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Reviews of Attainable Hi-Fi & Home-Theater Equipment

Most Popular Featured Releases

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 November 2018

Because Music/Caroline 0525436048
Format: CD

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Héloïse Létissier, born in Nantes, France, in 1988, performs as Christine and the Queens and has released two full-length CDs and eight EPs. Her music addresses many of the issues of gender and sexuality that are so much a part of conversations these days. For her new album, Chris, Létissier has adopted a masculine persona, with hair and attire to emphasize it, in an attempt to examine her own freedom to choose a fluid definition of gender, as well as to look at male attitudes toward women, sexuality, and other issues.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 October 2018

Adventure Music AM1115 2
Format: CD

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Mandolin master Mike Marshall has been recording for more than 30 years on labels large and small. For the last 12 years he’s recorded for Adventure Music, a label he founded with the late Richard Zirinsky. Marshall has played or collaborated with many musicians, including fiddle player Mark O’Connor, guitarist Jerry Douglas, banjoist Béla Fleck, and the Turtle Island Quartet. In 2010, he and classical mandolinist Caterina Lichtenberg recorded their first collaboration, Caterina Lichtenberg & Mike Marshall, and in 2015 they returned with a disc of arrangements of works by J.S. Bach. For Third Journey, the two selected a program of classical, traditional, and modern compositions, each work showing off their virtuosity without being a mere showpiece.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 October 2018

Atlantic 572449-2
Format: CD

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Thank You for Today is Death Cab for Cutie’s ninth studio album, and the first without guitarist Chris Walla, who had announced his departure during the recording of the band’s last album, Kintsugi (2015), to which he contributed guitar, keyboards, and vocals. But even then, for the first time in Death Cab’s recording career, Walla wasn’t in the producer’s chair. Rich Costey produced Kintsugi, and now this new one as well.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 September 2018

ECM 2608 (6025 675 16187)
Format: CD

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The Norwegian jazz pianist Tord Gustavsen has released eight recordings on ECM since 2003, the first three of which were trio sessions. The most recent, The Other Side, returns him to the piano-trio format after leading two quartet albums, and two ensembles featuring singers. Drummer Jarle Vespestad has played on all of Gustavsen’s recordings, but this is bassist Sigurd Hole’s first appearance on record with the pianist. Hole’s interest in Norway’s folk music as an inspiration for jazz is something he shares with Gustavsen, and makes him a good choice for this trio.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 September 2018

Sony Legacy 19075841402
Format: CD

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Gary Louris, the guitarist, singer, and leader of the Jayhawks, has collaborated over the years with other songwriters on songs recorded by them or other artists. Nine of the 11 songs on the group’s new album, Back Roads and Abandoned Motels, fall into that category, yet the result is more stylistically consistent than the band’s last album, Paging Mr. Proust (2016), for which Louris wrote most of the songs himself. Proust took the Jayhawks into new territory while reinforcing their strengths. But if on first hearing Back Roads seems less exciting, it soon becomes clear that this album further confirms Louris’s compositional talents even as a co-writer, and that the Jayhawks remain the best band for his work.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 August 2018

Blue Note B002843502
Format: CD

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At age 80, tenor saxophonist Charles Lloyd is going strong. He’s done an album almost every year since 1989, and is still challenging himself and his listeners. In 2016 he released I Long to See You, featuring guitarists Bill Frisell and Greg Leisz, who introduced elements of folk and country into Lloyd’s jazz. That group, which also included Lloyd’s regular bassist and drummer, Reuben Rogers and Eric Harland, was named Charles Lloyd & the Marvels, and returns in Vanished Gardens.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 August 2018

Parlophone 0190295730260/CDBB 7782
Format: CD

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Welcome to the Blackout (Live London ’78) is a two-disc live set from David Bowie’s Isolar II: The 1978 World Tour, which drew heavily from two albums Bowie released in 1977, Low and “Heroes”. Those recordings were part of what Bowie would later call the Berlin Trilogy, which concluded with Lodger (1979). The three albums were another shift in direction in an ever-changing career.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 01 July 2018

Perro Verde/Fantasy FAN00235
Format: CD

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The Prodigal Son, Ry Cooder’s 17th solo studio recording (not counting his many film scores), is his first such outing since Election Special (2012), and the first since Chávez Ravine (2005) that doesn’t overtly address political themes. While on his last five albums Cooder was the primary composer, on The Prodigal Son he returns to his role as interpreter of songs from America’s past. The emphasis is on old blues and country gospel, but Cooder also includes three of his own compositions that fit well with the vintage tunes he’s chosen.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 July 2018

Grant Green: “Funk in France: From Paris to Antibes (1969-1970)”

Resonance/INA HCD2033
Format: CD

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Grant Green: “Slick! Live at Oil Can Harry’s”

Resonance HCD2034
Format: CD

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Grant Green (1935-1979), like his near contemporary Wes Montgomery (1923-1968), died while still in his 40s, and like Montgomery’s, Green’s later recordings are sometimes scorned by jazz purists. While toward the end of his life Montgomery leaned in the direction of easy listening, Green played funk. Beginning in 1969, when he returned to Blue Note after a few years with other labels, Green’s jazz showed the influence of then-current soul musicians James Brown and the Meters, both of whose compositions he covered that year on Carryin’ On.

Details: Written by: Joseph Taylor; Category: Featured Releases; Created: 15 June 2018

Planet Mu/Timesig TIMESIG008CD
Format: CD

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In 2016, Daniel Lanois used his pedal steel guitar as the basis for Goodbye to Language, a series of ambient compositions that recalled Brian Eno and Harold Budd, two composers he’s worked with. His collaborator on that album was Rocco DeLuca, who played lap steel. The complex, layered compositions revealed new sounds and evoked new emotions with each hearing. Tracks that had at first seemed contemplative and calming later opened the way to deeper, sometimes darker territory.