Album Reviews

Dennis Wilson didn�t sing very well in the conventional sense of the word: his pitch was frequently off, he warbled, his vocal timbre was raspy and calling his range �limited� would be an overstatement.

Very few singers can get this close to a dry microphone, be balanced way forward of the backup band and sound as good as Peggy Lee does on this series of standards backed by a pair of small ensembles, recorded in 1953 and 1956. Neither the original nor the reissue notes explain the album’s temporal context so perhaps there’s no story there.

You had to be there, and I was.

Listening to a straightforward, blues/gospel-drenched comping session like this reminds you that jazz has lost its soul today and aims mostly for the head. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s good to get back to the essential, visceral nature of the genre. This set, recorded in New York at an unidentified studio or studios on three days during the summer of 1963, let’s you know why.

In the nervous, jumpy, wiry world of guitar-driven late ‘70’s-early ‘80’s post-rock intellectual punk, popularized by bands like Gang of Four, Buzzcocks, early XTC and (more broodingly) Wire, Mission of Burma was America’s premier practitioners. They probably accrued more legend than record sales, though.

Memories can play nasty tricks on the mind. Events long since past that once seemed sublime can turn out to be anything but when the time machine slides them into the present.

The Canadian folk/rocker’s vital third album opens with an ambitious, though somewhat out of character tune featuring a melodic line and driving rhythmic pulse reminiscent of something that might have been penned by Death Cab For Cutie’s Ben Gibbard, though the vocal is unmistakably Edwards’: a feathery, vulnerable-yet-stoic tone fitted to unadorned, precise phrasing that can comfortably draw out a one syllable word the length of a football field.