Album Reviews

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Album Reviews
The Two New* Rolling Stones Box Sets: Deal or No Deal? Part I
Michael Fremer  |  Aug 10, 2013
As you know, digital is "perfect", so it shall remain a mystery why Part 1 of the Rolling Stones Box Set feature originally published on musicangle.com in 2011 got lost in the conversion to analogplanet.com. Part II made it. The omission was discovered recently when a reader asked about the recent ABKCO individual clear vinyl reissues. He was told to read the two part story because according to ABKCO, the new clear vinyl reissues were sourced from the files that produced the box set's excellent results, but of course Part 1 was nowhere to be found on the site. So belatedly, here it is.-Ed.
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Album Reviews
Doug MacLeod Can Sing the Blues, But Can a Classical Engineer Record it?
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 24, 2013
Back in 1995 in The Tracking Angle's second issue I wrote of acoustic folk/blues artist Doug MacLeod's performances on his Audioquest LP Come to Find (AQ 1027): "You'll hear a lifetime's accumulation of feelings, experiences and influences in his fingers, in his voice and in his songs...."

MacLeod was 46 at the time. Eighteen years or so later MacLeod is still at it, as he's been since he picked up bass and guitar as a child. He's issued 19 studio albums some live ones and even an instructional DVD. The years have only enhanced and enriched MacLeod's technical and communicative abilities. He's an even more fluid and nuanced guitarist and singer than he was back in 1995.

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Album Reviews
Rumer's "Boys Don't Cry" Will Make Some Mist, Others Bawl
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 21, 2013
Real name Sarah Joyce, the 34 year-old singer-songwriter who goes by the name Rumer (after the English writer Margaret Rumer Godden), was born in Islamabad, Pakistan and is most often described as having a Karen Carpenter-like soothing, dreamy voice.

The daughter of a British woman whose British engineer husband was assigned there to work on a dam, Rumer and her six older siblings lived isolated in an ex-patriot community. Not until she was 11 and her “parents” divorced and the family moved back to England did she and her siblings discover that her father was the family’s Pakistani cook.

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Album Reviews
Bill Evans Jim Hall "Undercurrent" Equals Sublime Music Making
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 17, 2013
Sublime music making of the highest order despite the "shock value" cover, the collaboration between pianist Bill Evans and guitarist Jim Hall, who at 82 is still performing produced two albums of enduring beauty and quiet grace
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Album Reviews
Preservation Hall Jazz Band Celebrates 50 Years With "That's It!"
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 16, 2013
Best known for playing the traditional jazz it was founded to preserve fifty years ago, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band here celebrates its next fifty with a forward looking program of audacious, often raucous and sometimes mischievous new originals mostly written by 41 year old Ben Jaffe, son of the hall's founders Allan and Sandra and current Creative Director
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Album Reviews
"The Dave Brubeck Quartet At Carnegie Hall" Issued on Double 180g Vinyl
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 08, 2013
By the time the "classic" Dave Brubeck Quartet arrived at Carnegie Hall on February 22nd, 1963 it had "practiced, practiced, practiced" as the old joke goes. The quartet of Brubeck, drummer Joe Morello, bassist Eugene Wright and alto saxophonist Paul Desmond was a well-oiled music making machine.

It was also the world's most popular and well-known jazz ensemble, having toured the world for the State Department and released numerous big selling albums such as Time Out, which sold well in excess of a million copies.

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Album Reviews
"Thank You Les, A Tribute to Les Paul" Issued on 180g AAA Vinyl!
Michael Fremer  |  Jul 01, 2013
This loving tribute to Les Paul featuring longtime trio cohort Lou Pallo and others with whom Les played at Fat Tuesdays and the Iridium is musically fabulous assuming you like the timeless "old school" style. And if not, why not? If it's good enough for Keith Richards, Steve Miller, Billy F. Gibbons and Slash, among others who perform here in that style, well hell, then it's good enough for you!

No doubt Les's playing and his technological innovations with guitar and multi-tracked overdubbing affected all of them. But surely his playing hit them more squarely in their young guitarist wheelhouse.

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Album Reviews
Gil Evans's "Out of the Cool" Into the Crapper?
Michael Fremer  |  Jun 30, 2013
Last winter an old audio biz friend of mine visited bearing a gift: a new Italian 45rpm pressing of Gil Evans' dark, brooding and oh so slinky 1960 recording of Out of the Cool originally issued in 1961 by the then new Impulse! label created by producer Creed Taylor for parent company ABC-Paramount. The album was Impulse! A-4, the label's fourth release.

This reissue on the DOXY label puts the entire album on a single 45rpm record. Given that side one runs almost 21 minutes, I was surprised they squeezed it onto a single side. Sides two's approximately 16 minutes is slightly more manageable with "slightly" the operative word.

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Album Reviews
Bob Dylan's Morose Masterpiece Untangled in Black By Mobile Fidelity
Michael Fremer  |  Jun 27, 2013
Dylan claims Blood on the Tracks' pained, heartbreaking and often very angry and vicious songs weren't personal confessionals, though he was in the midst of a painful divorce. His son Jakob says they were. Does it really matter if they were about or inspired by his life? He delivers them as if they were very personal as does any great actor, but they are just as satisfying or disturbing thought of as having been inspired by his personal circumstances at the time.

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Album Reviews
"Blade Runner" Soundtrack Delivers Sonic Fireworks
Michael Fremer  |  Jun 24, 2013
Ridley Scott's 1982 "future noir" classic "Bladerunner" based on Philip K.Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" was a box-office flop when first released. Like "TRON", another flop, it has gained stature over the years, though like "TRON", the movie's visual and sonic pleasures are greater than the storytelling.
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Album Reviews
Aaron Neville's A&M Debut Remains a Musical and Sonic Treat
Michael Fremer  |  Jun 17, 2013
Well before Aaron Neville's gorgeous warble turned to wobble and he began using it as vocal ground cover—so much so that Saturday Night Live easily satirized it—his was a gorgeous instrument capable of both technical excellence and exquisite emotional communication as this impeccably produced and recorded 1991 release demonstrates.
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Album Reviews
Elvis Back Up Tapes Astonish
Michael Fremer  |  Jun 10, 2013
When first released by RCA as a single LP back in 1988 (RCA 9589-1-R) this album, probably sourced from digital, created a sensation—at least among the legions of Elvis Presley fans.
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Album Reviews
David Bowie's "The Next Day" Offers a Bleak Yet Satisfying World View
Michael Fremer  |  May 30, 2013
David Bowie fans who lost the thread around his Tin Machine days or who meandered mystified or perhaps less than fully satisfied through his end of century output and beyond need to return for The Next Day his first album in a decade, following his 2004 heart attack and major surgery. Not that Heathens wasn’t a good outing
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Album Reviews
Johanna Martzy's Bach Unaccompanied Violin Sonatas Reissued by The Electric Recording Co.
Michael Fremer  |  May 08, 2013
Through her early EMI recordings, among others, the late Hungarian violinist Johanna Martzy has achieved fame, notoriety and a cult following that escaped her during her lifetime.

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Album Reviews
Thom Chacon Delivers It Straight Up On Sophomore Effort
Michael Fremer  |  Apr 25, 2013
Singer/songwriter Thom Chacon delivers hardscrapple tales in a voice well-suited to the task that will immediately remind you of what's his name? Maybe John Prine, or John Mellencamp, or Steve Earle or Bruce or Guy Clark or?

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