This Week's Most Worthy Picks

[subterranean]

Reading my e-newsletter, I'm astonish that this week we got so many albums to check out from some of the world's greatest musicians.

Manic Street Preachers
The Holy Bible (10 Years Anniversary Edition)
Epic

Ten years after its debut, the Manic Street Preachers' masterpiece The Holy Bible finally gets a release in America as a lavish three-disc 10th Anniversary Edition. In addition to the original British LP version, this set contains a bigger, heavier US mix that was intended for release in 1995 but was scrapped after the band's guitarist Richey James went missing in February of that year. It also contains several live radio tracks, including a complete Radio 1 session, two demos and a DVD filled with UK TV performances and highlights from their 1994 appearances at the Glastonbury and Reading festivals. For fans, this is a treasure trove, but it's also a good choice for curious American listeners who've always wondered what the fuss about the Manics was — this, more than any other album, explains why they're revered in their home country.


Elvis Costello
The Delivery Man (Deluxe Edition)
Lost Highway

What really makes The Delivery Man work is that it just plain sounds good. It's the first album that he's recorded in its entirety with his road band the Imposters, and they give this music serious muscle, but it also helps that the production by Costello and Dennis Herring stays out of the way — it's simple, direct, and unadorned, letting the performances shine through.


REM
Automatic For The People
Rhino

Turning away from the sweet pop of Out of Time, R.E.M. created a haunting, melancholy masterpiece with Automatic for the People. At its core, the album is a collection of folk songs about aging, death, and loss, but the music has a grand, epic sweep provided by layers of lush strings, interweaving acoustic instruments, and shimmering keyboards. Automatic for the People captures the group at a crossroads, as they moved from cult heroes to elder statesmen, and the album is a graceful transition into their new status. It is a reflective album, with frank discussions on mortality, but it is not a despairing record. R.E.M. have never been as emotionally direct as they are on Automatic for the People, nor have they ever created music quite as rich and timeless, and while the record is not an easy listen, it is the most rewarding record in their oeuvre.


REM
Out Of Time
Rhino

Out of Time was lush with sonic detail, featuring string sections, keyboards, mandolins, and cameos from everyone from rapper KRS-One to the B-52's' Kate Pierson. The scope of R.E.M.'s ambitions is impressive, and the record sounds impeccable, its sunny array of pop and folk songs as refreshing as Michael Stipe's decision to abandon explicitly political lyrics for the personal.


The Rolling Stones
Singles 1968-1971
Abko

Some of the Stones' very best is here, including "Street Fighting Man," "Honky Tonk Women" and "Jumpin' Jack Flash."



I may have to wait another few weeks for that record to be available in my nearest record store :(

[subterranean]

New Releases, 3/29/05


Morrissey
Live at Earls Court

Live At Earls Court finds British rock icon Morrissey and his band performing in London at the end of the You Are the Quarry tour. Not to be confused with the DVD Who Put the "M" in Manchester? recorded at the beginning of the tour in May, Live at Earls Court is a completely different concert from December 2004 and features a vastly different set list. While past live Morrissey albums such as Beethoven Was Deaf featured the singer's penchant for beautifully ragged ersatz rockabilly, Earls Court showcases the more polished group sound developed out of the You are the Quarry sessions. Which isn't to say that Morrissey has lost his edge, on the contrary such songs as "I Have Forgiven Jesus" and "The World Is Full of Crashing Bores" prove his legendary wit and sardonic tongue are fully intact and as sharp as ever. Similarly, his burnished baritone vocals have arguably never sounded better and the lush, muscular band arrangements frame him with a glam-regality befitting his late-career resurgence. Although newer songs off You Are the Quarry are the focus, longtime Moz fans will be delighted at the amount of The Smiths songs included here. In fact, the mix of the old, the new and the unexpected — he also performs some rare b-sides — make Live At Earls Court one of the most successful albums of Morrissey's career.


Beck
Guero

In many ways, Guero is deliberately designed as a classicist Beck album, a return to the sound and aesthetic of his 1996 masterwork Odelay. After all, he's reteamed with the producing team of the Dust Brothers, who are widely credited for the dense, sample collage sound of Odelay, and the light, bright Guero stands in stark contrast to the lush melancholy of 2002's Sea Change while simultaneously bearing a knowing kinship to the sound that brought him his greatest critical and commercial success in the mid-'90s. This has all the trappings of being a cold, calculating maneuver, but the album never plays as crass. Instead, it sounds as if Beck, now a husband and father in his mid-'30s, is revisiting his older aesthetic and sensibility from a new perspective. The sound has remained essentially the same — it's still a kaleidoscopic jumble of pop, hip-hop and indie-rock, with some Brazilian and electro touches thrown in — but Beck is a hell of a lot calmer, never indulging in the lyrical or musical flights of fancy or the absurdism that made Mellow Gold and Odelay such giddy listens. He now operates with the skill and precision of a craftsman, never dumping too many ideas into one songs, paring his words down to their essentials, mixing the record for a wider audience than his friends. Consequently, Guero never is as surprising or enthralling as Odelay, but Beck is also not trying to be as wild and funny as he was a decade ago. He's shifted away from exaggerated wackiness — which is good, since it wouldn't wear as well on a 34 year-old as it would on a man a decade younger — and concentrated on the record-making, winding up with a thoroughly enjoyable LP that sounds warm and familiar upon the first play and gets stronger with each spin. No, it's not a knock-out, the way his first few records were, but it's a successful mature variation on Odelay, one that proves that Beck's sensibility will continue to reap rewards for him as he enters his second decade of recording.


Sting
Bring on the Night

Sting really got carried away with the idea that his supporting crew for Dream of the Blue Turtles was a real jazz band, and technically, he was kind of right. He did pluck them straight out of Wynton Marsalis' backing band (thereby angering Wynton and emboldening his anti-rock stance, while flaring up a sibling rivalry between the trumpeter and his saxophonist brother Branford — a veritable hat trick, that), and since he was initially a jazz bassist, it seemed like a good fit. At the very least, it seemed like a monumental occasion because he documented the entire development of the band and making of Dream with a documentary called Bring on the Night, releasing a double live album as its soundtrack just a year after the debut hit the stores. This could be called hubris (and I will call it that), especially because the appearance of the live album feels like a way of showcasing Sting's jazz band and jazz chops. Most of the songs run around five minutes long and there are no less than three melodies, two of which marry an old Police number with a tune from Dream. Arriving as a second solo album, it can't help but feel a little unnecessary, even if the loose, rather infectious performances show what Sting was trying to achieve with his debut. Even so, this is a record for the cult, and while it will satisfy them, to others it will seem like, well, hubris.