Album Reviews

Former child star and Rilo Kiley front-gal Jenny Lewis may present herself as a latter day Charo, but she’s not afraid to plant serious concerns within her art, both in Rilo Kiley and in this earnest solo setting backed by Louisville natives The Watson Twins.

If it’s November, then it must mean it’s time for another round of Beatles-related vinyl reissues, remasters, and upgrades — and we are all-in to cover everything that’s coming our way. First up, it’s time to give the drummer some — meaning that today’s Fabs-centric focus is on Richard Starkey, a.k.a. Ringo Starr, who saw his first four 1970s solo LPs on Apple reissued by Capitol/UMe on limited-edition color vinyl on October 25, 2025. Read AP editor Mike Mettler’s combo review to see if you should order the new vinyl copies of Sentimental Journey, Beaucoups of Blues, Ringo, and Goodnight Vienna as soon as possible. . .

A funny thing happens as you age: time compresses. When I was 20, music from the 1940s seemed old. Robert Johnson was positively pre-historic, and to my ears the sound was equally cobwebbed. Oh, like everyone else, I bought CL 1654 after seeing it on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home and reading one of the breathless cover dissections in a magazine. Back then every cover prop "meant" something. 

By the end of the '70s, rock was dead, prog-rock had grown grotesquely self-indulgent, and the angry punk/new wave deconstruction had begun. It was a long-overdue musical cleansing. The Sex Pistols and The Clash were at opposite ends of the dividing line: one unabashedly stupid, the other worldly and literate. The late Joe Strummer was anything but working class, but he kept his upper-class roots tightly wrapped beneath a veneer of growling anger and disgust. He was hardly alone in towing the image line.

This 1962 release is a pick-up session plain and simple, made interesting by the presence of the adventurous multi-instrumentalist Roland Kirk and the always-tasteful pianist Tommy Flanagan&#151not that the snare-popping Haynes isn’t a superb and exciting drummer and Henry Grimes doesn’t acquit himself well on bass.

Sonny Rollins sparring with Freddie Hubbard (title tune only) backed by the reunited Coltrane drum’n’bass section of Elvin Jones and Jimmy Garrison sounds like an enticing lineup for this May, 1966 session at Van Gelder’s and it is!