I’ve heard and read complaints about the unadventurous reissues coming from Analogue Productions, especially now that the parent company Acoustic Sounds owns its own pressing plant, Quality Record Pressing.
Like Steve Earle, Ryan Adams and other distinctly American artists, Shelby Lynne finds it difficult to settle down musically in one place.
Since releasing I Am Shelby Lynne in 2000, she’s been a moving target for her fans and critics alike. Though she won a “Best New Artist” Grammy® Award for that album, in fact, it was her sixth record! Go figure.
The Los Angeles based band Dengue Fever played to a packed house near downtown San Diego, on a beautiful night in late January. For those not familiar with this unique outfit, they are comprised of a group of American musicians with xenophile and psychedelic tendencies fronted by Chhom Nimol, an exotic female vocalist from Cambodia. Michael Fremer reviewed their latest CD, Cannibal Courtship, here http://musicangle.com/album.php?id=1015. Sound funky? It is, in the most delicious way.
The phono preamplifiers reviewed this month are both affordable ($400$1960) and highly accomplished, and the most expensive of them offers versatility that's unprecedented in my experience. Three of them are designed to be used only with moving-magnet, moving-iron, and high-output moving-coil cartridges, so I installed Shure's V15VxMR cartridge in VPI's Classic 3 turntable and listened in MM mode to all of them, beginning with the least expensive.
A funny thing happens as you age: time compresses. When I was 20, music from the 1940s seemed old. Robert Johnson was positively pre-historic, and to my ears the sound was equally cobwebbed. Oh, like everyone else, I bought CL 1654 after seeing it on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and reading one of the breathless cover dissections in a magazine. Back then every cover prop "meant" something.
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.
"My girlfriend loves everything at the beach except the sand, the surf and the sun." That lyric pretty much sums up the playful, sensous, and dangerous kitsch-world of this exotic six person L.A. group fronted by the black widow spider persona of the sexy Cambodian pop chantreuse Chhom Nimol whose fixation with '60s Cambodian pop fuels the music.