Album Reviews

If you search the musicangle data base for “Dolly Varden,” you'll find a review of Forgiven Now, also issued on Diverse Records 180g vinyl. The Dumbest Magnets is the group's previous album, not the follow up to Forgiven Now. Therefore it can't and doesn't demonstrate musical growth, or greater chance-taking. It does prove that the group's previous album is yet another exquisitely turned out pedal steel drenched acoustic/electric album of introspective country-rock.

“She brushes off comparisons to Billie Holiday,” according to Mobile Fidelity’s online blurb. Why? That’s like denying the elephant in the room. Peyroux’s squooshy vibrato and top of the throat delivery produce sly vocal timbres that just about channel Billie Holiday between your speakers. Even the miking and equalization have been carefully chosen to sustain the Holiday allusion and almost mimic the mellow recording quality of the time, just as the inner gatefold photography and Peyroux’s outfits reprise the visuals of the ‘40s. It’s canny but I find it distracting and mannered.

Good luck finding a copy. They're pretty much sold out and the price of used copies is only likely to rise for this iconic grunge-rock album with the "sell-out" cover.

One of the events covered most by the music press in the last few months has been that a “lost” John Coltrane album has been found and finally released. The original session tape vanished when Impulse moved from New York City to Los Angeles, the label having dumped many tapes of unreleased material in the process. The music was thought to be lost forever, but the family of Trane’s first wife, Naima, found the “take home” session copy in 2004. The story of its discovery is sure to captivate many fans, making it the perfect marketing tool for this new archival release.

Englishman Dolby hit double paydirt with a catchy synth-novelty song and an accompanying video just as the pop-synth and music video/ MTV phenomena broke. However, “She Blinded Me With Science” was not his first song, nor does it really reflect what the guy's about. His first album, The Golden Age of Wireless (Harvest ST-12203), was originally issued without “She Blinded Me…”. When the song and video became popular, the album was reconfigured and reissued. Dolby was an instant celeb, and faded just as quickly, though his album Aliens Ate My Buick (EMI Manhattan E-148075) remains a cult fave for both music and sound. Come to think of it The Flat Earth was pretty good as well.