Album Reviews

For once, all of the hype is justified: Kathleen Edwards is a genuine, fully formed musical force. Failer, her debut, delivers everything one could want from a record except great sound, but that one failing will not interfere with the pleasures to be derived from this 10-song gem recorded on a shoe-string budget. The 24-year-old Canadian mid-tempo rocker/singer/songwriter has been compared to Lucinda Williams, but Neil Young backed by Crazy Horse is more apt in my book.

This odd scenic detour on Herbie Hancock's career path is well worth visiting 36 years later, both because of the intrinsic value of the music he created for the movie and because it resonates so effectively with the current interest in the "swinging '60s" popularized by (and sent-up in) the Austin Powers flicks--though on a far more cerebral plane than Powers could ever hope to reach. These culturally repressed and repackaged, often dead-ended times make looking back at Blow-Up--the movie--all the more alluring for its promise of excitement, sexual liberation, and a progressive changing of the socio-sexual guard.

Sound quality aside, the very fact that this album has been reissued by Rhino on vinyl (anonymously mastered at Capitol from the original analog tapes) is astounding. More than a dozen years ago, Rhino begin a limp-wristed "Save the LP" campaign. Predictably, it went down in flames and the company issued a 12-inch package of Rhino catalog items called (I Guess We Didn't) Save the LP containing a three-CD set in a 12-by-12 slide-out insert. Cute.

On her 18th album--and her first in eight years--Joan Armatrading offers a mostly light-hearted exploration of love and affection on Lover's Speak, a set of 14 melodic, hard-rocking, well-crafted songs. Whether leading with her husky, low-end growl or vulnerable, breathy falsetto, the 52-year-old veteran performer's distinctive voice remains remarkably supple--her mid-'70s power barely diminished by time.

Lonely and Blue, the rarest and most valuable of Roy Orbison's Monument LPs--his first for the label--has been given splendid sonic and packaging care by Classic Records, in both monophonic and stereo editions. According to Classic's Mike Hobson, this is the first time the original master tapes have been used since the original pressings were issued in 1961. At a January 2003 Consumer Electronics Show press conference, Hobson told how the masters were discovered in Nashville and gave every indication of having not been "cracked" since they were used to generate the original LP. What Mobile Fidelity used for its gold CD, or Sony for its gold CD, remains a mystery, then, but when you hear this issue, you'll have no doubt the original tapes were used--especially if you've become accustomed to those CDs.

This Otis Rush love fest, produced by Mike Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites at Fame in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, was payback for the generosity and help Rush provided the youngsters back in Chicago during their "formative" years. Led by The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the white suburban audience that formed the core of the "counter-culture" had discovered the blues. Butterfield had backed Dylan at Newport in 1965, causing a big stir, and soon thereafter Mike Bloomfield and drummer Sam Lay were in the studio with Dylan to record Highway 61 Revisited.

Perhaps, in a perfect audiophile world, Shel Talmy would have arranged to remix these three-track originals to analog for the LP release and to digital for the CD. But this isn't a perfect world. However, compared to my original American Decca "stereo" pressing of The Who Sings My Generation (Decca DL 74664), this is perfection. The original stereo edition was an electronically reprocessed, boxy-sounding compressed mess. While purists may have preferred it in mono, the stereo remix found in My Generation (Deluxe Edition) is respectful and keeps most of the action centered, avoiding hard-left and -right separation. I did get a chance to hear an original UK Brunswick mono pressing, and this reissue has nothing to be ashamed of.