Music CDs Reviews - Page 11

Mary Gauthier
Mercy Now
Lost Highway Records

With three dark and relentlessly honest independent albums behind her—The New York Times named her 2002’s Filth & Fire the best independent album of the year—singer-songwriter Mary Gauthier could not expect to compromise on her major label debut. And fortunately, she doesn’t.

Working in a framework reminiscent of John Prine’s puckish irony and Lucinda Williams’ frank yearning, she specializes in barely contained pain. On I Drink, Gauthier, who has battled alcoholism, turns a jaundiced eye to the sad life of an alcoholic who has driven everyone away, while on Harlan Howard’s Rhymer, she speaks firsthand of the restlessness of the creative soul.

Mostly, however, Gauthier sings about the too-often unavoidable wreckage of romance. Empty Spaces finds a quiet acceptance in a lover’s departure, and Falling Out of Love showcases her Leonard Cohen mood, whispering spooky, if infinitely chilling poetry. This is an unsettling work of terrible beauty.

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Beth Nielsen Chapman
Hymns
BNC Songs

When singer-songwriter Beth Nielsen Chapman went looking for a CD of the Latin hymns—such as Adoramus Te and Veni, Veni Emmanuel—that she remembered from her Catholic youth, she was astonished to learn that she couldn’t find one anywhere. That proved the inspiration for Hymns, her gorgeous new album sung mostly in the music’s original language.

Chapman, the co-writer of Faith Hill’s This Kiss, has long recorded her own thoughtful albums with a secular-spiritual bent, like 1997’s Sand and Water. Thankfully, Hymns offers another achingly beautiful original, Hymn to Mary, which Chapman wrote while undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer in 2000. She sings the song, like the rest of the material, in a clear, pure soprano voice, absent of anything that might deter from its eloquence.

Despite the album’s religious origins, Hymns underscores not so much the dictate of the church, but the glorious commonality of the human family. It’s a record not only to enjoy, but also to treasure.

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After releasing her critically acclaimed debut The Soul Sessions, an album of smoldering R&B covers, Joss Stone returns with Mind, Body & Soul, a sassy collection of soulful fare that sees the British chanteuse evolving from earth-child to natural woman.

Produced by R&B veteran Betty Wright, the album features Stone co-writing much of the material, lending credibility to a vintage sound that’s wise beyond her 17 years. Like its predecessor, Mind is a slick combination of soul, funk and pop. Tracks such as You Had Me, the album’s first single, are ripe with hammering rhythm, while Security and Right To Be Wrong are full-fledged gospel nods.

However, though the album is full of infectious grooves, it sometimes wades in musical monotony. The real gem here is Stone’s sultry alto. Her vocals manipulate the often-uninspiring lyrical content into something authentic and convincing. Stone’s pipes are this CD’s saving grace, and they make us excited about the Stone music that’s still to come.

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Kasey Chambers
Wayward Angel
Warner Bros. Records

Austrialian singer-songwriter Kasey Chambers, whose 2002 release Barricades & Brickwalls earned her laudable footing in alternative-country’s burgeoning arena, returns with an acoustic collection of sonic narratives on her third album, Wayward Angel. Intimately fashioned, Wayward journeys to previously unexplored musical frontiers with a vulnerability that’s both haunting and amorous. Tracks such as Follow You Home and Bluebird flavor the album with accentuated bluegrass, while Guilty As Sin teases listeners with an undercurrent of ’70s rock. Although Wayward’s content contains Chambers’ signature self-doubt, it’s not enough to create a CD of lament. It’s her personal evolution that makes Chambers an accessible storyteller, much like Lucinda Williams—a comparison of which Chambers’ music deserves.

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Billy Currington
Billy Currington
Mercury Nashville Records

As country music moves increasingly toward the suburbs, this debut by Rincon, Ga. (pop. 4,376), native Billy Currington reinforces the genre’s small-town heart. The honky-tonking Currington, who recalls Sammy Kershaw in vocal tone and subject matter, tries to hold on to common sense in an increasingly crazy world. He reminisces fondly of a simpler time, insisting that Andy Griffith looked better in black-and-white and growing up down South was as idyllic experience. But he turns poignant on Walk a Little Straighter, drawing on his memories of an alcoholic stepfather.

Currington also laments the real-life loss of American jobs to Mexico, and in Ain’t What It Used to Be, paints an affecting portrait of a man who watches his livelihood, his girl and his life disappear in the rear view mirror. With Off My Rocker providing a bit of comic relief, this newcomer rounds out a nearly perfect first-time bow.

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Tim McGraw
Live Like You Were Dying
Curb

Country singer Tim McGraw, who has sold 30 million records in the last dozen years, could easily assemble a CD of safe radio hits and be assured of another chart topper. But on his eighth album, he got brave, tackling issues such as death (Live Like You Were Dying), loss (My Old Friend), suicide (Kill Myself), drug use (Drugs or Jesus), spousal abuse (Walk Like a Man), and the will to carry on.

Those topics may not sound like hit material, but as the career-crowning title song proves, they can be that and more. McGraw knows the pain of a number of these subjects, having grown up in an unstable home with a "scary" stepfather, and only recently losing his biological father, baseball great Tug McGraw, to brain cancer. That’s why he’s able to infuse these songs with both believable and moving emotion, turning out one of his most satisfying—and life affirming—efforts.

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Renee Olstead
Renee Olstead
Reprise/Warner Bros. Records

On her major label debut, Renee Olstead convincingly masquerades as an experienced, sultry songstress with a vocal dexterity that is all at once confident and vulnerable, wistful and seductive. The Texas-born talent, whose many entertainment credits include a co-starring role on the CBS sitcom Still Standing, covers selections from the great American songbook in a gentle sensuality few 15-year-olds can speak of, let alone croon.

The album opens with a jazzy, Big Band production of Summertime, so rich in orchestration that George Gershwin himself would swoon. Other perennial songs include a duet with Peter Cincotti on Neil Sedaka’s Breaking Up Is Hard To Do and an eloquent version of What a Difference a Day Makes, made famous by Dinah Washington.

Much credit goes to producer David Foster for anchoring the standards with near flawless arrangement and penning the album’s sole original ballad, A Love That Will Last, with wife Linda Thompson. However, it’s Olstead’s consistent execution that provides the debut with enough substance to propel her alongside fellow torch singers Diana Krall and Norah Jones, thus confirming the adage that age is but a number.

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Holly Williams
The Ones We Never Knew
Universal South Records

Newcomer Holly Williams wishes for a lot of things on her unforgettable debut, but none more poignant than trying to save an unnamed singer of the blues, dying in the back of a baby blue Cadillac on New Year’s Eve 1953. For her, the legendary Hank Williams, who died at 29, isn’t just country’s patron saint—he’s also her grandfather. As the title of her deeply searching album references, the Hillbilly Shakespeare is only one of the huge influences absent from her life. As the confrontational Between Your Lines suggests, her father, Hank Williams Jr., who split from her mother when Holly was a baby, is apparently another. This particular Williams offspring may write in an intimate style more akin to neo-folkie Shawn Colvin than rowdy ol’ Bocephus, but she shares the family legacy of pain, and, as her hauntingly beautiful album suggests, pure genius.

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Jimmy Buffett
License to Chill
RCA

Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett has been riding the Margaritaville wave for so long that most people forget he began his career as a Nashville tunesmith. On License to Chill, he spotlights both the songwriter and the song-finder behind his fun-in-the-sun persona, and brings along a host of countrified buddies (Alan Jackson, Kenny Chesney, Toby Keith, Martina McBride, Clint Black and George Strait) to help him revisit his roots.

On Simply Complicated, a humorous bit of social commentary, he reflects on his full-circle career: “Am I country, pop, or rock ‘n’ roll/I know they are related/So I’ll just let you be the judge/It’s simply complicated.” That it is.

Buffett’s “Parrothead” fans may find the songs short on hedonistic romps, but this is his most satisfying album in years, one that makes him sound serious about his craft again. License to Chill delivers a thrill.

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Like Norah Jones and Diana Krall, jazz pianist Jamie Cullum is experiencing mainstream popularity for the fresh twist that he puts on some of our favorite standards, including the snappy I Get a Kick Out of You and the funky, rhythmic I Could Have Danced All Night. But rather than merely revisiting the classics, Cullum offers up several delightful original compositions, as well as a refreshing take on songs by Radiohead, Jeff Buckley and Jimi Hendrix.

Twentysomething captures the restlessness of a young man eager to explore the world, his senses heightened, as virtually every experience becomes a new milestone to process. The Cullum-penned title track captures the fate of a hip cat who finds himself living in a Starbucks world. The CD’s best track is Blame It On My Youth, a heartbreaking ballad of a young man left to pick up the pieces after an all-consuming love ends.

Cullum will likely be compared to a young Harry Connick Jr., but his music is unique and definitely his own. Twentysomething is a CD that transcends oceans, genres and decades. It’s one you won’t tire of hearing.

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