Last year, lambchop were commissioned by the San Francisco International Film Festival to perform a live score to soundtrack FW Murnau's. 1927 proto-film noir masterpiece Sunrise. It so happened that Lambchop's leader, Kurt Wagner, had already embarked upon a self-imposed mission to write a song a day. As a result of both endeavours he ended up with so many songs that there are now two new Lambchop albums, each containing 12 songs. So is this the alt.country equivalent of OutKast's Speakerboxxx/The Love Below?
Not quite.
As the house band at Motown throughout the '60s, the Funk Brothers were arguably the greatest hit machine the world has ever seen. Yet nobody ever knew who they were. Three decades later, director Paul Justman tracked down the survivors and brought them out of obscurity to pay belated tribute to the men who made the Motown sound. Evocative and nostalgic stuff.
Probably the best blues album in the world...ever!
Martin Scorsese's seven-part TV series on the blues has had mixed reviews in America. But it's impossible to fault the accompanying five-CD box set, which must qualify as the most comprehensive blues compilation ever released. With 116 tracks chronologically sequenced and expertly annotated, there's hardly a big name in the genre who isn't represented.
Nevertheless, the set raises fundamental questions about why anybody should still bother listening to the blues.
Look closely at the cover of Dylan's Bringing It All Back Home, and you'll see a copy of Robert Johnson's King Of The Delta Blues Singers. Released in 1961 but recorded a quarter of a century earlier, the Stones, Cream and Led Zeppelin all plundered it for source material, making it arguably the single most influential album on '60s rock. All 29 sides recorded by Johnson in his short lifetime are included here, and if you don't already own them, now's your chance. That they come with a second disc rounding up 25 of Johnson's contemporaries from Bessie Smith to Son House is a bonus.
This timid compilation suffers from the eternal failing of dance's left field in mistaking an imitation of Eno, Reich etc for a genuine response. And where Herbert is a maverick provocateur, making music from McDonalds wrappers or lurching into revisionist big band music, his prodigies are more faint-hearted. The majority of cuts (including those from Herbert himself) are sleepy and heavy-lidded-boring, even. There's nothing wrong with this LP if you like smoochy post-dance or cocktail jazz, but it's hardly sensual or murderous.
