Album Reviews

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Michael Fremer  |  Aug 06, 2012  |  2 comments
All of Fiona Apple's albums have been been personal and confessional (some might say "self absorbed") but this one is really personal and confessional and attractively self-absorbed too.

Michael Fremer  |  Aug 03, 2012  |  9 comments
Why listen to "purist" British blues bands recreating what they've heard on record or in clubs, when you can hear the real thing? That's how I've always felt about it. This album by the British blues band Ten Years After is something else and perhaps in retrospect it's unfair to tag TYA as a "purist blues band."

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 27, 2012  |  2 comments
This is the third album from Brooklyn based Clare and the Reasons and its first to be issued on vinyl. Movie, the group's 2007 debut features Van Dyke Parks and Sufjan Stevens to give you an idea of what's going on here.

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 27, 2012  |  9 comments
Starting in 1954 the late veteran DJ William B. Williams hosted a long-running radio show on WNEW-AM called "Make Believe Ballroom" (a name, coincidentally, we also used at summer camp for kids who prematurely wore jock straps before they really had a need to).
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 25, 2012  |  7 comments
“Strange Days” was the perfect album for its time. For music lovers at a time when records were the main means by which a generation communicated with its culture, the title, cover art, music and sound resonated with the meaning of the fall of 1967 (even though the album was recorded the previous spring at L.A.’s Sunset Sound).
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 19, 2012  |  10 comments
There was no "sophomore slump" for Bob Dylan. Quite the contrary. His first album brought promise, but it was an album of covers with but two originals and it hardly sold. Some at Columbia called signing Dylan "Hammond's Folly," and the lackluster sales for Dylan's debut seemed to back them up.

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 16, 2012  |  10 comments
Originally released in June of 1972, Bowie's "rock concept album" broke the then still obscure musician and changed the face of rock'n'roll forever—and that ain't hyperbole. If this wasn't the album that gave Freddie Mercury his dream, I can't imagine what was.

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 11, 2012  |  23 comments
Do you really need a musical discussion at this point in time? All I can say is that in the "Summer of Love" of 1967, all you could hear coming from car radios, and open windows was the edited version of "Light My Fire." It defined that summer for most of my peers and was the perfect calling card with which to beg for some action from a date. Hard to believe that was 45 years ago.

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 06, 2012  |  11 comments
You can tell me yours, but my first encounter with Thelonious Monk was the 1963 Columbia album Criss-Cross(CS 8838). I'd given up on rock'n'roll, which had become all Fabian and Frankie Avalon-ed out and new musical adventures of a more adult nature were in order for this high-schooler.

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 05, 2012  |  11 comments
It's a bit late in the day to write a review of the music on this album, which concerns itself mostly with how the music business chews up musicians with dreams and spits them out—not that Syd Barrett, the subject of "Shine On You Crazy Diamond" was done in by the business.

Michael Fremer  |  Jul 02, 2012  |  3 comments
NIck Lowe has aged more than gracefully—he's never been better melodically and especially lyrically. On his latest release, issued by Yep Roc on a "wide groove 45rpm" record, Lowe waxes both melancholic and bemused about a break up.
Randy Wells  |  Jun 28, 2012  |  6 comments
Joni Mitchell’s decision to stay in New York City instead of traveling 300 miles north to attend a three-day rock festival in August of 1969 was probably a good idea. If she had actually seen Woodstock for herself, she may not have created such an intense and idealized song by the same name.

Michael Fremer  |  Jun 19, 2012  |  5 comments
Talk Talk's Mark Hollis may have long ago retired from the music business, but his musical legacy prospers and grows. A near cult-like devotion hovers around the group's records as succeeding generations discover his dense, probing, faith-based cogitations. The intensity and strength of his spiritual commitment was matched only by the forcefulness of his later "spirited" rejection.

Michael Fremer  |  Jun 14, 2012  |  3 comments
Who begins a debut album with a dirge-like, mournful song taken at a heartbreakingly slow pace like Richard Manuel's "Tears of Rage?" The Band did on their debut album that didn't exactly hit the pop charts running.

Michael Fremer  |  Jun 13, 2012  |  2 comments
Jazz Fusion may have turned out to be a dead end genre exiled to The Weather Channel's 24 hour forecast, but at its inception arguably with the group Weather Report, the sun shone brightly on its possibilities. How ironic that the jazz offshoot took off with Weather Report and dead-ended on TWC!

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