DAVE MATTHEWS & TIM REYNOLDS
Live at Radio City Music Hall
RCA
Aug. 14
Matthews and guitarist Reynolds played gigs together in the days before fame struck, and last paired up for a record about 10 years ago. Here, their obvious musical chemistry is revisited in intimate versions of Matthews Band staples Crush, Grace Is Gone, Don't Drink the Water and Gravedigger, along with warm readings of Neil Young's Down by the River and Daniel Lanois' The Maker. The previously unrecorded Sister stands out here as the sort of sensitive-guy anthem Matthews excels at, while the more familiar Dancing Nancies rocks as hard as the meandering, eight-minute Lie in Our Graves does not.
Prince
Planet Earth
NPG/Columbia
July 24
Prince gets a pass because, well, he's Prince, a fact he likes to remind us of every so often with either a gangbusters tour or a throwdown performance at halftime of the Super Bowl.
But when it comes to his recorded output of late, his means of getting music to the people - either by including CDs with the purchase of concert tickets or by giving them away as freebies in a Sunday newspaper, a stunt he recently pulled in Britain - has shown far more creativity than the music itself.
Even if his comeback albums Musicology and 3121 helped lift him from his mid-to-late-1990s artistic dead-spin, they've failed to capture the public's imagination the way Prince did so freely at his 1980s creative peak.
So while Planet Earth is the best of Prince's recent efforts, it only shows glimpses of the genius that was once his Purpleness' hallmark.
It's not for a lack of variety. The album flirts with a number of Prince's most recognizable styles, from glittery pop to rock to R&B. But it doesn't push boundaries the way his albums once did.
It's a decent Prince album, which at this point might be the best you're going to get out of the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.
The best track is Mr. Goodnight which sounds like Prince remaking the Notorious B.I.G.'s Big Poppa. He's in classic ladies man form as he raps his come ons, enticing a woman by telling her, I've got a mind full of good intentions/and a mouth full of Raisinets, and later promising to screen Chocolat with her before hitting the pool. Now that's romance.
Mr. Goodnight exudes effortless, sexy charm, which is in short supply elsewhere on the record.
The album-opening title track is a clunky, if well-meaning, plea for the environment that begins with a simple piano and builds to a guitar implosion, but never finds its center.
It's not that Prince isn't having fun - Chelsea Rodgers is a full-on funk party that likely would be a blast live, and The One U Wanna C sounds straight off of Sign 'O' the Times - but you get the feeling he's simply spinning his wheels.
Prince is still Prince, of course, but Planet Earth will not be the catalyst for another purple reign.
THE NEW BOSSA NOVA
Luciana Souza
Verve
Aug. 21
A few months ago Gilberto Gil performed at Carnegie Hall and played a memorable bossa nova version of the Beatles' When I'm 64. He remarked that a lot of Beatles songs were just right for bossa nova. It raised a question: How much can bossa nova accommodate? What are its fixed qualities? An acoustic guitar with some particular harmonic voicings and a leavened samba rhythm; an overall weightless feeling. Then what?
The spare arrangements of The New Bossa Nova get a lot right. You can measure all the tiny tonal changes in the medium-range voice of Luciana Souza, a Brazilian-born jazz singer. Her pianist, Edward Simon, may never have played more airily. The saxophonist Chris Potter improvises in short, jabbing figures; he's artful, and can make you think of Stan Getz on his own jazz-bossa nova crossover records (maybe a Stan Getz who's been listening to a lot of Wayne Shorter).
But the repertory here is, with a few exceptions, West Coast pop singer-songwriter music, including songs by Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman and Michael McDonald. An interesting exception is Elliott Smith; a less interesting exception is Sting. At any rate it's here that the problems arise.
The producer is Larry Klein, a gray eminence of adult pop and also Souza's husband; their judicious choice of songs mostly avoids the super-famous or overplayed. But a fair amount of the romantic lyrics are profound or analytical in a way that seems a little too leaden for bossa nova.
Coupled with an occasional hyperprecision in Souza's singing, this all begins to make the project lose its stability. (The arrangement of You and the Girl, written by Souza and Klein, builds a perfect atmosphere of restful unease. Then the word vainglory appears.) The album is properly introspective; perhaps it just isn't sweet enough.
TIME ON EARTH
Crowded House
ATO Records
July 10
Ten years after disbanding, Crowded House was reunited last year by its songwriter, Neil Finn. Partway through recording a solo album, Finn reconvened the bassist Nick Seymour, a founder of the band in 1985, and the keyboardist and guitarist Mark Hart. One member was absent: the drummer Paul Hester, who suffered from depression and committed suicide in 2005. That's one reason the reunion album, Time on Earth, is suffused with thoughts of mortality and mourning.
Yet Crowded House has always been a pensive band, balancing melancholy and consolation in songs like its 1986 hit, Don't Dream It's Over. In the new Don't Stop Now, Finn sings, Give me something I can write about/Give me something I can cry about. With Matt Sherrod on drums, Crowded House sounds like its old self (and like Finn's solo efforts). The music harks back to the folk rock and Merseybeat of the 1960s, backing straightforward melodies with guitars and piano.
The reunited band doesn't pretend a decade hasn't passed. The 14 songs here are the thoughts of a grown-up songwriter. Silent House, written with the Dixie Chicks, speaks to an aging relative whose memory is deteriorating; English Trees contemplates the aftermath of a long-ago breakup. A few songs are upbeat, like the ironically jaunty She Called Up and the guardedly optimistic Even a Child. But Time on Earth is filled with ballads and thoughts of how transient life is, nowhere more so than in the aching, shimmering A Sigh, which acknowledges, No changing the story now.
The reunited Crowded House is to perform Wednesday and Thursday at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist
Peter Brighton was amazed when he found the giant jackfruit. He had been watching it grow on his farm in far north Queensland, and when it came time to pick it from the tree, it was so heavy it needed two people to do the job. “I was surprised when we cut it off and felt how heavy it was,” he says. “I grabbed it and my wife cut it — couldn’t do it by myself, it took two of us.” Weighing in at 45 kilograms, it is the heaviest jackfruit that Brighton has ever grown on his tropical fruit farm, located