Album Reviews

If you�re not yet familiar with him, Matisyahu is a 28-year-old white, Chassidic Jewish reggae-rapper/rocker from West Chester, Pennsylvania. Now read that over a few more times, do you have a mental picture yet? He dons the traditional dress of The Hasidic Jews, wears a long beard and sounds a bit like �Jr. Gong� Marley. In addition he�s a self proclaimed former-Deadhead, loves Phish and is an adept beat boxer. Now that I�ve got you scratching your head wondering if I�m making this all up, it would be a good time to add that he�s also a talented songwriter, and his album, Youth is quite the unique musical experience.

A generation has grown up without Reference Recordings, which due to a series of business mishaps, had gone silent and not due to a lack of demand for its consistently spectacular recordings and often adventurous titles.

The timbre may have deepened, though almost imperceptibly, but caressing the soft, melodic waves of this set of tidily drawn, dreamy reveries, k.d. lang�s voice remains a magnificent, mellifluous instrument.

In his first commercial release since 2005�s folk-laden Hotel ; Moby brings the eclectic Last Night . The album could be considered Moby�s return to the high-tempo dance music, which brought about his late 1990s fame. Whereas Hotel explored the synergy (and sometimes lack of) between guitar-strumming light rock and bass heavy electronica, Last Night is pure dance. Moby does not lend his voice to the double album�s 14 songs, but his cast of vocalists highlights his arranging skills.

True, The Who were once called The High Numbers, but can you imagine a more self-loathing album title than The Who By Numbers? Painting by numbers or doing anything by "the numbers" usually connotes rote work. It was an honest assessment of the album.

Dennis Wilson didn�t sing very well in the conventional sense of the word: his pitch was frequently off, he warbled, his vocal timbre was raspy and calling his range �limited� would be an overstatement.

Very few singers can get this close to a dry microphone, be balanced way forward of the backup band and sound as good as Peggy Lee does on this series of standards backed by a pair of small ensembles, recorded in 1953 and 1956. Neither the original nor the reissue notes explain the album’s temporal context so perhaps there’s no story there.