earwax
Groove organist James Taylor has a clear-cut penchant for old-school
TV themes; his last album was an ode to Mission Impossible, and his new release features arrangements of "Starsky and Hutch"
and "Dirty Harry." This sound rings through all of Creation - the disc plays like an homage to Muzak from the '70s. Taylor's
crew does manage to conjure up that polyester era, but why should
we settle for imitation when David Clayton Thomas and Blood, Sweat
& Tears are still (somehow) playing over in Atlantic City? In
the meantime, the compositions on Creation are so derivative that it's almost embarrassing. The title track
has the faux-grandiose flair of '70s rock; Taylor's churchy organ
recalls "Foreplay," from Boston's 1976 debut. The supporting musicians
seem technically proficient, but also content to ride the similar
grooves of each song without ever really digging in. The result:
Taylor sounds just as white as his "Fire and Rain" namesake, but
without the catchy melodies. There's nothing on this album that
hasn't already been done (better!) by Taylor's predecessors. - Nate Chinen Teenage Fanclub Ignore the title's silly attempt to assign their aural escapism
a geographic origin - these dreamy highlanders acknowledge their
true point of departure when they sing "Your Love Is the Place
Where I Come From." Rather than attempting to simulate the shock
of novelty by tinkering with received musical form, these lads
immerse themselves in Beatlesy/ Byrdsy convention in order to
construct a cheerier alternative to the "bad world" that exists
outside the recording studio. And as their confidently chiming
guitars and ethereally airtight harmonies coalese into tunes so
familiar and yet so new they may well have sprung from a collective
melodic unconscious. The messy complications of modern life and
romantic love are neatly resolved and the timeless promise of
the three-minute pop song realized. An evasive project, true,
but it's carried off with a sweetly knowing wink that's neither
arch nor cutesy. - Keith Harris Television Personalities Dan Treacy's concerns, both sonic and lyrical, are so quintessentially
British that these tracks sound neither more anachronistic nor
more immediate than they might have when recorded at the turn
of the '80s. While his knack for pop cultural referents is occasionally
too arcane to signify stateside, it fleshes out mild social satires
that encourage boys to fold laundry as an act of rebellion and
gasp in awe at the popularity of "The Boy in the Paisley Shirt"
(he's the greatest dancer). Mixed deep within the echo chamber
of a restrained psychedelia that rarely shunts song form, Treacy's
Cockney vocals stray into the charming tuneless with the bemused
air of a man lysergically confident enough to declare "If you've
seen half as much as me/ You still haven't seen half of what I've
seen" yet grounded enough to feel ashamed that he doesn't know
if his next-door neighbor is Jamaican or Irish. - K.H. Verbena It's hard to believe that Souls For Sale was Verbena's first album. This solid collection of low-key but
insistently hook-ridden traditional pop rings of long-weathered
innocence that's rare to find in a young band of just two years.
With jangly simplicity that whispers of dusty Southern backroads
in your rear-view mirror, Verbena is a jigger of Ted Nugent with
the grit of the early Stones, topped with the better side of Royal
Trux harmonies. Their raggedly hummable "Shaped Like A Gun" is a shoe in for an
MTV buzz-bin hit (no offense intended), while the swaggering post-lo-fi
perfection of "Junk For Fashion" is Marshall-filtered confection
with a tangy Southern drawl. Alabama hasn't seen anything this
good since Skynard. And the South hasn't seen anything this good
since R.E.M. This album will reside in my CD player for the next
two months, cause it fuckin' rocks. What can I say, Verbena rocks
so hard that they've robbed me of my eloquence. - Geeta Dalal Wyclef Jean Wyclef's invocation of an international, Pan-African diaspora,
a long-overdue corrective to gangsta provincialism, may well mark
him as the last MC to still believe that hip hop culture can contain
the world. His all-inclusive lyrics, ranging erratically but spryly
from biblical injunction to Haitian patois to nursery rhyme nonsense
to quotes from whatever song he just heard on the radio, insist
that "Anything Can Happen," from a drive-by to a Knicks championship.
And whether inciting revolution by urging his listeners to run
red lights or offering his Grammy appearance as an alibi when
accused of car theft, he takes the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" literally,
his carnivalesque refusal to recognize discrete musical categories
enabling him to dance warily through a trippily Caribbean-tinged
soundscape no more hallucinatory or less dangerous than the world
outside your window. - K.H.
James Taylor Quartet
Creation (Acid Jazz - Hollywood Records)
Songs From Northern Britain (Creation/ Columbia)
They Could Have Been Bigger Than the Beatles (Velvel)
Souls For Sale (Merge)
Wyclef Jean Presents The Carnival Featuring the Refugee Allstars (Ruffhouse/ Columbia)