José Feliciano - Feliciano!, album review

Never Better Covered

Is this the greatest covers album, ever? Released in 1968 on the back of the great version of a superb song, The Doors’ Light My Fire, I would say it is. This didn’t make my Top Fifty, but it could/should have. The album also made a star of Feliciano, and he never made a better album, but this did for his career.

A1	California Dreamin'
A2	Light My Fire
A3	Don't Let The Sun Catch You Crying
A4	In My Life
A5	And I Love Her
B1	Nena Na Na
B2	(There's) Always Something To Remind Me
B3	Just A Little Bit Of Rain
B4	Sunny
B5	Here, There And Everywhere
B6	The Last Thing On My Mind

The virtuoso guitar playing is a major factor, but it is probably the vocal and acoustic/orchestral arrangements that carry this, the Puerto Rican lilt/language adding the exotic. And, naturally, the songs themselves and their clever selection, tapping into current hits as well as the known of Lennon/McCartney. It would be hard for someone of Feliciano’s talent to have made a pig’s ear of such an innate excellence.

Stand-outs are LMF and a beautiful cover of California Dreamin’. Another surprise gem – in as much as The Beatles’ songs are inevitably popular – is the Marsden Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying. Plaintive perfection.

One of my first albums.

Convertible Music

Medusa's Disco - Ripe, album review

Far-out Freshness

Would it be tautologous to say Medusa’s Disco is like Kula Shaker on speed and acid? I suspect not as there is much more than the manic energy in this band’s psychedelic revisitings, and it is probably in the partial echo of Crispian Mills on the fine opening track State of Mind that KS is invoked.

By second Twisted Dentist (Novocaine) that whimsy of a comparing surmise is blown away by the wild wah-wah and other vitalities in this noisy song, the vocals here much more aggressive in tone and actual screaming. And wow, what wildness, as the band themselves put it in their description playgound of sound.

Divine slows it down somewhat and reflects a little bit of Muse, but still in the right rock ballpark, not operatic but fine vocal harmonising, sitar competing in the increasing sound as it closes. Give Up is the fifth track and this is as clever as it is adventurous, playing again with some sweet and tight vocal harmonising counterpointed by dissonant guitar and some fine grunge other, before moving into a Sabbath-esque riff: I do like this eclecticism and honouring minor-plagiarism from its birthsounds. Cream too? I think so. This is a great track.

Well, it continues. Atomic 7 has wonderful instrumental playing, tight and heavy and psychedelic, and the vocal harmonies just get better and better, here the drums rolling off these with gusto. I’m not sure they can be better, being perfect before, but I am enthusing. Ode to Seeds straps on its garage and rides without a saddle. Whatshisface from Whatevertown is Wouldyouwantsomethingdifferentbecauseyouarenotgoingtogetit. Damn right.

Beautiful Creatures closes the album out at ten minutes of incendiary Sabbath-esque Worship of Wah Wah wonderment. And other clever instrumental tweaks, a song sung too within this framing Heavy rock. There are increasing nuances of psychedelia, and I think these guys are clearly having so much fun within their considerable expertise. Perhaps the freshest retrorock I have heard for a very long time. Not tautology then, but paradox.

Get it here.

Space Music 16

Rodney Crowell - Close Ties, album review

After Years, Here and Now

This is a great album. Lyrically intelligent; musically honed from years of writing and performing - this might well be a career peak.

East Housten Blues sets us up with that quality that marks one out from the other – fine guitar work throughout, harmonies in the chorus, spunk in the beat. Next Reckless is into folk, a descending melody and song about drinking and women, judging by the evidence I’m feeling reckless.

Life Without Susannah remembers and regrets, and It Ain’t Over is an interesting immediate companion as Crowell duets with his former wife Roseanne Cash, a beautiful accompaniment when she does perform, Crowell writing my heart ain’t the problem, it’s my mind that’s a total mess, John Paul Jones joining in too, so a triplet in fact.

That’s the impact overall – these, if not confessional, apparently honest songs merging truth from experience and what we know about life having lived it for quite a while.

There is another duet, this time with Sheryl Crow, I’m Tied to Ya, a powerful plaintive song that has Crowell in the finest of emotive singing, so an affecting, perfectly-crafted song, and lyrically strong,

I've heard it said, beware the fist behind your lover's kiss
And stand up guys have knocked me down before
But to rise with you above the petty politics of bliss
I'll gladly make my heart an open door

but this actually follows my favourite on the album I Don’t Care Anymore which is a righteous rouser in its assertive and defiant reflection on past and present, regret again pervading the narrative where fortune or fame – so experiencing both – is ultimately meaningless as it is what it is in the here and now. The Country rap as it drives pulsing to its end is superb.

Two Faces Music 13

China Moses - Nightintales, album review

Dee Dee's Daughter Delights

How apt on the 1^st April, in the month when Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote his poem ‘The Nightingale’

… 'Tis the merry Nightingale
That crowds and hurries, and precipitates
With fast thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant, and disburthen his full soul
Of all its music!

that I can review this album by China Moses with its own delicious notes and full soul of all its music. [OK - it is a misreading of the actual title, but that's the license, and it's also prevalent on the net!]

Indeed, it is the merging of jazz and soul that informs this collection of songs, opener Running a bass-throbbed riff of a jazzfunk song, and next Put It On the Line a sultry old-school nighttime walk of a song, organ puffs and a sweet soul chorus just audible in the background before the sax and shouts burst in.

Third Disconnected is mostly funk, and Moses’ vocal continues with its sass, the staccato accompaniments – instrumental and vocal – add to the pert beats. In fourth Ticking Boxes we have in this balladic surround the foreground deep swell of Moses singing with equally deep emotion. The following Whatever keeps the pace slow and brooding. Then it is Watch Out and the abrupt pump of bass again.

There’s orchestral lounge jazz on eighth Lobby Call with the trumpet accompaniment from Takuya Kuroda, and on tenth Blame Jerry, Craig David producer Anthony Marshall and trumpeter Theo Croker join in a Moses self-penned but old-standard-sounding contribution to the fulsome range on this fine album.