Red Hot Chili Peppers Californication (Warner Bros.) Apparently, reports of the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ creative demise were premature. The band’s new album, Californication, is a dark, hypnotic masterwork that reminds us that alternapop needn’t be a bad word. Like most good albums, Californication is an ambitious, overreaching mess with…
Alex Chilton Like Flies on Sherbert (Peabody) Virtually ignored upon its limited-edition release in 1979 but subsequently hailed as a masterpiece by critics and altrockers alike, Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert has finally been reissued in pristine form, along with four bonus cuts, by the same tiny Memphis label…
T-Model Ford You Better Keep Still (Fat Possum) On his 1997 debut album, Pee-Wee Get My Gun, North Mississippi bluesman T-Model Ford defined his ragged, psychotic artistry with the aptly titled “I’m Insane,” a true story in which the seventysomething nut-job proudly boasts of “thumpin'” the asses of everyone from…
Blur 13 (Virgin) In the well-worn realm of “theme” music, there is precious little new to be said about a handful of mossy topics — love, loss, drugs, and death spring immediately to mind. On its sixth album, 13, Blur disregards this truism and attempts to say something memorable about…
Various Artists Fit For Kings: A Compilation of Peripheral New Zealand Music (Drunken Fish) Birchville Cat Motel Siberian Earth Curve (Drunken Fish) Like the weirdest, wildest practitioners of ’60s free-jazz, the avatars of the busy New Zealand noise scene have spent the better part of a decade deconstructing music until,…
The Neville Brothers Live at Tipitina’s (1982) (Rhino) Before they became the mere soundtrack for the increasingly treacly solo career of vocalist and Linda Ronstadt collaborator Aaron Neville, the Neville Brothers were the embodiment of New Orleans’ vast music history — from the second-line shimmy of Professor Longhair and the…
U2 The Best of 1980-1990 (Island) U2 is no stranger to division. During its early days, the band engaged in an internecine dispute over whether its sound should hew to the punk or Christian genres. (Thankfully it’s fully neither.) The religious split in U2’s homeland has clearly inspired the band…
’68 Comeback A Bridge Too Fuckin’ Far (Sympathy For the Record Industry) He isn’t a household name even in his adopted home of Memphis, let alone among the hipsters of indie-rock, yet Monsieur Jeffrey Evans is arguably the greatest roots-rocker ever spit from the rock ‘n’ roll underground. From his…
Q-Burns Abstract Message Feng Shui (Astralwerks) Michael Donaldson, the DJ-songwriter known as Q-Burns Abstract Message, can’t be terribly serious about practicing feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of arranging furniture to create maximum environmental harmony. Q-Burns lives and records and keeps a weekly DJ gig in Orlando, the home of…
Roy Montgomery And Now the Rain Sounds Like Life Is Falling Down Through It (Drunken Fish) Roy Montgomery is a different kind of guitar hero, a minimalist who chooses to recline within the the forest rather than diddle among the trees. A pivotal figure in the New Zealand underground for…
The Jimi Hendrix Experience BBC Sessions (MCA/Experience Hendrix) Back in 1988, when Rykodisc first issued some of the BBC recordings made in the late ’60s by the Jimi Hendrix Experience, it seemed impossible to imagine there was a facet of Hendrix’s legacy that hadn’t been documented ad nauseum in the…
Various Artists Bespoke Songs, Lost Dogs, Detours & Rendezvous: Songs of Elvis Costello (Rhino) Although it’s meant to further illuminate the songwriting genius of Elvis Costello, the uneven, erratic Bespoke Songs, Lost Dogs, Detours & Rendezvous instead chronicles the artistic demise of a once-great wordsmith. Because it pulls Costello-penned cuts…
The Pernice Brothers Overcome by Happiness (Sub Pop) Back in the mid-’90s, singer-songwriter Joe Pernice and the Scud Mountain Boys created a kind of minimalist altcountry infused with staggering, unwavering melancholy. Their three albums were littered with alcoholics, drug addicts, suicide victims, and losers in love and romance, with Pernice’s…
Jim Lauderdale Whisper (BNA/BMG) After bouncing from Reprise to Atlantic to the Nashville indie Upstart, neocountry master Jim Lauderdale is back on a major label with an album that neatly summarizes the singer-songwriter’s brilliant, if commercially underwhelming, career. Whisper strikes a balance between the vibrant honky-tonk of his 1991 debut,…
Sonic Youth A Thousand Leaves (DGC) Unlike any other album Sonic Youth has released in the last decade, A Thousand Leaves has met with surprisingly harsh criticism. What critics once saw as modernist lyrics, revelatory guitar tunings, and meaningful clouds of feedback have now been redefined as obtuse poetry, meandering…
