Al Green Your Heart’s in Good Hands (MCA) Even with his Seventies hits inspiring everyone from Dwight Yoakam to film directors such as Quentin Tarantino and the Hughes brothers (Allen and Albert, of Menace II Society fame), Al Green still has to compete with the likes of Michael Bolton and…
The first thing you notice is the gleaming and colorful clothing. Orange and silver vinyl, red leather, psychedelic swirls on thrift-store polyester. Then the hair. Dark curls, purple braids, and blond crimps. And when the punky, percussive music starts, it all swirls into motion, like a carnival ride or an…
Joe Satriani Joe Satriani (Relativity) Joe Satriani has always been an odd sort of guitar virtuoso. Too flashy to ever play sideman, too song-oriented to just wail away in some fusion project, and too weak-lunged to sing with any kind of Clapton-like proficiency, he tries to make catchy instrumental music…
Boy George Cheapness and Beauty (Virgin) Brace yourself for the second — okay, third, if you count his out-of-nowhere hit with “The Crying Game” from 1992 — coming of the Boy. Armed with a tell-just-about-everything autobiography (Take It Like a Man) that has sold gobs in England; regularly pumping up…
The Blue Meanies make it a practice to sleep with their fans. “We can’t afford hotels, so usually someone puts us up, people in the crowd we happen to meet,” explains Bill Spunke, the Meanies’ 27-year-old lead singer. “Sometimes you luck out and stay with someone who lives in a…
Call it karma or chalk it up to sheer luck, but things have a way of working out for Stephan Mikes. For example: Ten years ago, while he was living in Jupiter, Florida, Mikes paid $300 for a secondhand sitar, then shelled out a few extra bucks for a beginner’s…
k.d. lang All You Can Eat (Warner Bros.) I miss the country k.d. The ache and twang in her voice, the kitschy cowpunk outfits, the whole Tom Mix meets Patsy Cline thing. Since she dumped the westernware for romance with 1992’s Ingenue, lang’s music has undergone a maturation of sexual…
When you talk with John Hiatt, it becomes glaringly obvious the man knows how to laugh. A robust and hearty howl almost constantly precedes his answers, as if it’s his hammy way of announcing that he’s about to speak. Listening to Hiatt’s music, it’s also evident that he knows when…
Juan Gabriel El Mexico Que Se Nos Fue (BMG/U.S. Latin) Pop hero Juan Gabriel goes back to his roots a la Gloria Estefan on this Mexican-style Mi Tierra. Nortenos, rancheros, son michoacano, and other forms of Mexican country music are the stuff of Gabriel’s nostalgia, and like Estefan’s Grammy winner…
“Day after day, innocent people are being deported, interrogated, and tortured,” Sascha Konietzko yells through a bullhorn in KMFDM’s “Terror,” a track on their most recent album, Nihil. “Fundamentalist forces are undermining the integrity of liberal and democratic political structures/Radical anarchists, fascists, and terrorists are responsible for the violence.” Not…
Sun 60 Headjoy (Epic) Some people have argued that bands such as Sonic Youth and Urge Overkill, simply by forsaking their indie status and signing with a major label, have made a Faustian pact with the corporate alt-rock devil. But that kind of knee-jerk analysis does a disservice both to…
If you think reruns appear only on television, check out what’s new on disc. The live album, the creative and lucrative answer to songwriter’s block, is saturating CD bins like Michael Jackson’s HIStory lesson. Originally pioneered with jazz, live records found a niche in the Fifties and Sixties with landmark…
Among all of nature’s marvels, perhaps the egg best symbolizes the paradox of reality. Within a plain, inert, unassuming white shell lies the very stuff of life — dormant, waiting to break free and have (ahem) a crack at the world. True to its name, the Hialeah-based band Egg is…
Tal Ross a.k.a. detrimental vasoline — Giant Shirley (Coconut Grove Recording Company) Eccentricity has its place in pop music. Come to think of it, pop music may be the only industry in which going off the deep end might be considered a viable — if not exactly smart — career…
Al Stewart feels compelled to explain. “They seemed like good ideas at the time,” the Scottish-born singer-songwriter says in his delicate and strangely familiar burr. “But I really didn’t even particularly care for them then.” The “they” in question here are Stewart’s two big radio hits from the mid-1970s, a…
For Squirrels Example (550 Music/Epic) The knock on For Squirrels — and I ought to know, because I mouthed it more often than just about anyone else — always has been that they merely were R.E.M. Jr.: Pete Buck’s Murmur-era guitar strum-o-rama laced with Michael Stipe’s oblique mutterings. Well, while…
Jorge de la Vega and Carlos Franzetti Astor Piazzolla, a Flute and Piano Tribute (Milan) Astor Piazzolla took tango from the streets of Buenos Aires to the concert halls of the world. To the dismay of Argentina’s tango purists, and to the delight of just about everyone else, his compositions…
Paco de Lucia made his unlikely MTV debut earlier this year in Bryan Adams’s video “Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman,” the theme song from the movie Don Juan de Marco. Portraying a wistful guitar player seated quietly among lovers in a dusty taberna, de Lucia easily steals the…
On their 1993 album, What a Crying Shame, the Mavericks demonstrated just how good feeling bad really can be. Brooding ballads about breakups and lost love, tinted with the retro glow of Buck Owens, George Jones, and Roy Orbison — and embodied by lead singer Raul Malo’s haunting lilt of…
Hal Shows Lifeboat (Raven) “Nobody said this would be easy,” intones Hal Shows at the beginning of “Pawnish Queen,” the second cut on Lifeboat. The line is prophetic, as the Tallahassee-based musician spends much of his self-produced album obsessing about the personal consequences of living in a dysfunctional society, while…
Lord knows how many poor, unsuspecting fools are killed by hidden tracks every year. Think of it — the late-night lone driver, winding down a mountain highway, happily head-bobbing to the latest CD by his or her favorite band. The final chord of the last listed track fades, but he…
Various Artists Desperado: The Soundtrack (Epic Soundtrax) Here’s yet another soundtrack that exists comfortably without its companion film A a self-sustaining disc that uses snippets of dialogue (see Pulp Fiction) to underline the effectiveness of its music, and not merely to give the songs context. And like Pulp Fiction’s soundtrack,…
