My Amazon Reviews: The Kooks "Listen"

Kook Funk
3 Out Of 5 Stars

The Kooks have become an entirely different band since their debut. What began as a band that used The Kinks and The Arctic Monkeys as a jumping off point has reinvented itself as, of all things, funky. Soulful background vocals, disco-fied guitars, use of electronic drums and other trappings cover a lot of ground on "Listen." It's a much better album that the lackadaisical "Junk Of The Heart," but I never expected them to want to be Chic. Or Daft Punk.

The biggest culprit here is "Down," which breaks into a "down down, diggity down down diggy diggy down" (Kid Rock, anyone?) hook. Along with an insistent bass, it's a song that wouldn't be out of place to get a polished up club remix. The big soul vocal backups from "Around Down" bust the album wide open from the very beginning, Granted, this is a far more exciting album than "Junk" was, but not the direction I ever thought I'd hear The Kooks aiming for.

There are a couple classicist pop tunes here, like "Bad Habit" or the squiggly synth in "Dreams," lead singer Luke Pritchard has an engaging voice, and guitarist Hugh Harris and bassist Max Rafferty get a real chance to strut their stuff. Along with a touch of irony; in my I-tunes library, "Listen" buttresses Kool And The Gang" without the feeling changing up very much. So if you came here looking for the inspiring "Konk" or the perkiness of their debut, you won't find it on "Listen." But if you want a serving of dance-rock, you'll get what you came for.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Elvis Costello and The Roots "Wise Up Ghost

DNA Splicing
4 Out Of 5 Stars

"Wise Up Ghost." In which two of the music world's encyclopedic nerds play with Costello's past and Questlove's concepts of pop and funk. Musically it is a fascinating record, with the two of them combining bits of Elvis' older tunes with deeply funked out basslines, boiling things to a rare essence; the songs that equal or surpass the originals.

For example, just as deep as the second song, sample lyrics from "Sweet Underground" and "Hurry Down Doomsday" are tangled together to create "Sugar Won't Work." Or how "Stick Out Your Tongue" rewrites "Pills and Soap," one of Costello's angriest protest songs. Which is something else to note about "Wise Up Ghost." The Roots place a lot of dark menace into songs that weren't as sinister as they were when they started out life.

Even the samples spin things around. The tinkling piano of "Satellite" tease "Tripwire" into a more spooky area, along with the subject matter. Questlove and Elvis don't just stick with the lyrical cut and pasting, songs are pulled into the sampler like "Satellite," as well as "Radio Silence" on the (bonus track version) "Can You Hear Me."

It's not like Elvis hasn't explored collaborations and re-visiting before. This comes closer to "The River In Reverse," with Allen Toussaint and the roaring Stax romp of "Get Happy" than other Costello works, while The Roots bring out the moments when Costello becomes more a sublime singer, even though there's more than a little menace to the demanding title track or "Stick Out Your Tongue." "Wise Up Ghost" may sound like a mismatch of talents, but The Roots make this album into one of Costello's most interesting in a long time.

     

My Amazon Reviews: Dr John "Locked Down"

Steaming in the Swamp
4 Out Of 5 Stars

This is one heck of a comeback album for Dr John. Produced by Black Key Dan Auerbach, it combines the Keys' garage esthetic with John's Gumbo New Orleans funk. That may serve as both recommendation and warning; if you dig on the Keys' wall of noise sounds, you'll probably like this more than older Dr John fans might. The production is dirty and swampy, with minor key horns and wailing back-up singers piling on some serious blues.

Meanwhile, the Good Doctor uses the opportunity to rail against politics, to throw down a little old time religion, and to bump and grind like it's after closing time and the streets are empty except for you and some old friends with a piano. "Locked Down" is no excessive cheap nostalgia, it's a modern record with everyday concerns. Like the latest Tom Waits album, "Bad As Me," "Locked Down" lets the man Mac Rebennack, and the persona, Dr John, come together and use the character's strengths for superior purposes. As the Dr prowls through "Ice Age" or storms across Auerbach's guitars in the title track, he sounds like a man unleashed.

That retro-groove is astonishing, only letting down on the syrupy "God's Sure God." However, there hasn't been a record this greasy from Dr John for a couple of decades, and there are no covers/standards that seem to have been his stock-in-trade for too long. "Locked Down" is the return of The Night Tripper, and as such, makes this the best Dr John album in near 20 years.

   

My Amazon Reviews: Sly And The Family Stone "Greatest Hits"

Boom Acka Lacka Lacka Boom!
5 Out of 5 Stars

One of the men who can lay an honest calling to "Father of Funk" is Sly Stone, and this brief but effective best of maps it out brilliantly. When I was in high school and on the Wrestling Team, there were "Sports Buses" that took team members home after practice. In reality, they were Ford Vans, but they also had 8-Track players. Our driver was this burly, bearded bear of a man named Terry, and he almost always had this album in the 8-track. I have many memories of going home on dark winter evenings as "Hot Fun In The Summertime" and "Everyday People" would play.

Almost Forty years later and I'm still digging it. Sly cross pollinated funk, rock, 60's psychedelic and a decidedly political bent and emerged with not just the first truly integrated rock band to create hit records, but anthems that partied and thought out loud. While Stone's eventual personal disintegration happened after this anthology was released (meaning it's missing "If You Want Me to Stay" and "Family Affair"), what's here is still extraordinary in its power.

After all, if you can't smile to the hits here, you're probably too old or old enough to have gone deaf. "Stand!," "Thank You (Fallettinme Be Micelf Agaon)" and "Dance To The Music" are still guaranteed crowd pleasers, and the non/lesser-hits like "You Can Make It" and "Sing A Simple Song" will pack the party. Which is the cool thing about this Greatest Hits. Stone may have had a little gas left in the tank, but this album was released at a peak moment in his creative timeline. You can pop it in and it rings joyously from beginning to end, holding together like a whole album and not just a collection of singles. To this day, it remains a classic time capsule for creativity in American Music.

  

My Amazon Reviews: OK Go "Of The Blue Colour of The Sky"

The Purple Rain that falls from the Blue Colour of The Sky
3 Out Of 5 Stars 

OK Go took a detour from the majestic power pop of their first two albums and ventured into Minneapolis. At least that is what you may end up thinking when you give a listen to the awkwardly titled "Of The Blue Color Of The Sky." Gone completely are the hyper-energetic songs that garnered comparisons to the likes of Cheap Trick or the perennially underrated Urge Overkill; in their place are Princely sounds as filtered through The Flaming Lips. Die hards may buckle under the change, but I dig it.

First off, the band's knack for a good hook is still in play. Both "All Is Not Lost" and "This Too Shall Pass" are highly memorable pop tunes, even if they don't race along at the kinetic pace of Oh No's "Here It Goes Again." (Make sure to YouTube the single camera/single take marching band version of "This Too Shall Pass" - and the video version of the song would have been a perfect bonus cut.) Then they take on the raspy falsettos of Prince on "End Love" and "White Knuckles." It's a song that makes me wonder if the band hasn't been giving some serious listening to My Morning Jacket's Evil Urges.

Only problem is, if you have the first two OK Go albums, you might be checking your CD to make sure you're still listening to the same band. I started really wishing for a good guitar blast to break through the all the sonic oddities and just kick up the volume a notch or two. I'm all for a band taking artistic control of their sound and changing it up now and then, but "Of The Blue" is a 360 swing from OK Go of the past. I give them a bonus half-star just for the gutsiness of their move and now look forward to where the next album takes them.

My Amazon Reviews: Prince "Hits and B-Sides"

Punch a Higher Floor

4 Out Of 5 Stars

Prince is a genius. Not much to dispute here. And this three disc set, many of the songs on the third disc unavailable on CD elsewhere, is the best of his many anthologies. Covering his years at Warners (a company Prince now thoroughly despises), the 56 songs at a fairly bargain price is an excellent source of Princely funk.

Beginning with his earliest one-man band material, it is awe inspiring to see just how fast Prince went from being a generic funkster with a dirty mind ("Soft and Wet," "Uptown") to the audacious gender bender of colossal music like "1999" or "When Doves Cry." The string of albums that ran from 1999to Sign 'O' the Timeswould have left Prince in the halls of giants, and there's plenty of other tracks around these albums to listen to.

A good percentage of the credit is due the The Revolution, Prince's groundbreaking multi-cultural/sexual/instrumental coconspirators, who managed to whip up his ideas into ravaging mixtures of guitar rock, funk and new wave without being completely of one genre. Songs like the Hedrixian "Purple Rain" or pstychedelic swirl of "Raspberry Beret" cross over effortlessly (Warren Zevon even took a good crack at "Raspberry") between styles. But he dismantled The Revolution over time, and while songs like "Thieves In The Temple" or "7" are brilliant, they don't have the electric verve of those earlier singles.

Be that as it may, Prince had long become a master-tunesmith by this point. Even his duff material (many of the b-sides on disc 3) has an indelible charm. This is the disc where you can find "Another Lonely Christmas" or "Erotic City" (a minor hit in its own right). The minor quibbles come on the basis of some edited single selections ("When Doves Cry" being a major violation), a non-chronological sequencing and the omission of some sizable hits (the #1 "Batdance" most notably). Still, this is the set to own, over both Ultimate Princeor The Very Best of Prince.