The best new records I heard this month were ones I reviewed for
The Grid: Rosanne Cash and Hidden Cameras.
The Hidden Cameras are a band I wondered if I would ever love
again the way I did from about 2002-05. To me, they seemed to have stalled, and
I didn’t enjoy any of Joel Gibb’s newer songs as much as I did those that
sprung from his initial burst of inspiration. This album makes me a believer
again: both the sound and the songs signal an entirely new chapter. The Hidden
Cameras play a noon-hour show at the University of Guelph on Feb. 13, a show at
the Starlight Lounge in Waterloo that same night, and Lee’s Palace in Toronto
on Feb. 15. My Grid review is here.
Here are the other January 2014 releases reviewed in my column
for the Waterloo Record and Guelph Mercury.
Couer de Pirate – Trauma (Grosse Boite)
At the end of a TV drama there’s often a plaintive piano track,
often sung by a pixieish woman, sometimes a cover version. Quebecois superstar
Couer de Pirate was commissioned by just such a TV show to do 12 such covers,
which comprise this, her English-language debut. It’s an odd showcase of the
woman’s talents, as this is very much a one-dimensional representation of her
capabilities: every song is the same tempo, features almost the exact same
piano chording, and she sounds careful never to betray any actual emotion (lest
it distract from the TV montage, no doubt).
And so here is a gimmicky reworking of Amy Winehouse, mopey
numbers by The National, Bon Iver and Patrick Watson, not-bad takes on Nancy
Sinatra, Tom Waits and the McGarrigle sisters, and a surprising reinvention of
Kenny Rogers’s “Lucille.” But there are also all-too-obvious picks: does anyone
need another cover of “Ain’t No Sunshine” or “Dead Flowers”? Why cover “Last
Kiss” after Pearl Jam did? And for anyone whose followed Couer de Pirate’s
career closely, it’s more than disappointing that her take on The Weeknd’s “Wicked
Games” is nowhere to be found.
As with most covers albums, this is a mild distraction—and an
odd move into the Anglosphere from a woman who has sold hundreds of thousands
of records in her native tongue. (Jan. 23)
Download: “Lucille,” “Summer Wine,” “Heartbeats Accelerating”
Fred Eaglesmith – Tambourine (EOne)
Somewhere in a small town in North America tonight, Fred
Eaglesmith and his band are playing a small community hall packed with fans.
The next night, it will happen again in a new town. And then again. And again.
In an age of blockbusters, Eaglesmith is a small-scale niche marketer par
excellence, putting out 17 records in 33 years and touring endlessly. He’s had
much more popular singers cover his songs and land Top 40 hits with them, but
he still works with Guelph producer Scott Merritt and makes his records in a
tiny hamlet in Norfolk County, with one microphone and his five-piece band—two
guitarists, a mandolin player and a rhythm section—all playing together at
once. It’s the kind of country and early rock’n’roll that Eaglesmith, 56, grew
up with. Tambourine could be 1964, it could be 2014, and it sounds all the
better for not letting us know the difference.
Although Eaglesmith’s recordings have evolved over the years,
the sheer volume of them could lead you to think they’re interchangeable. He’s
been working with his current band for several years now, ever since the death
of long-time sidekick and mentor Willie P. Bennett, and they bring a renewed
vigour—as well as three-part female harmonies—to his delivery. But Tambourine
stands out as being one of Eaglesmith’s most solid collection of songs in many
years; it’s not just mood, nuance and performance that he and Merritt nail perfectly
this time out. And with “Nobody Gets Everything,” he’s most certainly written
another hit—for someone else to eventually sing, while he continues to get in
the van and do his own thing. (Jan. 30)
Download: “What It Takes,” “Nobody Gets Everything,” “Train
Wreck”
Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings – Give the People What They Want!
(Daptone)
There’s a track on Sharon Jones’s new album called “Long Time
Wrong Time”: it’s been four years since we heard new material from this
hard-working soul singer, but it’s never the wrong time to hear Sharon Jones.
This album was pushed back seven months while Jones battled Stage 2 pancreatic
cancer—which forced her to take the longest break of her career.
So much about Jones’s personal story is inspiring, from her
hardscrabble upbringing to her decades of obscurity to her late-in-life stardom
to this current medical battle; every time you hear her voice, you want to root
for her. Listening to her fifth album, easily her best, you hear a woman who
would never let something like a potentially life-threatening disease get in
the way of a good show.
So of course Jones is fantastic, and of course her Dap-Kings are
the tightest backing group this side of the E Street Band (they’ve been used by
Amy Winehouse and Michael Bublé, among others). They’ve been at it full-time
for more than 12 years now, and what started as a retro revival soul shtick has
fully evolved into songs and a production approach that doesn’t recall glory
days long past: it often exceeds them. Give the People What They Want delivers
10 tracks that most often recall the Staples Singers: not just Jones in Mavis’s
role, but guitarist Binky Griptite’s evocation of Pop Staples’s guitar, and the
increased role of backing vocalists Saundra Williams and Starr Duncan.
Jones sings here about how “People Don’t Get What They Deserve”—and
while she may been sidetracked lately, there’s every indication here that her
upward trajectory is about to go sky high. (Jan. 16)
Download: “Stranger to My Happiness,” “You’ll Be Lonely,” “Long
Time Wrong Time”
Doug Paisley - Strong Feelings (Cameron House/Warner)
Everyone loves Toronto songwriter Doug Paisley—as they should.
His 2010 album Constant Companion was hailed as a classic by all who heard it;
it was a slow-building word-of-mouth favourite, a collection of homespun songs
that sounded like you’ve known them all your life, sung them around campfires
in the summer, kept you warm in long Canadian winters. Leslie Feist sang on
that album. Mary Margaret O’Hara sings on this one. The Band’s Garth Hudson
plays on both. Afie Jurvanen of Bahamas has toured with him, and appears
here—as does Bazil Donovan of Blue Rodeo and avant-garde sax man Colin Stetson.
If his soft-spoken delivery is any indication, Doug Paisley is not an extrovert
rustling up any favour he can; these people all came to him.
Paisley’s craft comes from such a well-worn tradition, from
Gordon Lightfoot through to Sarah Harmer, that there is little room for
surprises. And yet “Where the Light Takes You,” an otherwise straightforward
Blue Rodeo-esque mid-tempo country song, is transformed in the coda into a
minor-key psychedelic turn with the sudden appearance of analog synth that
pushes the song into Pink Floyd territory. Likewise, “What’s Up Is Down” would
be a standard folk ballad were it not for the jazz piano, Mary Margaret O’Hara
on backing vocals, a sad trombone and a soloing saxophone.
Constant Companion is a hard album to top; Paisley doesn’t
exactly do that here. But Strong Feelings is still a more-than-worthy
introduction for most folks to Paisley’s talents—enough to illustrate the rare,
intangible gift he possesses, the one that separates the merely good from the
truly great.
(Jan. 30)
Download: “Song My Love Can Sing,” “Radio Girl,” “Where the
Light Takes You”
Bruce Springsteen – High Hopes (Columbia)
High hopes, indeed—that sums up the way every Springsteen fan
has felt for the past 20 years, a period of time when the icon has both
thrilled and chilled, rarely consistently. Few of his albums are true clunkers
(Working on a Dream); a few can stand strong alongside earlier triumphs
(Magic); some are merely successful sidetracks (We Shall Overcome: The Seeger
Sessions). Springsteen himself likely has high hopes for this record: his last
album, Wrecking Ball, was his first ever to not be certified gold sales status
in the U.S.
As a compilation of stray tracks and covers from the last
decade, High Hopes is predictably scattershot: part well-trod cliché, part overdue
(he’s been playing “American Skin” live for the past 14 years), and partly a
welcome chunk of worthy new songs. It also rounds up a few strong covers:
Australian punk band the Saints’ “Just Like Fire Would,” the droning “Dream
Baby Dream” by Suicide, and the title track, by obscure L.A. band the
Havalinas.
Despite the fact the album was made with different producers and
different band members—now-deceased E-Streeters Clarence Clemons and Danny
Federici are here, as is everyone else who’s been in and out of the band in the
last decade—it hangs together surprisingly well, due mostly to the fact the
material never sinks as low as the worst moments on (the otherwise not-bad)
Wrecking Ball.
The only misstep is the prominent role afforded guitarist Tom
Morello, whom Springsteen clearly adores and grants second billing on most of
the tracks here (listed as “featuring Tom Morello”), even shared lead vocals.
Springsteen obviously feels like he’s tapping into the youthful energy of
someone merely 15 years younger than him, allowing Morello to take multiple
solos employing his patented pyrotechnics from his rap-rock days in Rage
Against the Machine. Ever wonder what Eddie Van Halen would have sounded like
in the E-Street Band? To find out, one must suffer through the heavy-handed
take on the 1995 song “Ghost of Tom Joad,” where Morello indulges in
unnecessary shredding.
Holding pattern Springsteen—maybe that’s the best we can hope
for while we wait for a tour announcement. And pray that Morello stays
home. (Jan. 16)
Download: “American Skin (41 Shots),” “Just Like Fire Would,” “Down
in the Hole”
