- Ben Greenman: James Brown’s “The Singles, Volume Eight: 1972-73.”
paragraph class="noindent">Since his death, in 2006, James Brown has become one of the most repackaged artists in history, thanks in no small part to an ambitious series of double-disk sets released by Hip-O Select. The sets have looked at Brown’s full singles catalogue, year . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Smokey Robinson and more Hip-O Select soul.
paragraph class="noindent">Hip-O Select continues to mount impressive reissue campaigns for sixties and seventies soul. In the midst of James Brown and Complete Motown retrospectives, the label has started in on the solo albums of Smokey Robinson, who created one of the most enduring catalogues in pop-music . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Shirley Clarke’s “The Connection” at IFC Center.
In 1961, the director Shirley Clarke transformed Jack Gelber’s Off-Broadway play “The Connection”—about a quartet of jazz musicians and their junkie friends waiting for their heroin dealer in a run-down loft—into a disturbing meta-movie. (It opens May 4 at . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: Tift Merritt’s “See You on the Moon.”
paragraph class="noindent">Tift Merritt was, for a few years, the bearer of a proud tradition of distaff country soul that reaches back to artists like Dusty Springfield and Bobbie Gentry. After the promising début “Bramble Rose,” in 2002, Merritt released a pair of albums produced . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Jason & the Scorchers’s “Halcyon Times.”
paragraph class="noindent">Jason & the Scorchers were one of the bright lights of the mid-eighties, fusing rock guitars, punk tempos, and country songwriting on albums like “Fervor.” The band’s double-speed take on Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie” confirmed the . . ....
- Edward P. Jones: “Shacks.”
In my first months as a college freshman, I cared more than anything about a young woman with whom I’d gone to high school—Sandra Walker, a thin, brown-skinned woman who might not have been pretty enough for the rest of the universe but was more . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: John Mellencamp’s “No Better Than This.”
paragraph class="noindent">John Mellencamp’s new album, “No Better Than This,” is his twenty-first studio record, but it’s also a début of sorts. It’s his first album for Rounder Records, the independent roots label, and it is, on the . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Richard Thompson’s “Dream Attic.”
paragraph class="noindent">Richard Thompson has been turning out literate, moody, spiky albums for four decades, three on his own and a decade before that in partnership with his wife, Linda. There are so many highlights in his catalogue (“Shoot Out the Lights,” “Hand of Kindness,” . . ....
- Ben Greenman: R. Kelly’s “Love Letter.”
paragraph class="noindent">Though this week marks the appearance of the first posthumous Michael Jackson album—thuddingly titled “Michael,” it contains mostly leftovers and left-outs that don’t do justice to Jackson’s canon—it’s better to let sleeping kings lie . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: Bob Dylan’s “The Lost Notebooks of Hank
Williams.”
paragraph class="noindent">One of the most anticipated records of the year stretches back to 1953, barely. Early on the morning of New Year’s Day, Hank Williams, drunk and doped up, died frozen in the back seat of his blue ’52 Cadillac. Williams, who was only twenty . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Red Desert.”
paragraph class="noindent">Michelangelo Antonioni’s first color film, “Red Desert,” from 1964 (new on DVD from Criterion), is both a plangent anti-romantic melodrama and a prescient environmentalist masterwork, a “Silent Spring” of the soul. Reworking his lifelong theme—the inseparability of human . . ....
- Patricia Marx: Shopping at the Isabel Marant boutique, in SoHo.
paragraph class="noindent">“I’m devastated,” a young woman said into her cell phone, while waiting in line for the dressing room at the new Isabel Marant boutique. It was the shop’s second day of business. “There’s so much stuff taken. Gone . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Paul Simon’s “So Beautiful or So What.”
paragraph class="noindent">Paul Simon spent the eighties venturing eventfully into African and South American music, but on his twelfth album, “So Beautiful or So What” (Concord), his excursions are more temporal. The lead single, “Getting Ready for Christmas Day,” partly about a soldier in Iraq . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Amanda Fortini: The perfect creations of the Pioneer Woman.
On a chilly Tuesday morning in November, so early that the previous night’s full moon was still glowing in the dark sky, Ree Drummond, a blogger who calls herself the Pioneer Woman, drove her family’s pickup truck out to the middle of a winter-brown pasture . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: Dave Alvin’s new album, “Eleven Eleven.”
paragraph class="noindent">While much of Dave Alvin’s recent work has found him in an acoustic mood, his new album, “Eleven Eleven” (Yep Roc), announces its intentions from the first. The record opens with the squalling “Harlan County Line,” which was inspired by (and . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: Big Star’s “Keep an Eye on the Sky.”
paragraph class="noindent">Big Star’s name, taken from a Southern supermarket chain, has primarily been read as an ironic commentary on celebrity, but in retrospect it seems like an astronomical warning. After the Memphis power-pop outfit, led by Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, released its dé . . ....
- Ben Greenman: New releases from Harper Simon and Richmond Fontaine.
paragraph class="noindent">Harper Simon may be his father’s child, but he’s no child. Simon, the oldest son of Paul Simon, was the subject of songs like “St. Judy’s Comet” (“Little sleepy boy / Do you know what time it is? / Well . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Johnny Cash’s “American VI: Ain’t No Grave.”
paragraph class="noindent">There are several good things about “American VI: Ain’t No Grave” (American Recordings), the second posthumous release from Johnny Cash and the final page in Rick Rubin’s final-chapter reclamation project. The title song demonstrates admirable defiance in the face of . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Mose Allison’s first new album in a decade.
paragraph class="noindent">Back in the late fifties, when he released albums like “Back Country Suite” and “Young Man Mose” for Prestige, the Mississippi-born pianist and singer Mose Allison was a singular talent, in the sense that few others were even trying to do what . . ....
- Russell Platt: “Venus and Adonis” and “Come to the River: An Early American Gathering” reviews.
paragraph class="noindent">Perhaps the refined tastes of Boston’s large academic audience account for its welcoming embrace of period-performance practitioners. Whatever the reason, New York has nothing to compare with the Boston Early Music Festival, which, for several years, has been releasing recordings on CPO that allow . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Barbara Stanwyck as Douglas Sirk’s muse.
paragraph class="noindent">Barbara Stanwyck has a distinctive effect on the two films in which Douglas Sirk directed her, both of which are included in “The Barbara Stanwyck Collection,” from Universal. She had often played the role of what’s euphemistically called “a woman with a . . ....
- Richard Brody: Joseph Losey’s 1951 film noir “The Prowler.”
paragraph class="noindent">With its opening shot, of a woman wearing only a towel, seen through a bathroom window from the point of view of a Peeping Tom, Joseph Losey’s 1951 film noir “The Prowler” (VCI Entertainment) announces the furious desire and the desperate envy on . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Ben Greenman: “New Multitudes,” a tribute to Woody Guthrie.
paragraph class="noindent">Woody Guthrie’s hundredth birthday is this July, and it’s being commemorated with everything from a special Web site (Woody100.com) to a new Shepard Fairey print to a raft of concerts and panels. Among the celebrations, of course, are records—reissues of . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Richard Brody: Robert Aldrich’s film-noir masterwork, “Kiss Me Deadly.”
paragraph class="noindent">If the film noir were to be forgotten, Robert Aldrich’s frenzied 1955 masterwork, “Kiss Me Deadly” (Criterion) might serve as the supreme reminder of what the genre had been. From the film’s nocturnal opening images, of a terrified woman (Cloris Leachman . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Andrea Thompson: Quinto Quarto
paragraph class="noindent">At Quinto Quarto, everything is taken as a sign of authenticity. There are tables full of Italian speakers; the manager sends off regular customers with a kiss on the cheek and “Buona sera!” If the lone woman in a party picks the table’s . . ....
- Ben Greenman: Robbie Robertson’s “How to Become Clairvoyant.”
paragraph class="noindent">Few members of the classic-rock pantheon have had more problematic solo careers than Robbie Robertson. After the dissolution of the Band’s original lineup, Robertson took nearly a decade to surface as a solo artist: his eponymous début was a landmark of late . . . (Subscription required.)...
- Mike Peed: “Edi & the Wolf,” in the East Village.
paragraph class="noindent">At this new Austrian tavern, wedged into an increasingly companionable stretch of Alphabet City, “Edi” is pronounced “Eddie” and “the Wolf” does not refer to Harvey Keitel’s character in “Pulp Fiction.” These are the nicknames of the . . ....
- Wyatt Mason: “The Art of Fielding,” review.
In Chad Harbach’s first novel, “The Art of Fielding” (Little, Brown; $25.99), Henry Skrimshander arrives for his first day at Westish College, a “slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan,” with a beat-up copy of a book . . . (Subscription required.)...
