Tony's 2011 Picks - Eleven from '11

I didn’t buy a lot of “new” music in 2011.  There wasn’t a lot of new music that jumped out and screamed “buy me.”  Some of those that I did buy I’ve already written about at length.  I pretty much stuck to stuff that’s come out in years past that I didn’t get when they were new.  So my list of favorite releases from 2011 is a short one.  Ten of them contain new music, and one of them is a monster of a box set.  As one would expect from me, the list is filled with the usual suspects, but as long as the usual suspects continue to make new music, I’ll continue to buy it and write about it.

Tom Waits – Bad As Me The only surprise about this Tom Waits release is the brevity of the songs.  All thirteen songs (16 if you got the “deluxe” version) run under five minutes.  Sound-wise, there are no surprises.  The “human beatbox” that was prevalent on 2004’s Real Gone is gone, and keyboards that were absent from that release make their return on Bad As Me.  As usual, Tom Waits barks, hollers, croons, and rasps.  Keith Richards makes an appearance on four of the songs, the funniest of which is Satisfied.  Here Tom Waits mocks Mick and Keith by name and tells him that, unlike the singer who “can’t get no satisfaction” he will be satisfied by the time it’s his turn to depart planet Earth.  There’s an anti-war rant called Hell Broke Luce, which features machine-gun fire and snarling guitars.  He’s got poetic ballads like Back in the Crowd and Kiss Me.  Bad As Me has the mix of the old-timey and the surreal one expects of any Tom Waits release.  The songs sound like they were recorded after all the bars closed.  There’s dark humor and sorrow, anger, disgust and heartbreak.  The disgust comes in Talking At The Same Time: “We bailed out all the millionaires/They got the fruit, we got the rind…”  The sadness comes in Pay Me where the singer tells of his family who pays him not to come home.  The only way down from the gallows is to swing… To borrow a phrase, Bad As Me is chock full of brawlers, bawlers and bastards.  It is essential for any Tom Waits fan.  Same as it ever was…

Emmylou Harris – Hard Bargain  For most of her career, Emmylou Harris has contented herself with being an interpreter of songs written by other people.  She’s always been insecure about her songwriting.  I think she sells herself short in that regard – she wrote From Boulder to Birmingham!  What I didn’t realize [and I probably should have – I have many or her albums] was that she was the primary songwriter for only three of her albums before Hard Bargain.  Emmylou wrote all the songs on Red Dirt Girl [2000] and Stumble Into Grace [2003], but returned to recording other peoples’ songs for All I Intended to Be [2008].  On Hard Bargain, Emmylou returned to songwriting and produced a wonderful collection of songs.  There are three elegies on Hard Bargain.   The Road is for Gram Parsons.  In this song she can still remember every song he played.  My Name is Emmitt Till is told in the first person, telling how a black boy from Chicago was murdered in 1950s Mississippi for talking to a white woman, how he was kidnapped from his uncle’s house, beaten, stabbed, shot, and thrown in the river “like trash when they were done.”  And she tells of how Emmitt Till’s mother kept the casket open to show her son’s mutilated body “for the whole wide world to see.”  Darlin’ Kate is for her late friend Kate McGarrigle, a frequent collaborator who lost her battle with cancer.

The album includes Six White Cadillacs.  Here, death is a welcome respite from the road that “we won’t have to wander anymore.”  The Ship on His Arm is about a wartime marriage that was inspired by her own parents, who married during World War II.  There’s New Orleans, where “the whole world stood to watch us drown,” but “to cut and run ain’t in our blood.”  It’s interesting how Emmylou chose to make “hurricane” and “Pontchartrain” rhyme in a song.  There are songs of lonely women – Lonely Girl and Nobody.  Given her long-time advocacy for animal rights, she even wrote a song about a Big Black Dog.  There’s a lot of melancholy on Hard Bargain, but it’s a good album nonetheless.  Her voice is still as angelic as ever.  I read in Billboard not too long ago that her next project will be a duets album with Rodney Crowell.  It’ll be good, that much is certain.

U2 – Achtung Baby Box Set Carol got me this for my birthday.  When author Bill Flanagan wrote his book U2 At the End of the World, he wrote about U2 in their Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  Manager Paul McGuinness described this time as a three-year campaign.  This box set is the product of that period.  Included in this set are six CDs and four DVDs.  The six CDs include the original Achtung Baby remastered, the original Zooropa remastered, B-sides and Rarities, 2 CDs of remixes [the Über and Ünter remixes], and the “alternate” Achtung Baby.  The hardest core U2 fans have heard all of these before, but not me.  The remastered Achtung Baby and Zooropa sound as good as one would expect.  The B-sides and Rarities are interesting.  I could do without the remixes.  The “alternate” album [‘Kindergaten’] is for U2 what Let It Be…Naked is for the Beatles.  Take away the studio tricks and underneath you still get a pretty good album.  The DVDs include the documentary U2: From the Sky Down.  One DVD contains each of the videos made from the Achtung Baby/Zooropa period.  A third DVD is the Zoo TV – Live From Sydney concert.  This show was quite a bit of sensory overload, but it was good to see Bono not take himself so seriously for once.  The fourth and last DVD has lots of goodies – a Zoo TV special,  an MTV documentary, MTV’s show Most Wanted where a fan got to see a U2 show via satellite from his house, a video short about Trabants [‘Trabantland’], U2 on Naked City, U2 on TV-AM.  There’s CD-ROM content as well, complete with links to websites.  This is how to do a box set the right way.

Glen Campbell – Ghost On The Canvas  The country icon makes his final album and says goodbye to his fans.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Glen%20Campbell

 

Gregg Allman – Low Country Blues  Gregg’s first solo studio album in fourteen years has been nominated for a Grammy in the Best Blues Album category.  In fact, of the five albums nominated, three were made by members of the Allman Brothers Band.  Perhaps for this year they should rename the category “Best Blues Album by a member of the Allman Brothers Band.”  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/08/gregg-allman-low-country-blues.html

Warren Haynes – Man in Motion  Also nominated for Best Blues Album [the third being the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s Revelator].  The hardest working man in the music business, Warren took a year off from Gov’t Mule to release and tour behind this soulful gem.  To these ears, Man in Motion is more of a soul album than blues, but I tend to nitpick.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/05/warren-haynes-tale-of-two-albums.html

Neil Young – A Treasure  Neil Young changed musical directions with every album he made for Geffen during the 1980s.  This CD captures Neil and some legendary Nashville studio pros in his “country phase.” http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/neil-young-treasure.html

Levon Helm – Ramble at the Ryman  Recorded at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in 2008, Levon Helm and friends keep the spirit of The Band alive.  Levon doesn’t do all the singing, but with Larry Campbell, Theresa Williams and daughter Amy Helm along for the ride, he doesn’t have to.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/2011/06/levon-helm-ramble-at-ryman.html

        

Joe Bonamassa – Dust Blow  This is the first of three releases Joe Bonamassa put out in 2011 [the others being Black Country Communion 2 and Don’t Explain (with singer Beth Hart)].  With three releases in 2011 Joe is trying to take Warren Haynes’ title as the hardest working man in the music business.  Unwilling to be put in a blues-rock straight jacket, Joe goes in a more eclectic direction as he did with his previous two releases, Black Rock [2010] and The Ballad of John Henry [2009].  I love to hear this guy play.

http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Black Country Communion – 2  After a not-so-stellar first album,  Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa and company fulfill their potential on their sophomore release.  At times Black Country Communion sounds like the second coming of Deep Purple.  Everything is better – Kevin Shirley’s production is better, Glenn is singing better, Joe is playing like a hard-rock guitarist, and Derek Sherinian can finally be heard in the mix.  Jason Bonham didn’t need to improve his drumming it’s still rock-solid as it was on the first album.  Father John would be proud.  http://tonysmusicroom.blogspot.com/search/label/Black%20Country%20Communion

Joe Bonamassa - Dust Bowl/Black Country Communion 2

Joe Bonamassa is a busy guy these days. He’s put out two albums this year, and it’s not even July yet. The first was his own Dust Bowl; the second was the sophomore effort from his other gig, Black County Communion, imaginatively titled 2. How Zeppelinesque, but I’m getting ahead of myself just a bit.

The most interesting sounding song is Black Lung Heartache. Acoustic Greek instruments [Baglama, Bouzouki, Tzouras] abound for the first 1:28 until the electric guitar takes over the riff. The acoustic instruments reappear at the 2:58 mark and ride out the song. The Greek instruments make another appearance on the title track, but unlike Black Lung Heartache they’re used more for coloring rather than to carry the song. Dust Bowl has a sort-of “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly” twangy guitar on it along with some tasty slide soloing. That’s the kind of “light and shade” that made great recordings for Led Zeppelin. The most surprising song is John Hiatt’s Tennessee Plates. John Hiatt’s songs are uniformly very good, but that’s not the surprise. The surprise is not only the man himself joining the festivities on vocals, but also that JB would go for such a country-sounding song. Steve Nathan plays some fantastic piano. Vince Gill adds his six-string to top it off. Producer Kevin Shirley has Vince Gill’s Telecaster panned left, JB’s Les Paul panned right. If you want to hear the difference between a Fender and a Gibson, put on your headphones and listen to this song. Vince Gill also plays and sings on his lazy country shuffle Sweet Rowena. The last song is a cover of a song from Barbra Streisand [?!?] called Prisoner. Had I not read that somewhere else, I would have been blissfully ignorant, but I like it anyway. Black Country Communion cohort Glenn Hughes joins JB on Free’s Heartbreaker. It’s not as gritty as the Paul Rodgers original that I prefer, but it’s good enough that I foresee this becoming part of BCC’s live set.

When Black Country Communion [Glenn Hughes, Joe Bonamassa, Derek Sherinian, and Jason Bonham] put out their first album, I wrote the following review for Amazon.com:

I bought this CD while on a business trip. I listened to it while on a long drive back to my hotel. Having heard what each of these musicians is capable of, I was primed and ready to like this CD. However, after one listen, I'm ready to sell it back. I've heard many great vocal performances from Glenn Hughes - this is not one of them. Most of his vocals here are not singing, they are shouting. He's so much better than this [think of his work with Tony Iommi or Gary Moore]. The first thought that came to mind was that he was trying to be the male version of Christina Aguilera. According to drummer Jason Bonham, it took ten days to record and mix this album. It sounds like it. I've heard Kevin Shirley's work with guitarist Joe Bonamassa, Iron Maiden and Rush. He has good-sounding productions. His production acumen deserts him here. As for keyboardist Derek Sherinian, why did he join this band? You can barely hear him in the mix. His talents are woefully under-utilized here. Jason Bonham does good work here. His drumming is one of the few bright spots of Black Country Communion. Joe Bonamassa is an excellent blues-rock player, but he's horribly miscast as a hard-rock player here. Don't quit your day job Joe. I expected much from this CD - it didn't deliver.

Surprisingly, every criticism I had of the first album has been addressed in the second. I’d love to think I had something to do with that, but that would be delusional. Apparently I wasn’t the only one with these very criticisms. The songwriting is better. The production is much better – it sounds like what I would expect from Kevin Shirley. Glenn Hughes keeps the vocal gymnastics to a minimum. No scales, no over-emoting, no yelping or whooping as he is prone to do – just the best vocals I’ve heard him perform in awhile. He’s not trying so hard to live up to his billing as “The Voice of Rock.” On this CD, he IS “The Voice of Rock.” Joe Bonamassa proves he can play hard rock in addition to the blues and ballads he does on his own. He’s got the fat Les Paul tone, he’s also got the acoustic light-and-shade thing going, so it’s as if he’s channeling Jimmy Page, only his playing is more precise. Jason Bonham was outstanding on the first CD, and nothing has changed here. His dad would be proud. As for Derek Sherinian, welcome to Black Country Communion - we can finally hear you! Speaking of which…

The first song, The Outsider, sees JB hammering out the riff until midway through the song, when he and Derek S. go into full Blackmore/Lord “Highway Star” solo-trading mode. On the DVD that accompanied the release the first BCC album, producer Kevin Shirley said this kind of dynamic was what he had in mind in putting JB and Derek S. together, and here that concept comes to fruition. Save Me is a song Jason Bonham brought with him from his aborted collaboration with Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones. If there are any Zeppelin comparisons to be made, look no farther than this song – think of a cross-between of Kashmir and In The Light from Physical Graffiti. I like this one a lot. The Battle for Hadrian’s Wall is JB’s first vocal on “2”. The title alone is another reminder of Led Zeppelin [The Battle of Evermore, anyone?]. The song is a mixture of electric and acoustic sounds. It’s reminiscent of his work on Dust Bowl, but just a tad heavier. There’s just something strange about a native New Yorker singing a song about a Roman wall built in the north of England, but it’s a fine song anyway. For the heavy songs, look at Smokestack Woman and Man in the Middle. Glenn Hughes is in fine voice on both. Then there’s Little Secret, a slow blues tune Glenn sings about relapses into substance abuse. The blues is a different twist for Glenn, but it works here. Crossfire is similar to an older Glenn Hughes song, Soul Mover. If you liked Soul Mover, you’ll like this one. “2” closes with Cold. It is a sufficiently epic closer that has me hitting “replay” often.

2011 is a good year to be a fan of Joe Bonamassa. I recommend Dust Bowl and Black Country Communion 2 highly.