Discs
Rock
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
Live
[Vagrant]
★★★★
Once every decade or so, a band comes along to recombine disparate elements from rock’s recent past into a new hybrid.
Sometimes, this band turns out to be a flash in the pan — mostly, this happens when technology or recording studio tricks of the moment overwhelm whatever musical statement might be attempting to break through.
Less often, a band manages to find the common thread in musical forms that might have seemed idiomatically disparate before said band arrived to connect the dots. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club is one of these groups. By taking the seedy, snarling dark side of New York City art-rock, a la the Velvet Underground, uniting it with Led Zeppelin’s post-blues stomp, and then adding a dollop of ’80s alt-rock, via My Bloody Valentine and the Stone Roses, the California-based trio came up with something truly invigorating.
When the band played the Tralf in 2007—its first appearance in Buffalo—all the promise of its three studio albums was delivered. On stage, band leaders Robert Levon Been and Peter Hayes came across as dark and slightly menacing, and the post-modern alt-blues erupting from their amplifiers created a gloriously deafening roar. By the end of the show, the crowd was drenched in sweat, and so were the men on the stage.
So, naturally, a live album from BRMC was in order, and “Live” delivers the goods a few times over.
A three-disc mini-box hosting one concert CD and a pair of DVDs — one presenting live performances in Berlin, Dublin and Glasgow that were captured during the same tour that included the Buffalo stop; the other stuffed with 120 minutes of appropriately grainy, black and white documentary footage— the album makes the case for BRMC as one of the finest rock bands of its generation. (More exciting, dynamic, tuneful and consistent than, say, Kings of Leon, Interpol and even the Strokes, combined.)
If you were at the Tralf show, don’t wait—go pick up “BRMC Live” now. If you weren’t there, no matter—this is the next best thing.
—Jeff Miers
Jazz
David “Fathead” Newman
The Blessing
[High Note]
★★★
Houston Person
Mellow
[High Note]
★★★
David “Fathead” Newman was 75 when he died last Jan. 20. “The Blessing” was recorded a little over a month before his death on Dec. 12, 2008. He had long suffered the ravages of pancreatic cancer.
There’s no use pretending that this is the same David “Fathead” Newman who was one of the two greatest soloists in Ray Charles’ band (the other was alto saxophonist Hank Crawford though trumpet player Marcus Belgrave was no slouch either). Nor is it quite the same jazz soul tenor stalwart so beloved for so long. But if you can listen to his version of, say, “Chelsea Bridge,” “As Time Goes By” or “Someone to Watch Over Me” here without being affected by the tenderness of his breathy final sound and the purity of his ballad playing, you may be using the wrong ears.
A lot of the sheer playing goes to the younger players here — guitarist Peter Bernstein, vibraphonist Steve Nelson and pianist Dave Leonhardt. Newman is there to remind you what a blessing his life in jazz was.
The apparently indefatigable Houston Person will be 75 on Tuesday. Even New York DJ Sid Gribetz admits Person has been “astonishingly prolific” in his life (more than 75 records with him as leader) and asks, rhetorically, in the notes “why do we need another album from Houston Person?” Listen to the lustiness of Person’s soul tenor and it’s not a even a question—not in a world where he’s just about the last in the tenor line of Gene Ammons, Stanley Turrentine, David “Fathead” Newman etc.
It’s impossible to listen unmoved to the gorgeous gush of his balladeering on such onetime jukebox monarchies as “To Each His Own,” “What a Difference a Day Made,” “Two Different Worlds” and “Who Can I Turn To?” And when he gets down to “Blues in the AM” and the final “Lester Leaps In,” you understand that such remaining tenor kings of the “Chitlin Circuit” (all those American nightclubs like Buffalo’s Pine Grille and the Bon-Ton) are a class of musical royalty precious and fabled indeed.
The disc isn’t, then, quite as “mellow” as it claims to be.
—Jeff Simon
Crossover
Andrea Bocelli
My Christmas
[Decca Universal]
★★★
You can find a lot of fault with this CD. There’s the hackneyed “Lord’s Prayer” with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and a “Jingle Bells” with the Muppets that veers between slow and fast, keeps going up keys and repeats the same verse over and over when the other verses are so pretty!
However I got to “Cantique de Noel”— “O Holy Night”— and all was forgiven. You don’t often get to appreciate Bocelli’s pipes. Now here he is with this marvelous over-the-top melody pouring out of him. You could argue about his vocal quality here and there but you’d be like Scrooge, because it’s just so joyous, with its raw power. It’s like in the middle of winter when you can go into the middle of snowy Delaware Park and take your dog off the leash and let him run. Sing, Bocelli, sing!
Other songs, just so you know what you’re dealing with, include a “Blue Christmas” with Reba McEntire and “What Child is This” with Mary J. Blige.
—Mary Kunz Goldman
Rock
Weezer
Raditude
[Interscope]
★★★½
A healthy portion of Weezer fans must be pulling what’s left of their hair out. Indie-rock folks who fell in love with the band’s debut, and bonded deeply with the unsettling heartbreak imbedded in the grooves of the classic “Pinkerton,” probably don’t recognize the Rivers Cuomo basking in the shallow power-pop glee running through “Raditude,” the band’s guilty pleasure of a new album.
Actually, the pleasure is only a guilty one if you suffer from a pre-existing condition — the “Pinkerton” flu, we’ll call it. People ailing from this disease want Cuomo to sing for, to, and about them. Increasingly over the band’s last three albums, Cuomo has been loosening up, though, dropping the responsibility of being cast as geek-rock’s poster boy, and enjoying himself. “Raditude” is the culmination of this trend. This time around, Cuomo is singing about himself, his own life, the one that includes all of fame’s cheap, plastic pleasures. Cuomo isn’t just selling out here — he’s selling out with a smirk on his face.
So Lil’ Wayne shows up to lend his irksome thing to “Can’t Stop Partying,” during which “Weezy and Weezer” throw down like they just don’t care. This should be offensive, but it isn’t— it’s just plain fun.
Not since “I Want You To Want Me” has a straightforward power-pop love song arrived in such insanely catchy form as does “(If You’re Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To,” one of Cuomo’s most shameless capitulations to his inner Eric Carmen. Brilliant!
If Weezer’s first two albums really meant something to you, if you felt that somehow Cuomo was and would remain the glum indie-rock outsider, “Raditude” might feel like a slap across the face. It does nothing more than offer ephemeral pleasures, and it stands for absolutely nothing. But it sure does sound great when you crank it up.
—J. M.
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