Album Reviews

This very limited double 45rpm set should have sold out within weeks of its release but that probably didn’t happen.

Fats Waller had been gone twelve years when Louis Armstrong and his All-Stars recorded this tribute album in 1955. Sadly, the notorious overeater died at 39 of a heart attack.

Coincidentally (or not?) this more than one year old release came to my attention, and I first played it on the daythe Exile on Main Streetreissue hit record stores. The band has been around for 15 years and has nine albums. I plead appalling ignorance but better late than never.

Elvis’s first post-Army album created a sensation when it was released just one month after he entered Nashville Studio B on March 20th, 1960, two week after his release from the Army. Unfortunately, for Presley and RCA Elvis Is Back!  wasn’t a big seller because it didn’t contain any hits. Presley had been away for two years.

If you go for Waits’s “Louis Armstrong meets Screamin’ Jay Hawkins meets Captain Beefheart” blues/jazzbo thing, obtaining it live or recorded live is probably as pure as it gets and arguably the best way to consume an artist energized by the crowd’s adulation and an adept touring backup band capable of creating thick, churning atmospherics.

Here’s one you don’t often see in the bins. Mary Wells auditioned for Berry Gordy when she was 16 and not long afterward had a monster, world-wide hit with “My Guy” back in 1964. It hit #5 in England and The Beatles asked her to tour with them.

Spoon’s latest is an introspective affair that trades the group’s usual tuneful exuberance for something more contemplative. But don’t be aFreud! It’s got all of the group’s signature moves, from deep, behind the grooves beats to catchy melodies set against vast empty spaces punctuated by exclamatory soundscapes.