Music CDs Reviews - Page 10

Through the Many Winters: A Christmas Album
Michael McDonald
Hallmark

Holiday albums are all about warmth and comfort, so Michael McDonald’s instantly familiar, husky baritone is a Christmastime natural. On Through the Many Winters, sold exclusively through Hallmark Gold Crown stores, McDonald’s gruff soulfulness wraps around the mostly traditional tunes like a thank-you hug from a beloved family member. Meanwhile, his arrangements are surprisingly inventive: He adds a touch of bossa nova to "O Holy Night," a bit of reggae on "Come, O Come Emanuel/What Month Was Jesus Born." The new songs aren’t quite as successful, especially "Christmas on the Bayou," filled with stilted, Cajun clichés. But that’s an easily forgivable misstep on an album otherwise brimming with good cheer.

Christmas Cookies
The Oak Ridge Boys
SpringHill Music Group

The Oak Ridge Boys have sung gospel, country and pop, so why not Christmas songs? They really make you feel like you’re home for the holidays with Christmas Cookies, which offers 14 musical treats, plus an actual recipe for Christmas cookies. The Oaks’ unmistakable vocal harmonies hit the mark on classics such as "Hark The Herald Angel Sing" and "O Come, All Ye Faithful." Richard Sterban showcases his booming bass voice in "I’ll Be Home For Christmas" and the group puts you in a sleigh-ride mood with "Jingle Bells." New selections include "Blessed Be The Day" and the lighthearted "Uncle Luther Made the Stuffin’." You may never get the chance to go caroling with the foursome that gave the world hits songs such as "Elvira," "Bobby Sue" and "American Made," but Christmas Cookies is the next best thing.

Moonlight Serenade
Carly Simon
Columbia

Timeless romantic classics performed by a timeless voice makes Carly Simon’s newest CD an ideal selection for your music library. This pop icon demonstrates her style is easily adaptable to familiar love songs originally orchestrated by Glenn Miller, Cole Porter, George Gershwin and other musical masters. The opening title cut sets the sensuous, inviting mood. How often have you heard Miller’s durable instrumental "Moonlight Serenade" with lyrics? Similarly, Simon brings new life to "In the Still of the Night," "I’ve Got You Under My Skin" and "I Only Have Eyes for You," backed by smooth, gliding strings. By the last line in the last song, "How Long Has This Been Going On," you realize Simon may be the best female artist to capture this music genre since Rosemary Clooney. This serenade leaves you wanting more.

Lee Ann Womack
There’s More Where That Came From
MCA Nashville Records

Country traditionalist Lee Ann Womack scored a crossover career song most performers only dream about with 2000’s I Hope You Dance, but she faltered with her next album, the pop-ish Something Worth Leaving Behind. Now the two-time Grammy winner returns with There’s More Where That Came From, a stunning album of deep-dish country that fits perfectly alongside the best work of female masters Dolly Parton, Tammy Wynette and Loretta Lynn.

Womack listened to more than 1,000 songs for the album she’s "dreamed of making since I was a young Texas girl listening to the classics." It shows. I May Hate Myself in the Morning may make cheating songs all the vogue again, while Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago, which Womack co-wrote, will likely become a standard. Delivered in her feathery soprano that dips and soars with nuanced emotion, this is a remarkable collection of exquisite pain.

Alanis Morissette
Jagged Little Pill Acoustic
Maverick Records

It’s been 10 years since Canadian Alanis Morissette cemented her title as the queen of jaded rock with Jagged Little Pill’s breakup anthem You Oughta Know. That bitter hit had jilted lovers everywhere singing along to its fusion of uncensored rage, propelling the album to sales of more than 30 million worldwide. A decade and four Grammys later, Morissette celebrates the record’s anniversary with an acoustic reissue. The songs—no doubt her most biting—endure the makeover, which includes layered strings, twangy guitars and harmonica. Her vocals sound less tortured and more determined, having become more convincing on each successive album. The tunes’ softer presentation seems as though Morissette has traded the angst for genuine, heartfelt introspection. Though most of the singles remain in regular radio rotation (Ironic, Hand in My Pocket and Head Over Feet), the album isn’t stale, but rather remains the most revealing and emotionally engaging of her career.

Lucinda Williams
Live at the Fillmore
Lost Highway Records

Lucinda Williams, named the best songwriter in America by Time magazine in 2001, creates an intimacy in concert that is rare even for a genre that is built on hypnotic confessions of living, losing and trying to keep the faith. Matching poetic and naked lyrics of intense longing with a raw performance style that teeters on the rims between country, folk, rock and blues, Williams delivers a powerful amalgam of literature and music. On her first live album, a 22-song, two-CD set recorded last year at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore Auditorium, she reprises most of the songs from her 2003 Grammy-nominated album, World Without Tears, and 2001’s extraordinary Essence. Williams’ voice seems more ragged and worn than usual, but such deficiencies contribute to a snapshot of an authentic artist who has successfully made her own life double as art.

Jamie O'Neal
Brave
Capitol Nashville Records

Singer-songwriter Jamie O’Neal catapulted to country celebrity in 2000 with the soaring songs When I Think About Angels and There Is No Arizona, an unforgettable tale of love and lies. Both titles received Grammy nominations, but afterward, O’Neal lost her way after her record label dropped her in 2003, on the eve of her second album release.

Now comes Brave, which reprises half of the record that never came out. Nothing resonates as deeply as There Is No Arizona, though the album does a fine job in tracing the naiveté of youth to the battered strength of maturity. But in addition to songs about unsung champions (Somebody’s Hero), female bonding (Girlfriends) and the singer’s new baby (I Love My Life), O’Neal works in devastating songs of disillusionment and pain, such as When Did You Know and Devil on the Left. These moments prove that O’Neal is back—both as a potential radio hitmaker and as an artist of intrigue.

Jessi Alexander
Honeysuckle Sweet
Columbia

Newcomer Jessi Alexander hails from Jackson, Tenn. (pop. 59,643), and arrives with her debut as a perfect ambassador to both that pocket of the South and to Nashville’s brightest new talent. Yet her writing, influenced by the California bands of the 1970s, as well as by Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Bobbie Gentry, isn’t so much country as Southern.

The title track recalls an idyllic, languid childhood and the beckoning smell of honeysuckle, even as she tempers it with the bittersweet yearnings of an adult. An infectious tunesmith—her songs have been recorded by Trisha Yearwood and Patty Loveless—Alexander knows how to write melodies that burrow into the brain and the heart.

Even better, on This World is Crazy, she offers solace for the restlessness that comes with tough times and broken hearts. Now, who among us couldn’t use a dose of that?

Alison Krauss and Union Station
Lonely Runs Both Ways
Rounder Records

The Grammy Award-winning group has always thrived on woeful songs of broken hearts, hard times and perhaps most importantly, hope. In their first studio album in three years, Alison Krauss and Union Station again strike familiar chords in an edgy project that showcases multiple talents.

Krauss, in her usual heavenly voice, delivers further proof why she is queen of the bluegrass mournful. She sets the tempo in the opening line of Gravity, a song about leaving home at 17. The second cut, Restless, is a reflective tale about a bad relationship and the games that go with it.

Dan Tyminski, best known for the remake of Man of Constant Sorrow, shines on Del McCoury’s Rain Please Go Away, and tackles with conviction Woody Guthrie’s Pastures of Plenty. He also belts an up-tempo downer, This Sad Song, co-penned by Krauss and Alison Brown. Heartache has never sounded so beautiful.

Kenny Chesney
Be As You Are: Songs from an Old Blue Chair
BNA Records

Kenny Chesney hails from Luttrell, Tenn. (pop. 915), but the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year has made a second career as a Dixie-fied Jimmy Buffett, mixing the lazy sounds of the Caribbean with his coming-of-age ballads and rhythmic paeans to youth.

Now comes his all-out "island" record, but instead of rum-soaked songs about wild nights and bikinis on parade, Chesney offers quiet ruminations about how broken spirits might be whole again. The singer often escapes to the U.S. Virgin Islands to rest and restore, and songs like Something Sexy in the Rain and Somewhere in the Sun, which he wrote on the road after a snow-cancelled show, throb with the ache of a soul in need of peaceful waters.

At times, the album suffers from a mellow sameness, as if Chesney couldn’t fully flesh out his theme. Still, Magic, a jazzy, cocktail twirl around a black-tie ballroom, is worth the price of this beach-chair view of life.