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Daniel Lanois: Goodbye to Language
by Nenad Georgievski
Consistently imaginative, producer, guitarist and sonic explorer Daniel Lanois has long been hailed not only as a studio wizard but as a gifted musician with a definite and unabashed affinity for experimentation and the avant-garde. Lanois is lauded for many things and among those is his uncanny ability to create wonderful music and ambiances from minimal sonic elements. Goodbye to Language is a deeply beautiful record that redefines the word meditative and shimmers with breathtaking passages of unhurried, ...
read moreDaniel Lanois: Flesh and Machine
by Nenad Georgievski
Credit should be given where it's due. Producer/musician Daniel Lanois has never been satisfied with just keep churning out the same kind of music for the same kind of audience that swooned over his song based records or the productions he did for other artists. As a true artist he wants to evolve and continuously create something different and Flesh and Machine is a move in that direction. Lanois' work cuts a distinctive swath through the last 30 years of ...
read moreBettye LaVette: Interpretations: The British Rock Songbook
by C. Michael Bailey
Cross Nina Simone with Tina Turner and you get Bettye LaVette. Finally receiving the attention she deserves, LaVette finds herself on a most receptive world stage. LaVette appeared at the 2008 Kennedy Center Honors, in tribute to The Who's Peter Townsend and Roger Daltrey, singing Love Reign O'er Me," from Quadrophenia (Polydor, 1979). Video of the performance shows a stunned and humble Townsend and Daltrey, hearing their iconic song sung by an icon. Interpretations is a bold and are breathtaking ...
read moreBettye Lavette: Interpretations - The British Rock Songbook
by Jeff Dayton-Johnson
Bettye Lavette Interpretations: The British Rock SongbookAnti- Records2010
Perennial also-ran Bettye Lavette, among the many very good 1960s Detroit soul singers not signed to Motown--others include Barbara Lewis, Deon Jackson and Edwin Starr--offers a concept album of sorts. An interesting concept, too: R&B covers of classic British rock hits, from roughly the mid-1960s to the early 1970s (Led Zeppelin's All My Love," from 1979, is an outlier in temporal terms).There ...
read moreRamblin' Jack Elliott: A Stranger Here
by Ian Patterson
Few living artists can claim to have been mentor and model to Bob Dylan, but the man Dylan described as the King of folk singers-- Ramblin' Jack Elliott--has influenced a host of singers and story tellers from Johnny Cash and Ry Cooder to Tom Waits. Now in his sixth recording decade, Elliott returns in great voice with A Stranger Here, a collection of Depression-era blues numbers.
Elliott has carried on Woody Guthrie's folk tradition, though the blues has ...
read moreDaniel Lanois: Belladonna
by Nenad Georgievski
Daniel Lanois is doing something truly different in the world of music. His style doesn't really fit in with any genre that can be found at the local music store. Some may call it cosmic, folk, ambient, rock, spiritual, or soul... but the truth is that it is a combination of all these things. He's been heralded as one of the most brilliant producers around, and many musicians have benefited from the alchemic presence of this studio wizard and sonic ...
read moreTom Waits: Real Gone
by Nenad Georgievski
With each successive album, Tom Waits has become harder to pin down. He is unorthodox and approaches things differently; he is strange, and as a result of that his music is strange, different and unorthodox. His last two (simultaneously released) albums ( Alice and Blood Money ) contained pieces specifically written for the theatre and found him in a distinctly theatrical (Brechtian) mode. Real Gone is Waits's most vital album in twelve years as he moves away from the feel ...
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