Word: albums
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that he's got up his sleeve/ I hope it isn't contagious/ What's her name?/ Is that her there?/ Christ, I think he's even combed his hair!" For this song about the amours of Chuck E., and for a fine new album full of similar vignettes of life on the main stem, you can thank Rickie Lee Jones, 24, who has never cut a record before but who has sung in hard-times joints "full of bikers, degenerates, drunken men and toothless women" as recently as last year. She bought her first good...
Jones sings of such capers in a musky voice that slides across the lyrics, scatting between them and eliding words in vintage hipster style, as if English were a foreign language learned in a speed-speech course. For slow learners, lyrics are printed on the back of the album, and they make for some of the best new reading in pop. Still, one can appreciate the offhand confusion of Randy Newman, no small influence on Jones, and no master of elocution either. Specially imported to play synthesizer on one album cut, Newman was asked what he thought of the song...
WITH COVER STORIES in both Downbeat and Musician and a new album (NiceGuys) on ECM--the label that has successfully promoted the likes of Keith Jarrett and Pat Methaney--the AEC is riding a new crest of public interest and acceptance. But as Lester Bowie comments, there has always been a receptive audience for the group's work, and the size of that audience is of no great consequence. The music which so excites critics today is essentially unchanged since the days when the Art Ensemble played for groups of ten or fifteen devotees back in Chicago. Through years...
...would be easy to conclude that Patti Smith is being produced and retouched by the invisible, massive forces of the record industry. And it is true that mastermind technician Todd Rundgren produced her newly-released album, Wave. But it still isn't Boston, and that is because of the angst...
...ALBUM is softly stated, lacking the rambunctious bitching rancor of her previous work. It is disappointing in a sense. Much of the angst gets lost in the attempted level of sophistication. Patti is no longer wailing and screaming, but then again, she is no longer being spanked...