Staff Picks for February 2018
February 28, 2018
Though no other parody on the album matches the cleverness of "Smells Like Nirvana," satires such as "I Can't Watch This" and "Taco Grande" come quite close. In addition to re-establishing his satirical craftsmanship, Deep End showcases some of Yankovic's best originals ever; "Trigger Happy," "When I Was Your Age," and "You Don't Love Me Anymore" prove to be the album's greatest songs.
February 27, 2018
Third album of scruffy '90s-worshiping, guitar-mangling, slacker-fi indie rock finds the New York quartet on Sub Pop, home to many of their heroes.
February 26, 2018
One of the Cocteau Twins' most acclaimed and enduring full-lengths, Treasure is the type of album that seems impossible to get to the bottom of, even after several decades of obsessive listening. It's one of their easiest works to repeatedly come back to, as it's often very catchy, but still mysterious enough that it's hard to truly get tired of it.
February 25, 2018
1988's Lucinda Williams was her third album, but it was the first one to reveal the full depth of her gifts as a songwriter and vocalist, and the results were revelatory. The songs were artfully crafted but full of naked emotional honesty, Williams' vocals gave them the gravity they needed, and the band (led by guitarist and producer Gurf Morlix) was superb, sounding sweet and fiery. While many of the album's tunes would be covered to fine effect by other artists, no one has quite topped the versions on Lucinda Williams.
February 24, 2018
The entire band stole away to a remote seaside town to compose all of the 15 songs on this epic third album. Instead of bandleader Josh Hodges working as the primary songwriter as on prior LPs, every lyric, riff, and beat was created collectively, resulting in some of their most refined and focused songs.
February 23, 2018
The trio took extra care on Music Sounds Better with You to whittle down their stockpile of songs until they were left with what they felt were the ten best, then polished them in the studio until they shone like diamonds. The arrangements are light but rich, with loads of well-placed keys, horns, and synth strings dotting the mix, the vocal performances hit all the right emotional notes, and the songs themselves are memorably melancholy and sweet.
February 22, 2018
Unless you frequent jazz-friendly venues in New England, you've probably never heard of Chan's, a Chinese restaurant in Woonsocket, RI that started booking jazz artists in the '70s and was still doing so decades later. It was in 1985 that the Bostonian recorded this excellent album, which finds her joined by an acoustic sextet and swinging hard and passionately on Thelonious Monk's "Blue Monk," Fats Waller's "Ain't Misbehavin'," and Duke Ellington's "I'm Beginning to See the Light."
![Lightnin' Hopkins [Smithsonian/Folkways]](https://fastly-s3.allmusic.com/release/mr0000769873/front/400/JNJIhyNlaRqlrwPPjIyoXB_TZlp6n_cq-Emr2zx15tU=.jpg)
February 21, 2018
After a great deal of searching, Sam Charters found Hopkins in a one-room apartment in Houston. Persuading Lightnin' with a bottle of gin, Charters convinced Hopkins to record ten songs in that room, using only one microphone. The resulting record was one of the greatest albums in Hopkins' catalog, a skeletal record that is absolutely naked in its loneliness and haunting in its despair.
February 20, 2018
In the late '50s, Eddie Condon led this raucous version of his all-stars featuring cornetist Rex Stewart. While a posterboy for the mainstream and trad jazz tradition, Condon still let his bands rip, and rip they do here. This is fiery, in the moment jazz, rife with animated group interplay and a flagrant penchant for improvisatory derring-do.
February 19, 2018
One of the overlooked gems in Nick Lowe's catalog, 1985's The Rose of England was in some respects a continuation of the playful mood of the previous year's Nick Lowe and his Cowboy Outfit. But it offers some fine songs that point to the deeper themes of his work of the '90s and beyond, most notably "(Hope To God) I'm Right" and the title cut. And his choice of covers is spot on, especially his takes on John Hiatt's "She Don't Love Nobody" and Elvis Costello's "Indoor Fireworks."
February 18, 2018
The band's major label debut manages the amazing trick of being the band's best album to this point, Martsch and company using the opportunities for larger budgets and distribution to create an album at once inspiring and quietly emotional, not the easiest combination to pull off.
February 17, 2018
The Swedish multi-reed maestro turns to the relatively calm and linear world of Steve Lacy and finds a very happy medium. While he treats his inspiration's deadpan and deceptively simple melodies with clear respect, he also uses them as jumping off points for his own idiosyncratic deconstructions.
February 16, 2018
The second LP by the Brooklyn-based Elephant Six darlings offered a richer and more fully-realized take on their 60's-inspired pop which paired heady Left Banke and Fairport Convention-style ambitions with the lighthearted appeal of the Lovin' Spoonful.
February 15, 2018
Nestled between a pair of classics and two relative duds, Interpol's third deserves a revisit. In hindsight, it's a truly solid release that's gotten better with age, with some of their best songs ("The Heinrich Maneuver" and "Pioneer to the Falls") and welcome callbacks to their debut, like "No I In Threesome" and the expansive "Pace Is The Trick." Given what followed (2010's self-titled bore and 2014's slight course-correction), OLTA is an underrated delight.
February 14, 2018
The London quartet seemed like the scrappy kid brothers of similarly bouncy, angular bands like Maxïmo Park and the Futureheads, but on their debut album, the Shoes come into their own: Think Before You Speak is a set of cheeky, vulnerable songs with all the sugar-rush immediacy, and addictiveness, of a crush.
February 13, 2018
If there was a clear high point for OMD in terms of balancing relentless experimentation and seemingly unstoppable mainstream success in the U.K., Architecture & Morality is it. Again combining everything from design and presentation to even the title into an overall artistic effort, this album showed that OMD was arguably the first Liverpool band since the later Beatles to make such a sweeping, all-bases-covered achievement -- more so because OMD owed nothing to the Fab Four.
February 12, 2018
The debut effort by multi-instrumentalist Ben Watt and vocalist and songwriter Tracey Thorn took the alterna-pop world by surprise in 1985. And rightfully so. Watt's lush chamber orchestra jazzscapes, full of Brazilian bossa nova structures and airy horn charts, combined with Thorn's throaty alto singing her generation's version of the torch song, was a sure attraction for fans of sophisticated pop and vocal jazz.
February 11, 2018
A 1949 15-song session for the newly formed Atlantic Records resulted in the initial release of only two songs: "Kill It Kid" and "Broke Down Engine Blues." The music was forgotten until nearly 20 years later. McTell is mostly solo, in excellent form, and vividly captured on acoustic 12-string.
![The Wicker Man [1973] [Original Motion Picture Soundtrack]](https://fastly-s3.allmusic.com/release/mr0001421396/front/400/kE5jtcHg_8Hf_xdMV01W4RyhM-OFI8zG4l-qVpXXB1I=.jpg)
February 10, 2018
The Wicker Man is a stunning soundtrack. Paul Giovanni, together with obscuro folk group Magnet, uses flutes, lyres, harmonicas, and guitars in a mixture of original and traditional material to create a mysterious and sinister world that comes to life apart from the film. His background scoring has a medieval feel, all appropriate to the story, set on a mysterious Scottish isle where the inhabitants retain pagan rituals.
February 9, 2018
The Twin Cities band hit their stride on their ambitious second album, blending intricate harmonies, punchy guitar pop, and a quirky Northern mysticism wherein a guitar-slinging toolmaster and an adultery-witnessing pike were cast as bizarre Minnesotan folk heroes.
February 8, 2018
Given the massive size of their catalog and their frequent shifts in personnel and approach, suggesting an introduction to the Fall in the wake of Mark E. Smith's death on January 24, 2018 isn't easy. While it only goes up to 2004, the compilation 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden Greats is one of the best starters you can buy, gathering the high points from their first 27 years and making (some) sense of Smith's obsessive, eccentric worldview.
February 7, 2018
Parks is one of a handful of artists possessing a purity of vision that graces every project he is involved with. Very few could pull off an album carrying this title -- with all the themes and motifs befitting such a moniker -- done entirely in the style of the Caribbean, most specifically Trinidad circa the FDR administration.
February 6, 2018
Escapist treats abound from this mysterious, tongue-in-cheek collective from the Southern United States. Man or Astro-man? have an ear for yesterday's sounds of tomorrow, as they decorate their mostly instrumental tracks with obscure sound bytes from out-of-date sci-fi movies and forgotten TV shows.
February 5, 2018
Penn's 1992 sophomore LP was the album that proved to skeptics that he was neither a one-hit wonder nor an artistic lightweight trading on his famous surname. Free-for-All was a darker, less immediately engaging album than March, but it was also a far more consistent album than that wildly uneven debut.
February 4, 2018
A buncha wild-ass teenagers from Columbia, MO, who seemingly stepped out of the time machine in the late '80s from a land where the Rivieras, Trashmen, Astronauts and Ronny & the Daytonas rule at an all-night '60s teen dance, The UY were the real thing in those pre-Pulp Fiction days of no surf on the horizon. This generous 32-track anthology collects all the winners from their three long players for Norton along with stray 45s and a few unissued twist-o-ramas thrown in for good measure.
February 3, 2018
Sweet Trip's second album is nothing short of an undiscovered classic. Nobody else has managed to combine noisy, glitchy electronics and pop songcraft into something as exciting, memorable, and unpredictable as this album. As far as I'm concerned, this album is the sound of 21st century shoegaze.
February 2, 2018
Toots Hibbert, founder and frontman with Toots and the Maytals, was always one of the most soulful voices in reggae, and the notion of taking him to Memphis to cut an album of soul classics with a band comprised of American and Jamaican studio cats seemed like a natural. And it was; the heartfelt passion of Hibbert's vocals is a force of nature, and the band generates a groove that melds the best of the Deep South and the Islands.
February 1, 2018
Following the passing of frontwoman Dolores O'Riordan, this late-era gem -- and the band's entire catalog -- deserves a revisit. While it lacks the radio hits found on the early LPs, it's home to some of their best singles ("Animal Instinct," "Just My Imagination," and "Promises") and deep cuts ("Delilah," "Desperate Andy," and "Fee Fi Fo"). Hatchet is the Cranberries at their peak and a bittersweet reminder of O'Riordan's power, grace, and inimitable voice.