MemeStreams | Music Roundup for May 2006

Amazon: The recordings Johnny Cash started making for Rick Rubin's American label in 1993 launched a journey through the Great American Songbook--from traditional tunes to alt-rock--that continued until, literally, the end of his life. What wasn't known at the time was that Cash had anticipated the American Recordings concept 20 years earlier. A series of informal private sessions he recorded in 1973 featuring just voice and guitar--with a few numbers added between then and 1982--were left untouched at his House of Cash studio, unearthed only after his death in 2003. These 49 songs, labeled "Personal File," show him exploring 19th-century parlor tunes, Tin Pan Alley pop, gospel, little-known Cash originals, classic and contemporary country, and even a recitation of Robert Service's poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee." On many, his spoken introductions reveal personal ties to a given number. Cash reprises early country fare like Jimmie Rodgers's "My Mother Was a Lady" and "The Letter Edged in Black." He also revisits later country classics like the Louvin Brothers' "When I Stop Dreaming," close friend Johnny Horton's hit "When It's Springtime in Alaska (It's Forty Below)," John Prine's "Paradise," and stepdaughter Carlene Carter's "It Takes One to Know Me." The second disc is a virtual hymnbook, blending traditional gospel and A.P. Carter tunes with a sacred composition by Rodney Crowell and Cash gospel originals. For those enchanted by the illness-ravaged soulfulness of Cash's later American recordings, hearing him in his prime is not only breathtaking--it underscores the depth of his still-remarkable musical vision.
Product Description: Deep within the House of Cash, Johnny Cash’s recording studio, office suite, and museum in Hendersonville, Tennessee, behind the studio’s control room, was a small vault-like space in which many of his most prized possessions were stored. A collection of rare firearms dating back to the 18th Century, some personal effects of Jimmie Rodgers, artwork and letters from fans all over the world and much more was carefully arranged and locked away for safekeeping. Then there were the tapes. Hundreds of them. Demos from songwriters, album masters, multi-tracks of the ABC television series, and some boxes marked simply "Personal File." These are Johnny’s most intimate sessions, recorded mostly in 1973 and then subsequently at his leisure. Just a lone voice and an acoustic guitar, singing songs and telling stories about them. A concept that has since come to be thought of as revelatory but, as is evident in this stunning new set, is something Johnny Cash had been doing all along -- if only for his personal file. This 2-CD collection features 49 previously unreleased recordings.

Natacha Atlas - Mish Maoul

Music genres can be helpful, allowing us to filter through the vast ocean of listening options, which grows on a weekly basis. But these handy little tags are often inadequate, either allowing too much room for interpretation or not fully capturing a musician’s full range. In the case of Natacha Atlas, the question of genre becomes more of a "chicken or the egg" debate. Is she a world musician utilizing electronica, or is she an electronica musician heavily influenced by world music?

Jolie Holland - Springtime Can Kill You

Amazon review: The test of an artist's true bearing is often found in their second album, the notion being that there's been a lifetime leading up to the debut, and then just a year or two for its successor. Jolie Holland has risen to the occasion with aplomb. Writing specifically for this release as well as for a band for the first time, there's a resonant bearing to the set as a whole. A dreamy quality pervades the set. As the instrumentation subtly varies from track to track, it further underscores the changing settings of a mind running wild while the body sleeps. Holland also addresses the idea overtly on the song "Nothing Left to Do But Dream." The gentle narrative offers surprises, such as the jarring, "I took my sister to the river and I came back alone." Small combo arrangements throughout serve to empower the lyrics--cliché-free and full of emotional breadth.
All Music: It's intimate, like a secret told readily. And to further embolden herself, she's recorded portions of the disc in front of a small audience, and cut most of the music live from the floor. She engages country music, jazz, skeletal rock, swing, and '30s style pop.

The Wreckers - Stand Still, Look Pretty

Amazon: The Wreckers are Grammy-winning songstress Michelle Branch and friend/journeywoman Nashville singer-songwriter Jessica Harp, a team whose solid craftsmanship and soaring, airtight harmonies often lift their hook-smart contemporary country stylings above what's too often mere fizzy, pop-crossover formula. They may have entered the public consciousness via the wide exposure of "Good Kind" on the primetime soap opera One Tree Hill, but the bracing, back-porch charms of the single "Leave the Pieces" should find them a following well beyond that series' teen audience. The reflective title track, gritty folk charms of "Tennessee" and giddy crowd-pleaser "My, Oh My" are suffused with a lyrical maturity that's the perfect counterpoint to the duo's sturdy musical constructs. Solid songs all, delivered with a muscular vocal conviction that does considerably more than merely sell them.
All Music: ... the album is pitched halfway between Sheryl Crow and the Dixie Chicks, spiked with enough mainstream country-pop sheen to have it fit comfortably next to Miranda Lambert on the airwaves, but not enough to change the overall feeling that this record is a rootsy AAA record at its heart.

The Ditty Bops - Moon Over the Freeway

"Combining a magical attic’s worth of dusty musical idioms, iridescent golden harmonies and a quirky lyrical worldview, The Ditty Bops provide a refreshing antidote to the misbegotten, soul-grinding notion of thinking you know what happens next.... Abby DeWald (guitar) and Amanda Barrett (mandolin/dulcimer) embody the simple Saturday afternoon pleasures—of thrift store finds and getting lost in the library—with their amalgam of ragtime, jazz, vaudeville, Western swing and folk, but it would sell the Bops short to lump them in with nostalgia-driven absolutists." (Austin Chronicle) The Ditty Bops are different, way different, and that makes the singing-songwriting-playing duo of Amanda Barrett and Abby DeWald special. On their second album, Moon Over The Freeway, co-produced by Mitchell Froom (Suzanne Vega, Crowded House, Elvis Costello) as was their 2004 self-titled debut, The Ditty Bops are strangely, wonderfully captivating.
All Music: The music is heavily influenced by Western swing and Andrews Sisters-type harmonies, but there are also hints of tango, '60s pop, and classical, as well as a strong dose of indie rock.

Drive-by Truckers - A Blessing And A Curse

Amazon: Known for two big-idea concept albums, Southern Rock Opera (dedicated to Lynyrd Skynyrd) and The Dirty South (a 70+ minute exploration of their Alabama roots), the Drive-by Truckers here go economical with a 45+ minute rock album. Three singers (all guitarists, to boot) ensure that moods shift often, even with every voice bearing a sand-blasted quality that grit-pocks everything. Patterson Hood tackles most of the tunes, sounding like a roughed-up Faces on "Aftermath USA," detailing drugs and deterioration against boogied-up guitars, and sounding a more sensitive side on "Goodbye" and "Little Bonnie" (another in a line of Truckers' funeral tunes). With a barrel-chested croak of a voice, Mike Cooley runs down the rudderless-ness of love and desperation on "Gravity's Gone" and slow, acoustic tenderness on "Space City." The loudest guitarist, Jason Isbell, takes on two tracks: "Easy on Yourself" and "Daylight," where he alternates between wry fury and a yearning pine for more time, more space. Isbell basks in an array of slide-guitar throwdowns, always leaving a signature sound the way Skynyrd's Allen Collins and Gary Rossington did in their glory days. All in all, this is a calmer Truckers set, less ragged and more polished--but rest assured: Their live sets still smoke like their 40 Watt Club DVD from 2005.
All Music: the Drive-By Truckers are still what they were before making this record: the best hard rock band in America today.

Dixie Chicks - Taking the Long Way

The problem with Music Row country is that in addition to being mindless and boring, it slavishly follows market trends more than any label VP or hip-hop impresario could ever hope to. Taking the Long Way, by contrast, is an album of countryish rock, or country before country wasn’t cool.

Bird York - Wicked Little High [site and video]

Amazon: With Wicked Little High, a familiar face looks set to become a familiar voice. A busy actress with a long list of credits--including a recurring role on The West Wing--Kathleen "Bird" York had a bit part in best picture winner Crash. More significantly, she wrote and performed the Oscar-nominated theme song "In the Deep" (an honor shared with co-writer Michael Becker). There's more where that mesmerizing number came from on the striking redhead's seductive Narada debut. Take the title track, for instance, in which York can't resist the charms of a Mr. Wrong who's like "the fifth drink before a long drive home," but "desire is such a wicked little high when the one you want is blind to you." Sounding like Sia's sexy older sister, York wraps her smoky alto around 11 other tales of lust and loss, including the Isaac Hayes-penned r&b classic "Hold On, I'm Coming"--a top 10 hit for Sam & Dave--here reinvented as blue-eyed soul with a trip-hop beat. On other tracks, she assumes the voice of a teenage runaway in the grips of young love ("Open Wider") and an elderly widow grappling with loneliness ("Save Me").

Casey Dienel - Wind-Up Canary

All Music: Casey Dienel’s debut album should get widely recognized for how fresh and how unlike everything else the music is. Her seamless blend of styles and genres into one that she alone occupies should get her a lot of attention...and for good reason. Her music is endlessly spellbinding.

Corinne Bailey Rae - Corinne Bailey Rae

All Music: ... Corinne Bailey Rae's extraordinary vocal stylings, as she draws comparisons with everyone from Billie Holiday to Norah Jones.
Amazon: It becomes self-evident the moment you hear her sing the very first note on the first track 'Like A Star', that it showcases a slice of sublime Billie Holiday blues delivered with a voice that pins you, in the softest but most persuasive of ways, to the wall; a voice that floats up effortlessly, full of caress, subtlety and the very purest quality. It is wonderful, this voice, and surely a discovery to treasure, but it belongs to a young woman not from somewhere musically exotic, say Mississippi or even Manhattan, but just East of the M1: Leeds. Her name is Corinne Bailey Rae, and she was born to do this.

Eleni Mandell - Country for True Lovers

All Music: Eleni Mandell takes a different approach with this album, offering up a batch of gin-soaked, traditional honky tonk numbers that bring to mind previous singers like Brenda Lee, Connie Francis, and Patsy Cline. The flow each song has can't be underestimated, giving each a timeless quality.
PopMatters: Eleni Mandell has a voice like an eel, like a minx, all litheness and elegance overlaying scarcely concealed danger.