Album Reviews

Equipped with John Mellencamp's then recently acquired vintage 1/4" reel-to-reel 1955 Ampex 601 mono tape recorder  and a pair of iconic 50's era RCA ribbon microphones ( a 77 DX and 44 used singly) presumably supplied by producer T-Bone Burnett, the duo, accompanied by Mellencamp's wife Elaine, who shot the album's cover photo, hit the road during a break in last summer's  Bob Dylan-John Mellencamp-Willie Nelson tour to record thirteen freshly penned songs Mr. Mellencamp had written over thirteen prolific days.

The problem with an album like this is that there are two basically disinterested constituencies: Nino Rota fans who want to hear the actual soundtracks and people who don't know who Nino Rota is, or Fellini for that matter, and don't really care who they are or what The Umbrellas have done to interpret Rota's music.

Patricia Barber's café blue remains a musically and sonically stunning set seventeen years after its initial release on CD and later on a truncated vinyl edition. It's set in a dark, atmospheric musical space that recording engineer Jim Anderson captured perfectly, bathing Barber's sultry voice in a mysterious shroud of reverb created not by artificial means as was common at the time, but by establishing an improvised chamber under some stairs at CRC (Chicago Recording Company) where the record was produced.

Never mind that the songs sometimes ended up being more individual than group efforts and that squabbling and disagreement led to acrimony as well as long time engineer Geoff Emerick exiting, producer George Martin going on holiday and even Ringo Starr walking out for a few weeks.

Having licked his wounds and moped us into a melancholic swoon on the sumptuous sounding break-up album Sea Change, Beck casts off his blues and self absorbed ballads, puts his ears to the ground and, reunited with Mike Simpson and John King (a/k/a The Dust Brothers), comes up with an Odelay style, beat based musical mélange sure to please fans.

Clearly a fan, producer Steve Lipson places Jeff Beck's guitar in a distant reverberant  space that decreases its solidity but increases both its size and its mystery, evoking a God-like presence hovering above a lush, string-drenched orchestra. Or you could see Beck playing perched on a craggy, windswept rock surrounded by white-capped water. The album very much has a Pacific Ocean vibe.