
The '59 Sound, Gaslight Anthem's 2008 release, got a lot of comparisons to Springsteen. That was fair enough as there is no doubt that the band's sound was influenced by the godfather of their home state's rock and roll scene. However, what seemed to get lost in those comparisons, was that weren't simply Springsteen imitators even as his mark on them was clearly heard.
The Plimsouls were virtually alone as an authentic rock and roll band within the lemming-like procession of New Wavers that followed the punk explosion of 1979. In this Halloween 1981 recording from the Whiskey A Go Go in Los Angeles, this group's savvy fusion of influences is absolutely galvanizing.
As the spirit descended upon the South African band, BLK JKS (pronounced “Black Jacks”), again in the time following their 2009 full length release, After Robots, it brought forth messages of celebration and conveyed new adventures to be translated musically. The answer to that interpretation has come in the form of their latest release, a five song EP titled “ZOL!,” which will debut on Secretly Canadian just days before the start of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. The collection of songs is deeply rooted in vast African culture and combines psychedelic guitar riffs with complex drum patterns and echoing vocals.
