Category: Music Review

The “multimedia spectacular of lavish sets and exotic costumes” promised by the Pet Shop Boys turned out to be that and more. Some might argue that the almost two hours’ worth of elaborate production numbers was more theater than rock concert, and a case in point for the creeping decadence implicit in the band’s languid, […]

Garrison Keillor, who brought his radio show (this year it’s called American Radio Company) to the Chicago Theatre recently, is a man in search of an identity. As he tries to broaden the scope of his show without losing his old Prairie Home Companion audience, casting about for a persona to replace his quaint midwestern […]

It’s something of a mystery why Jimmy Johnson hasn’t achieved greater popular success. Johnson is blessed with one of the most distinctive voices in modern blues–a keening high tenor that some say evokes a bluesier Jackie Wilson but always reminds me of the late blues shouter Roy Brown. His guitar work is a pastiche based […]

If there ever was a shrine, a holy spot, for American music, it is Congo Square in the heart of New Orleans, in what’s now called Louis Armstrong Park, next to the French Quarter. Beginning in the late 18th century and continuing, with interruptions, until the Civil War, slaves gathered on Sunday afternoons in Congo […]

Of all modern blues instruments, the harmonica may be the easiest to play. Yet being a successful contemporary harpist is a daunting challenge. The four great geniuses of the modern style–John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Big Walter Horton, Rice Miller (“Sonny Boy Williamson no. 2”), and Little Walter Jacobs–defined the limits of the instrument so […]

The blues of guitarist Albert King shines with a keening, metallic glint. He builds solos like a welder, carefully measuring each phrase for its shading and intensity, then laying another atop or alongside it, often with unexpected drops and variations in tone and timbre, all the while working toward the inevitable climax. He dangles the […]

At some point we all stopped caring about the rockin’ enchilada that makes the best eating in rock ‘n’ roll–good drumming, killer guitar riffing, shimmery melodies, hooks galore. These things were all just stock-in-trade for some bands, bands like the Beatles, the Kinks, the Hollies, the Rolling Stones. There are still groups like that out […]

If you want to talk contributing factors, the Public Enemy mess has three of them. Those who would participate in the debate about the group ignore them at their peril, so it’s probably worth spelling them out at the beginning: (1) Professor Griff, the group’s former minister of information, is an anti-Semitic dickhead–a somewhat tragedically […]

The 80s was the decade of the anthem. Springsteen started it, of course, but between feel-good cheerleaders both passable (Peter Gabriel) and intolerable (Sting) and a wheelbarrow full of long-haired singers with their chins jutting out, from crazy Bono to the clowns in the Alarm, we kind of got our fill of prancing guitars and […]