MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: PATTY GRIFFIN - AMERICAN KID

A great favourite of roots performers, Griffin's songs are go-to material for the likes of Emmylou Harris, Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Dixie Chicks and even Solomon Burke.  Blessed with the classic Americana voice, she could be Southern, she could be Texan, but in fact comes from Old Town, Maine.  No matter, she has the grand ability to write a timeless tune that evokes the past and tugs at the heart.

This latest is a largely acoustic affair, porch music played tenderly, pushing the ear towards her confident croon.  She comes close to Harris at times, but when she leans into the notes has a blues tone that comes out, to great effect, a very pleasing vocalist.  Backing her guitar and mandolin players that include Luther Dickinson of the North Mississippi All-Stars, and his brother Cody on percussion, although several songs dispense with such noisy intrusions.  It's a brave writer and artist to focus on so many soft numbers, but that's a strong suit with such a confident singer.  Also joining in is the huge presence of one Robert Plant, with whom she works as a singer in Band Of Joy, and is dating/married to/something.  Plant sings so softly here, you can't recognize the famous pipes, but they have a pleasing sound that way.

While Griffin does rev it up a bit in a couple of numbers, the core of the album is found in its calmness, matching the spiritual search in much of the material.  It's a human search for a quiet soul.  Opener Go Wherever You Wanna Go is a song about relief of burdens, those of a soldier who know longer has to fight, a worker no longer sweating or worrying about bills, the singer offering a child-like freedom of a sunny day with no rules.  Ohio, a full duet with Plant, features a touch of the African drone sounds with which he's familiar, and offers up the titular river as a mystical meeting point, where love and blood flow outside of time.  God does show up a couple of times, once as a wild old dog, another time as an old, beaten man cries in fear that he's been forgotten in his faithful, hard-working life.  This is old-time religion in new parables.

Don't be scared though, the beauty wins above all, especially on the lovely duet, again with Plant, Highway Song.  While still an acoustic song, it has a nifty atmospheric bed and some dreamy effects on the organ that add a modern touch.  I'd never once point to this as an old-time listen, but it sure keeps those good values.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: JAKE CHISHOLM - DIAMOND IN A COALMINE

Deep blues and hard-hitting, raw electric guitar from the veteran Toronto player and front man (Jake and the Blue Midnights).  This is true grit, power-trio blues that slinks but never plods, getting deep in the groove, and hitting all the important moments. 

Chisholm is a nasty player, always preferring a dirty tone, with just the right amount of distortion, distortion on the vocal mic too.  That doesn't mean he can't play pretty though; the chording on Diamond In A Coalmine has the sweet soul notes of the 60's, on this slow heartbreak tale.  The follow-up, That's All They Could See, has some high-string riffing and slide sweetness too, but it's earthiness of the bass-drums-rhythm guitar groove that makes this song, and several others too.  Just like in baseball, good fundamentals make a great team.

There's a clever remake of The Rascals' You Better Run, and a different interpretation of Traveling Riverside Blues, but the rest are all Chisholm originals.  I really like that several of them are blues ballads, moving into soul.  The finale, When Love Goes Wrong, is the kind of blues not heard enough, a real tear-inducer, no machismo or b.s. or cliches, just the facts and emotions of a break-up, complete with Jimi Hendrix Angel-style guitar.  With this type of material, Chisholm stands out from the electric blues pack.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: BAZ LUHRMANN'S THE GREAT GATSBY

A Baz Luhrmann film is always filled with music, and his Great Gatsby adaptation continues his usual flair.  This time, Jay-Z is drafted to put together the ultra-modern soundtrack to accompany the period visuals and costumes, another of Luhrmann's trademarks.  That means heavy on the hit r'n'b/hip-hop blend, and Mr. Z drafts an A-list, including Beyonce, Andre 3000, Will.I.Am, Fergie, Kanye, Frank Ocean, and such.  There are big party songs, including the fun A Little Party Never Killed Nobody, as Fergie and Q-Tip bounce it up, and Beyonce and Mr. 3000 remake Amy Winehouse's Back To Black to good effect.  Will.I.Am appropriates the old Sonny and Cher hit Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down) for his new Bang Bang, complete with a Dixieland band remixed into dancefloor pounding.  It's all over-the-top, senses-twisting stuff that must work well on the screen (haven't seen it yet), and certainly has the cool factor pretty high.

But the Jay and Baz show doesn't just rely on the star power of today's pop heavyweights.  Jack White was drafted for a echo-heavy, very dramatic reading of U2's Love Is Blindness, sounding remarkably like Bono at times, with this year's nastiest guitar break.  Gotye up the atmospheric quota, and Florence & the Machine get moody, like those bands do.  Then there's the appearance of Brian Ferry's latest project, his period jazz band, which of course fits in perfectly with Gatsby.  Ferry arranged the first cut, which is a re-make/re-model of Crazy In Love, that hit Beyonce/Jay-Z number from years back, here with the jazz group backing singer Emeli Sande.  It's interesting, but I enjoyed the Ferry-sung arrangement of his own Love Is The Drug even more, banjo, cornet, tuba and all.  I was pretty skeptical of this whole jazz project of Ferry's, which is his new album, but the results here are impressive.

Anyhoo, it's quite the production, weighing in at 75 minutes or so, and with a lot more going on than the average tossed-together soundtrack collection.  I wonder what a Baz Luhrmann film about the Civil War scored by T Bone Burnett would be like?  Nah.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: BOB MARLEY - KAYA DELUXE EDITION

Every time I think that's about all the Marley reissues there can possibly be, they find another one.  Best-of's, soundtracks to documentaries, live albums, boxes, dub collections, remixes, the list goes on.  This one, however, at least makes sense, and gives us something new and pretty good, too.  It's the 35th anniversary of the Kaya disc of 1978, not one of his most celebrated albums, but stronger than its reputation.  Kaya was the second album Marley made after retreating to London for a couple of years, after the assassination attempt that left him and his wife Rita wounded.  The first album was Exodus, one of most revered in his canon.  Kaya, by contrast, is often thought of as the soft, almost apologetic disc, purposely made as a step back from his aggressive work.  Marley said he knew he had made music that was too militant for some in Jamaica, and wanted to mellow out.

Is that a bad thing?  Well, not when you look at the quality of his love and happiness.  In a fine mood, he spins easy, soulful reggae, leaning heavily on the I-Threes for back-up la-la-lovin', and smooth horns, as befit a fellow who was inspired in the '60's by U.S. soul.  Songs about spliffs are as controversial as it gets, but by this time, if you knew Marley, you knew about the ganja.  No, life was cool for him now, with Easy Skanking leading things off, and the inspirational Is This Love the big cut.  While he's known for speaking out about his people's suffering, what's made his legacy decades later is his peaceful message, either love for one or for all, Is This Love joining One Love as more powerful statements than the politics of that day.  Such was his keen interest in the peaceful theme that he went back into his deep catalogue of songs, re-recording numbers from his earlier career, old for Jamaica but brand-new for his international audience.  Sun Is Shining and Kaya itself are early 70's tunes  first done with Lee "Scratch" Perry.

The live disc included as the deluxe bonus is a concert from Rotterdam in 1978, during the Kaya tour. It's not heavy on the new album tracks, featuring only Is This Love and Easy Skanking over its 76 minutes.  It's more of a greatest hits, mirroring six cuts off the famous Legend collection.  With a loving crowd locking in to No Woman No Cry, Jamming, and Get Up, Stand Up, this is one of the best of the several Marley concerts available.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: ROD STEWART - TIME

Okay, the buzz on this one is that Rod returns to rock after a decade spent murdering the Great American Songbook.  Even more, this time he's not going to plunder the catalogues of fine modern songwriters (Ron Sexsmith, Tom Waits, Dylan, Sam Cooke), but would write for himself again.  And, get this, he was talking about those glory days of the early 70's, wanting to get back to the writing style of Every Picture Tells A Story.

Okay, you know not to believe that stuff, right?  We've spent twenty years hearing Elton John tell us he was making another Tumbleweed Connection.  If Rod could write another Maggie May, don't you think he would?  You make a lot more money that way, plus it would restore his shrunken manhood.

So, what you do is pretend to make that album, and hope enough people believe you.  Rod did indeed have a hand in writing each track here, except one Waits cover, and he found a couple of places to put on a mandolin.  But despite up to five co-writers on some tunes, nothing comes close to his old tunes.  Heck, nothing comes close to actually being good, either.  Blame Rod for all of it, since he's also taken on the producer role here too.

The worst offender here is the autobiographical Can't Stop Me Now, where our hero is at first rejected by the evil record company men, who mock his nose and clothes, but "They can't stop me now, the world is waiting".  Well, he tells us "It was rough and it was tough... Then along came Maggie May."   On the equally nostalgic Brighton Beach, we here about the 60's in cliche:  "Oh what a time it was/What a time to be alive/Remember Janis and Jimmy/Kennedy and King, how we cried."  Umm, do you mean Jimi perhaps?  Never mind, I quibble.

No, there are far more grievous complaints to lay, including this lyric:  "Time waits for no one/That's why I/Can't wait on you."  He thought so much of that chorus, he made it the title cut on the album.  The song Sexual Religion, itself a blatant attempt to raise interest by hinting at his huge 70's hit Do You Think I'm Sexy, offends me more for the line "You're a Jezebel of Eden".  While attempting to work the religion theme into the lyric, he's mangled up the Biblical references, as Eden was way back at the start of things with Adam, Eve and the snake and apple and stuff, but Jezebel was a 9th Century BCE queen of North Israel, thrown out a window and fed to dogs for turning her husband and the whole kingdom onto false gods.  She could never have been in Eden.  C'mon Rod, it's all there in Wikipedia, you couldn't just check?

I'm getting picky.  There's no need, it all sucks.  The one thing about all those years of doing cover versions was that Rod actually has pretty good taste in songwriters, and sometimes he'd actually make a pretty good record if the tune suited his voice.  The truth is he lost the ability to write songs a long time ago, and the news that he has started again should have been taken as a warning similar to a severe weather bulletin rather than a harbinger of good news.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: MICHAEL FEUERSTACK - TAMBOURINE DEATH BED

Sometimes, everything coalesces on an album, and that's what we have here from Feuerstack.  It's his most focused work, a distinct style for his writing, and therefore, not surprisingly, the first collection he's decided to put out under his own name.  The Montreal native (with loads of pals and a label in the Maritimes) has in the past recorded as Snailhouse, was a Juno winner as part of Julie Doiron and the Wooden Stars, produced Paper Beat Scissors, and worked with The Luyas, Bell Orchestre, Bry Webb, and more, so it's not about getting noticed.  I think it's more likely this album is where and what he wants to be.

It's all in the songwriting, always his forte, and stronger than ever.  There's a lot of beauty in the tracks, music and words, but always with rough edges.  You have to look for it, as he points out in Flowers In The City:  "Flowers in the city, staying pretty, even in among the weeds/soaking up the smog, turning into something we can breathe."  It's an apt metaphor for the whole album.

The album opens with the prettiest sounds you can imagine, a lightly plucked acoustic, and whispy vocals as Feuerstack is joined by Laurel Sprengelmeyer (Little Scream), singing "I've been under dark clouds, and I've been under clear/scavengers and doves use the same sky."  The calmness and sweetness of the performance mask the reality of taking the bad with the good on the journey.

And so it goes in this collection of gentle songs, at least on the surface.  The dark clouds are there, he never ignores them, but makes them smaller by acknowledging them.  And its quiet presentation is merely a front for songs of great strength.

R.E.M. - GREEN 25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The on-going, chronological reissues of the R.E.M. catalogue continue, and the good news is that even a switch of record labels hasn't changed the program.  For 1988's Green, the band jumped ship from indie status (I.R.S.) to major label Warner. That means the reissues also switch, from the EMI banner to Warner, but Green continues the same exact format.  The original album is on one CD, there's a bonus disc #2, a huge poster, postcards of the band, and an over-sized box to hold it all.  So for those collecting them all, this fits nicely alongside. 

At the time, the cool kids warned that moving to a major would be the demise of the group, going commercial and all that.  But it really had been a steady progress for the group, from minor-key mumblers to crisp and clear hit-makers.  Their previous disc, Document, had delivered The One I Love, and It's The End Of The World As We Know It, the crowds were bigger with each tour, and people could actually sing along.

Green did shake up things even more, with some deceptively poppy numbers, notably Stand, as light-hearted as they'd ever been.  The addition of mandolin on several tracks lightened things further, although lyrically for the most part the topics were still tough and more direct.  Orange Crush and World Leader Pretend saw Stipe taking on the big boys, the ones who send kids to war.

But even with weighty topics, Green didn't blast.  That came on the road, where these songs got the full treatment, especially from Peter Buck.  Often these reissues include a live concert as a bonus, which is nice, but I'll listen once and file it.  This period set is R.E.M. at its peak though, playing to big crowds and inspired by it.  They turn out the Green material with an intensity missing on the album.  The light stuff gets dealt with off the top, which turns out to be a fun way to start a show:  Stand, into The One I Love.  But then comes Turn You Inside-Out, now menacing and powerful.  Although it would be their next album, 1991's Out Of Time that took them to the top, Green, especially live, may be the best representation of the band.