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…
Fatboy Slim You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby (Astralwerks) As the hype surrounding electronica fades, the most inventive artists will start to stand out from the bandwagon-jumpers. Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, is one of the few who’ve been able to steer clear of overexposure while gaining fans and doing…
Gillian Welch Hell Among the Yearlings (Almo Sounds) Revival, Gillian Welch’s brilliant 1996 debut album, had an old-time, hardwood simplicity about it: The two voices and two acoustic guitars did the majority of the work but were supported on several songs by bass and drums. For her followup, Hell Among…
Tori Amos From the Choirgirl Hotel (Atlantic) Tori Amos likes contradictions. She’s a classically trained pianist who plays pop music, a feminist who humps her piano bench in concert, a waifish nymph with a grasp of classic Greek literature. But the biggest contradiction inherent in this 34-year-old musician is how…
Ani DiFranco Little Plastic Castle (Righteous Babe) Spice who? The real story behind girl power is Ani DiFranco, the singer-songwriter from Buffalo who has just released her tenth album. Though she’s sold more than a million discs, DiFranco has remained true to her independent roots, refusing to leave the label…
Taja Sevelle Toys of Vanity (550 Music) It’s been nearly a decade since The Guy They Used To Call Prince gave Taja Sevelle a record deal. Rather than attending college, the young Minneapolis native moved to Los Angeles, released a self-titled debut, and suffered the misfortune of having her single,…
Linda Smith Preference: Selected Songs, 19871991 (Harriet) Spare, honest, perceptive, and passionate in a peculiarly subdued way, singer-songwriter Linda Smith’s deceptively simple songs seem to have been beamed in from a parallel universe. No fake earnestness. No calculatedly naive idealism. No artifice whatsoever. These nineteen tracks, recorded at Smith’s Baltimore…
Various Artists Star Rise (Real World) In 1990 Michael Brook, a New-Age guitarist and producer, collaborated with Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, a Pakistani singer of Sufi devotional hymns, to create the album Mustt Mustt, an early example of ancient-meets-ambient hybridism. Khan was already a major celebrity in many Eastern countries…
Ben Folds Five Naked Baby Photos (Caroline) This is the proverbial “contractual obligation” album: When Ben Folds Five signed to Sony, the band still owed its first label, Caroline Records, one more full-length album. This kind of circumstance usually results in a hastily assembled collection of “rare” tracks (a euphemism…
Supersonic Wall to Wall Moustache (Sire) “Welcome to the fucked-up chemical beats of Supersonic,” announces this band’s press kit, which means there’s now more weight on the electronica bandwagon that was initially steered by the Chemical Brothers. Unlike that pioneering duo, however, Darren Pickles and Slapper Dave of Supersonic are…
Various Artists In Tha Beginning…There Was Rap (Priority Records) Say what you will about rap — it’s sexist, it promotes violence, it gave Vanilla Ice his fifteen minutes of fame — but it changed popular music as we know it. First heard in the late Seventies and early Eighties, rap…
Roni Size and Reprazent Newforms (Mercury) Mainstream America got its first real taste of electronica from Prodigy, the British group that took a rather obscure form of electronic dance music and made it accessible by adding familiar rap/punk vocals (and a familiar rap/punk image). The result was this past summer’s…
Edwyn Collins I’m Not Following You (Epic) As long as we’re being forced to relive the Seventies, why not let Edwyn Collins score the soundtrack? His darkly reedy voice, pop-culture fetishism, and cheesy synthesizers make for an appropriate, end-of-the-millennium update on that never-ending decade. On this, his fourth solo release,…
Chumbawamba Tubthumper (Republic/Universal) Chumbawamba must be as surprised as anyone that they’ve scored a Top 10 single with “Tubthumping,” that irresistible pop ditty with the rousing chorus, “I get knocked down/But I get up again/You’re never gonna keep me down.” Just last week it hit No. 7 on the Billboard…
The Pursuit of Happiness The Wonderful World of… (Iron Music Group) Over the course of five albums, from 1988’s bracingly smart Love Junk to the current, equally likable The Wonderful World of…, the Toronto-based Pursuit of Happiness has cranked out a welter of relentlessly brilliant hard-pop songs — wry, witty,…
Jen Trynin Gun Shy Trigger Happy (Warner Bros.) Jen Trynin may ponder love’s great existential questions to death, but Gun Shy Trigger Happy is a brilliant bit of navel gazing. This is a confident and cagey second outing, with more of the coy balladry and tough guitar-wrangling that made 1994’s…
Buena Vista Social Club Buena Vista Social Club (World Circuit/Nonesuch) Since the early Seventies, Ry Cooder has been rediscovering forgotten songs and breathing new life into vanishing musical traditions. By embracing numerous genres — including country, blues, gospel, Tex-Mex, and Hawaiian slack-key — the guitarist/producer has seemed to be on…
