newcritics

At this stage, the Bob Dylan test is simple: listen to a new record a few times and before you make your judgment, pretend it’s the work of a largely unknown old circuit rider named Robby Zimmerman playing bars and beer halls with his traveling blues band in the upper midwest.
Then decide.
By the high cultural [...]

Here is a new jazz release that features 18 tight songs all over the stylistic map, from moody meditations to funky blues to soulful swing. If you didn’t know who created it, you might guess it was a young composer trying his or her hand at different genres—yet there is a notable confidence to the [...]

Yeah, I’m still a hardcopy CD consumer for a couple of pretty good reasons–first, professionally mastered Red Book spec CDs remain much higher in audio resolution than all commercial compressed audio files, second I actually have more physical storage space than I have digital storage space (at least for digital files of sufficient size as [...]

A couple of weeks back, I met a friend for lunch downtown and wondered at the choice - an East Village UK-style pub, replete with an iconic red phone box out front. Fair enough, but an interesting choice of venue. I was early and perusing the menu when I realized at an instant why we [...]

Like a lot of people of my generation, I was transformed by Astral Weeks, the 1968 second solo album by Van Morrison.
On an intellectual level, it was the album that revealed to me the elasticity of music– that a performer could emerge from a pop music idiom and a vernacular tradition to completely transcend them, creating [...]

I have historically avoided doing the fund raising thing on my blog, this one, Facebook, etc… but I have just been made aware of a situation that compels me to ask anyone who will listen to consider lending a hand even in these economically trying times. A national treasure needs our help. On January 15th [...]

After XTC released their minor masterpiece Nonsuch in 1992, the boys from Swindon went on strike against Virgin records due to a contentious contract dispute. When Virgin finally blinked, allowing them to sign with another label, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding had at least two albums worth of stellar material. It was a tough time [...]

Last week, following a Super Bowl halftime performance gloriously packed with the kind of cornpone usually the preserve of country performers, Bruce Springsteeen dethroned teen singer-songwriter Taylor Swift atop the Billboard charts with his 16th studio album, Working on a Dream.
Springsteen’s chart success probably has more to do with the fact that middle aged men [...]

I had never heard this anecdote before. It’s from Jonathan Gould’s luminescent book on the Beatles, Can’t Buy Me Love:
“And Your Bird Can Sing” sounds like the second act of “She Said, She Said” — another song about personal pretention, sung by John to the accompaniment of George’s crazed, cacophonous guitar. [N.B., it should be [...]

(Crossposted at my joint)

John Lennon: The Life
Philip Norman
2008, Ecco, ISBN 978-0-06-075401-3
With several very large biographies of John Lennon in existence (most notably Ray Coleman’s Lennon [1984] and Albert Goldman’s The Lives of John Lennon* [1988]) and countless rehashings of the Beatles’ collective career (perhaps the most informative being Barry Miles’ Paul McCartney: Many Years from [...]

Earlier this month I wrote about my favorite album of the year, Stay Positive by The Hold Steady. Today a flyover look at the best of the rest.
Vampire Weekend.  Before the government’s decisions to let the Lehman Brothers fail turned a snowballing financial crisis into an avalanche and turned a tough year into a grim [...]

I’ve long since given up any pretense come December of being able to think in any comprehensive way about the *best* music of the year. There’s just too much new music released every year to an audience too scattered for a marketplace too micro-targeted and boutiqued for me to claim I can tell anyone what’s [...]

In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was a wee lad and people actually defined themselves by the music they liked, one was routinely compelled to chose sides–AM v. FM, Beatles v. the Stones, Punk v. Disco.  But one sound was ubiquitous and universally beloved, the sound of Motown–deceptively dense, guitar chanks and tambourine clanks [...]

Just a quick note to draw readers attention to today’s Thelonious Monk birthday broadcast streaming on WKCR.org.
KCR’s birthday broadcasts–24 hours celebrating and exploring a jazz great on his or her birthday–have long been one of the best things about living in New York that the Internet has made a global pleasure.
Monk was pure New York–born [...]

Well, almost anyway. Dread Zeppelin. They were a one-joke band, but it was a good joke, wasn’t it?

“Heartbreaker” by Dread Zeppelin courtesy of Youtube.

Little, Brown missed the mark in subtitling Joe Nick Patoski’s absorbing new biography of Willie Nelson ‘An Epic Life’.
Willie’s story is more of a tall tale. Like Daniel Boone, Willie belongs both to American history and American myth. Huckster. Trickster. Philanthropist. Pothead. Road dog. Genius. His nicknames read like godly epithets of a peculiarly American [...]

Live blogging tonight!
“God, I miss the fifties.” Roger Sterling
“I miss the blacklist.” Harry Crane
“I missed not live blogging with you all last week. Thank God my Norwegian ancestors kept me from being sad about it.” M.A.Peel
Okay, so I have now seen “The Benefactor,” where Roger and Harry had throw away lines waxing nostalgic for [...]

Some quick thoughts about new releases in heavy rotation around here….
 Say what you want about The Hold Steady–its songs adhere to formula;  the band’s a bunch of 30something,  retro classic rockers–the group’s appeal ain’t nostalgic and the new album Stay Positive is just plain excellent. Full of hooky, guitar driven rock songs with the kind [...]