Category: Catalog Releases

Ann Sally: Brand-New Orleans

Five months before Hurricane Katrina hit Louisiana and caused the levees in New Orleans to break, Ann Sally released Brand-New Orleans, an album of jazz and blues standards recorded with New Orleans musicians. I briefly thought about holding a Musicwhore.org New Orleans fund raising drive with that album as a donation prize, kind of like how local public television stations get viewers to buy stuff during donation drives. But I hadn’t yet listened to the album, and I have no connections with a label to facilitate such a drive.

Now that I have listened to the album, I should have held that drive anyway, just to get people to listen to it.

Like Máire Brennan, Sacha Sacket or Hatakeyama Miyuki, Ann has a grocery list/phone book voice — someone who would sound good singing a [grocery list/phone book]. She could have gone for convenience and recorded Brand-New Orleans with Japanese musicians with all the technical skill to pull off jazz and blues. But instead she traveled across the globe, and the effort pays off.

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Midnight Oil: Diesel and Dust (Legacy Edition)

Midnight Oil was the first band to teach me that a singer doesn’t need to sound polished, slick or appealing to be good. I could have learned that lesson from Bob Dylan, but the first Dylan performance I consciously encountered was "We Are the World". What an indictment on my generation.

The first time I heard "Beds are Burning", I thought, "Who the hell thought it was a good idea to give Peter Garrett a microphone?" Then my friends subjected me to the entire album, and eventually I gave in. The music was so urgent and awesome that I found myself championing the band.

When Sony Legacy remastered Diesel and Dust, I played it in excess all over again.

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Yorico: second VERSE

Yorico’s second album, second VERSE, came at an inopportune time. I was enamored of SLOTH LOVE CHUNKS and VOLA & THE ORIENTAL MACHINE back in 2006, and while I recognized second VERSE was a good album, I couldn’t give it sufficient playback time to get a real feel for it.

Before the release of Yorico’s third album Negau in January 2008, I went back to second VERSE to see whether Yorico was an artist in whom I could really invest. I’m sorry for not having paid second VERSE my undivided attention, because this album is so far her loudest and most ambitious.

It was apparent with the departure of Onitsuka Chihiro from EMI Japan’s roster that Yorico was brought in to fill the void. Her piano-driven songs didn’t rely so much on the Carole King influence as Onitsuka, but on the surface, they seemed complimentary enough. There was also a hint of a rocker in Yorico, a trait that informs but doesn’t quite drive EMI’s other major source of income, Utada Hikaru.

second VERSE, however, establishes Yorico as an artist apart from Onitsuka or Utada. The balladry that dominated her debut Cocoon gave way to a mostly boisterous album full of rock songs geared for the anime theme song set — melodic enough to hook a viewer but hard enough to mask its pop underpinnings.

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Throwing Muses: House Tornado

It was 1988 when I ditched radio and depended on magazines to direct my choices in music, and it was Pulse! magazine in particular that directed me to Throwing Muses. Back then, my knowledge of post-punk music extended to Midnight Oil, R.E.M., In Tua Nua and the Sugarcubes. I was hoping Throwing Muses would be the same.

Boy was I ever off the mark.

I bought House Tornado and listened to it. I couldn’t get into it. I played the album for a friend also exploring the same music as I was. He didn’t get it either. Thus humbled, I sold the album and used the proceeds to get something else. I’d buy The Real Ramona a few years later, but that was the extent of my interest in Throwing Muses.

In the ensuing years, I would listen to a lot of music. Some of it more challenging than Throwing Muses, some of it nowhere near as challenging as Throwing Muses. The Real Ramona would turn out to be a staple in my collection, an album so enduring it never got tired after years of repeated play. After a while, a little variety felt needed.

Nearly 20 years after my first encounter with House Tornado, I wondered what would happen if I heard it again. So I found it again, and I listened to it again.

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10,000 Maniacs: Blind Man’s Zoo

At the time of its release, Blind Man’s Zoo finally found 10,000 Maniacs making music appropriate to Natalie Merchant’s increasingly dark lyrics. Previous singles such as "Like the Weather" and "What’s the Matter Here" seemed a bit too bouncy to be dealing with such subject matter as depression and child abuse.

"The Big Parade" and "Dustbowl" are two of the album’s most vivid songs, while "Headstrong" has a backbeat as stubborn as Merchant’s bullheaded narrator.

Then I went back in time to discover The Wishing Chair and started to perceive shortcomings in Blind Man’s Zoo. Merchant’s literary settings on that first album — a graveyard in "Lilydale", an old house in "Tension Makes a Tangle" — were concerned more with imagery than message. With Blind Man’s Zoo, the balance started to shift in the other direction.

As I moved my vinyl collection to CD in the ’90s, Blind Man’s Zoo didn’t make the jump. The album had fallen out of favor as the band itself started to run its course. It’s taken me 19 years to revisit this album, and I have to say — I was right the first time.

Blind Man’s Zoo is perhaps the band’s most focused album, if not one of its most powerful.

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Kevin Volans: Hunting: Gathering (Duke Quartet)

As much of a Kronos Quartet groupie I am, they are not the be all and end all of classical music ensembles. Yes, Kronos was the first quartet I heard play a vast number of works — many commissioned by the ensemble itself — but taste can be fickle.

The Fitzwilliam Quartet reading of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Quartet No. 8 has a bit more bite, and the Emerson Quartet’s take on Charles Ives’ Scherzo: Holding Your Own is slightly more expressive.

Duke Quartet’s performances of Kevin Volans’ string quartets perhaps mark the first time I preferred another group’s version of works actually commissioned by Kronos. Hunting: Gathering includes two quartets also recorded by Kronos, plus the composer’s sixth quartet commissioned by the Duke itself.

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Emerson String Quartet: American Originals

If you’ve ever watched Platoon, you’ve heard Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Go to any classical music section of a record story, and you’ll find the Adagio on just about every Barber CD in the bin.

Barber, essentially, is a one-hit classical music wonder with the Adagio. He joins Johann Pachelbel (Canon in D) and Carl Orff (Carmina Burana).

The Adagio, however, is the second movement of Barber’s only string quartet, a work seldom recorded. Even Kronos Quartet opted to focus on the Adagio instead of the whole work on Winter Was Hard.

The only recording still in print to contain the entire quartet is Emerson String Quartet’s Grammy Award-winning album American Originals. (At least, it’s the only recording I could find.) The album focuses on two American composers traditionally seen as opposites in new music history: Barber and Charles Ives. This album, though, shows Ives and Barber had common ground at some point — perhaps not ideologically but maybe aesthetically.

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UA: turbo

The story of my change of heart toward UA’s turbo is the story of my change of heart toward reggae music.

turbo is often described as UA’s dub album, and while there are tracks with an obvious reggae influence, it’s not the album’s overriding aesthetic. Thing is, the description of the album keyed into a bias I already had — I don’t like reggae music.

When I downloaded "Private Surfer" from Napster at the start of the century, I said "Ugh" when I discovered the track was reggae. So I explored UA’s other albums, eventually buying most of them, and I even acquired turbo from the Evil Sharing Networks just to be a completist. But I would make no effort to drop the cash for a physical product. That was in 2000.

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U2: The Joshua Tree (20th Anniversary Edition)

Honestly, I’m not sure if the remastered sound is all that apparent, and I do love the convenience of having this album’s b-sides on one disc.

But the one thing for which I’m most thankful is the restoration of the cover art.

When The Joshua Tree was first released on CD in the late ’80s, it was housed in a longbox, which was well-suited to the odd panoramic shot of the American desert with the band off-center. It’s perhaps one of photographer Anton Corbijn’s most emblematic pictures of U2.

Back then, cover designers took liberties with the entire package — the image on the longbox wasn’t necessarily the cover shot in the jewel case. When longboxes were phased out in 1993, that totality was pretty much thrown out. As a result, the CD edition of The Joshua Tree featured a blurry facsimile of that classic photo.

It’s taken 14 years to correct that mistake. The 20th anniversary edition of The Joshua Tree presents the cover art as it should be.

Sure, but what about the rest of the reissue?

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Anton Webern: Complete Works for String Quartet and String Trio (Artis Quartett Wein)

Until I downloaded this album from eMusic, the only Anton Webern piece I’d heard was the Six Bagatelles, which Kronos Quartet recorded on its second recital album Winter Was Hard.

I’ve always liked the Six Bagatelles for its brevity and sparseness. Even in the span of half a minute, which each bagatelle averages, Webern manages to coax extremes out of the music — long, quiet chromatic melodies burst into a clash of tremolo. Exploring the works of Webern became one of those personal checklist items that get bumped in favor of more immediate gratification. (Thank deity for eMusic.)

Webern’s entire catalog of work can fit on six CDs, as composer/conductor Pierre Boulez demonstrated in 2000. Webern’s life was cut short when he was accidentally shot by an American soldier in 1945 — the glow from his cigar spooked the soldier. The Complete Works for String Quartet and String Trio contains 7 works spread over 20 tracks and clocks in at 64 minutes.

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