Of Note: CD Reviews

Eben Brooks alternates between a seriously folked-out, Gordon Lightfoot-esque vibe and an old English, renaissance faire type sound, sometimes blending the two. Fans of either of these genres will find some things to like here but may also wish that the producers had gone further to provide some of the typical ear candy associated with these types of music. In the liner notes for Just Me and My Guitar there is a disclaimer: “No non-guitar instruments were used in making this album.” Many times I found myself wishing that a tambourine, violin, mandolin, Irish whistle, flute, or some other instrument had been added to provide more depth and texture to some of these tracks. Also, the harmony vocals are such a welcome addition on certain tracks that I wish there had been more of them.

“Princes, Friends and Lovers” provides the most satisfying and complete effort with its playfully catchy melody, heartfelt lyrics, and some highly effective layered harmony vocals. “Pawns in the Game,” “Magician,” and “Number On a Page” all offer cerebral and critical commentaries on modern life and the state of the world. “Deified Hebraic Carpenterial Blues” offers a very clever and funny first person take on what it would be like for Jesus to come back to earth now in the body of a garden-variety pagan (“I haven’t had a day off since AD 33”). If “Dancer” and “Dancer #2” are autobiographical, then the woman who is the subject of the songs should either be flattered or horrified to find that it took two (not just one) melodramatic love-lost songs to cover the emotions she inspired. “Amadea” is a nice folk tale set to music and is the best example of Brooks’ “old school” (we’re talking medieval school) musical prowess. The bonus track is a cover and I will not reveal the name of the song, except to say that when I first realized what song it was, I rolled my eyes and braced for the worst….but then was surprised and impressed at how good it sounded.

Throughout most of CD, I go back to my initial observation that more instrumentation would have elevated the material. Here’s to hoping that the next album is called Just Me and My Guitar and Some Other Cool Sounding Instruments Too.

Once again our local Treasure — Master Minstrel of Melancholy, Bard of Bitter Ballads, and Sultan of Sweet Sadness — gives us some new reasons to kill ourselves. If we’re pathologically impressionable, that is, or maybe a few mountain oysters short of a full scrote. But everyone else is pretty much in for the usual from Mr. Page: gorgeous melodies; superb musicianship, composition, and arrangement; and plenty of those deliciously plaintive contemplations of a narrator who’s had his genius ass kicked by love more times than he should want to waste time trying to remember. And yet, he still comes up for more — not because he’s a masochist but because he wants every bit of contact with Love he can luck into or arrange, since sooner or later Love will get tired and that’s the perfect time to knock some sense into the bitch.

Even the occasional clichéd phrase has been given a nice new set of clothes; the familiar yawning metaphor playfully bounces between several luxurious musical beds, perfect for pleasant dreams.

By now, Page’s lucky listeners have gotten used to his narrator’s pains. Nobody’s likely to abandon this bewildered pilgrim whose possibilities seem endlessly rewarding even as they break your heart.

The hidden audio-bio track was a sweet idea, Gregoire, but your own voice would have been a natural. Yo man, dude.

Music lovers, get this puppy today. Glory be, we hear an angel sing and play; yes, we’ll always believe.

And how! And in sum: another lugubrious stunner from the Maestro.

Listening to the radio the other day, I was noticing how plain many of the songs sounded. Now don’t get me wrong. There are lots of great tunes out there, but so many of them sound like glorified demos. The missing link, at least in my humble opinion, is the lack of arranging. Not production or engineering, but arranging — as in backing vocals, strings, horns, percussion, sound affects ,and so on. It’s a lost art form. If it’s done right, the musical additions are “invisible” but an integral part of the sound. And the best in the business was probably the late Jack Nitzsche, easily one of the most important figures in the development of rock ‘n’ roll.

Maybe you don’t know the name, but you definitely know his work on everything from the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” to the Tubes’ “Don’t Touch Me There” and hundreds more. England’s Ace Records have put together a terrific compilation in tribute to Nitzsche, featuring a wide variety of his work from 1962 to 1979, and it’s required listening for anyone that might be studio bound. The label was unable to license the above hits or even works with the Stones, Buffalo Springfield, or Ringo Starr among others, but the CD’s 26 tracks still demonstrate an incredible range and will leave any music fan in awe.

Highpoints? For me it’s a toss up between Stevie Wonder’s “Castles In The Sand” and Judy Henske’s dramatic “Road to Nowhere” even though the compilation features one treasure after another. Where else will you find music from the Righteous Brothers, Marianne Faithfull, the James Gang, Graham Parker and the Rumour, Bobby Darin, and Frankie Laine in one place? Making this album essential even for the diehards who might own some of these tracks is the excellent 28-page booklet that’s included with the CD, which tells the story in the artists’ words, accompanied by excellent annotation. It’s amazing that one man was able to accomplish so much, but even a cursory listen to the album will leave you thinking the same thing I did the first time. They sure don’t make them like that anymore — the music or Jack Nitzsche.

On her sixth album, folk music master Peggy Watson delivers a masterpiece. With acoustic guitars, bass, and a little percussion Watson and her all-star band create an atmosphere of warmth and space lesser folk bands can only dream of. And in her lyrics, Watson takes the time to let truths reveal themselves.

It would be easy to compare her voice to other folk icons like Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell, but let us speak plainly now. No one can sing like Peggy Watson. Unabashedly timeless, she has found the vein of gold in her own instrument, and we all fall back dazzled.

Again and again Watson finds a way, with a turn of phrase or a melody, to encapsulate and convey the mysterious center of things, the heart of the matter where categories and definitions slip away. In the gentle front-porch sway of the album opener, “The Moon is Full Tonight,” she blurs the juxtapositions between banality, depression, and celestial transcendence so that you don’t know where the heartache ends and the ecstasy begins.

Another standout in a string of gems is “This is Love,” a reverent prayer to an old love, which is really a song about surrendering to truths you can’t change. Watson effortlessly synthesizes the contradictions of loss and grace, longing and acceptance in a ballad of luminous beauty, which is what elevates this album far beyond “folk music” to the status of masterpiece. Only great art transcends even its own forms and carries us over the boundaries of our preconceptions. In the Company of Birds soars.

The album closes with a shimmering, majestic, pastoral meditatio: the title track “In the Company of Birds.” In these MTV times where sexuality in music is commonly delivered in airbrushed silicone containers, this song illustrates the staggering power of real feminine sexuality. Here is a woman opening herself to a lover in a way so strong, so real, so honest, so unimaginably beautiful that it burrows all the way down into the deepest needs any man ever has, the need to be forgiven, to need to be accepted, even celebrated just as he is. Listen to this song, let it shake you down to the core, and tell me this isn’t the sexiest song you’ve ever heard.

Tilling the well-worn soil of blues and standards is a risky business. Jazz ballads were well past their heyday when Sputnik circled the globe, and all 19,041 blues licks registered with the American Blues Institute have been used thousands of times over. So it’s difficult to bring fresh life to the tunes that Sinatra, Smiley Lewis, and Roy Brown were putting out over 50 years ago. Additionally, if you record a disk of standards and old blues, how can you get a potential listener to pick up your disk instead of a reissue of Nat King Cole or Lady Day herself?

Sue Palmer, a veteran of Tobacco Road, Candye Kane’s blues band, and an established icon of San Diego blues and boogie-woogie, solves this dilemma with her new disk, In the Green Room. Along with various manifestations of her own Motel Swing Orchestra, Palmer does not try to recreate the passions, adrenaline, and excess that drove these American music forms while they were in their prime. In the Green Room is a disk of blues and standards for family fun times. These are love songs for the times you wink at your wife, old time tunes for singing around the piano, and blues you put on the stereo when you have a beer with your mom.

The mood is best summed up by the DVD video included on the disk of Palmer playing the old country classic “Cottonwood” in her living room with friends and family. What could be sweeter or simpler? And the montage of old family photos just puts the icing on the cake.

Besides such classics as “Saint Louis Blues” and “Mood Indigo” are a couple new tunes. “Gertrude and Steins” is the one song on the disk with a bit of a wink and a nod. And if my life could have a soundtrack, I’d want it to be the last number on this disk. “Killer Tiki Boogie,” a tune Palmer penned while fighting breast cancer during the buildup for war on Iraq, is clever, unworried, and about as hip as it gets.