Spitball Army

k.d. lang / Watershed

I’ll admit that I’ve have shied away from the more pop-oriented k.d. lang albums over the years, preferring projects like the narrowly-themed Shadowland and Drag, where lang focused her undeniable talents on a more sharply-delineated musical landscape (Patsy Cline-era country music and late-night crooner tunes, respectively).  Watershed fits squarely in the pop category, and its production is subtle and completely in service to lang’s gorgeous voice.  Indeed, there are few singers around today with the ability to sing in the lush and sensual tones that lang possesses – think of Linda Ronstadt without the bombast, and you’ll know what to expect here.  Sadly, the material – much of it written by lang herself – seems run-of-the-mill and moon-june-spoon, and doesn’t come close to matching the execution.  As with many of the later Ronstadt albums, repeated listens to Watershed only reveal the monochromatic texture behind the delicious and tempting facade.

Cat Power / Jukebox

Chan Marshall follows up her remarkable The Greatest with a second album of covers and, unlike 2000’s largely acoustic The Covers Record, Jukebox is a full band project.  My first listen to this recording – on an advance CD provided by Matador Records – left me scratching my head: all but two of the album’s twelve tracks ended with an extended fade-out.  Were these songs merely cobbled together from jam session outtakes where the band and Marshall couldn’t figure out how to close the song?  Surely, whoever handles such things wouldn’t have been so careless with the artist’s reputation – on the heels of a critically-acclaimed release – as to toss together twelve cover jams and attempt to call it an album!  I called someone at the label level to find out if there had perhaps been an error in the mastering of the advance CDs, but no answer ever came back.  Not wanting to believe – in fact, refusing to accept – that such idiocy could indeed exist in the music business (insert winking emoticon here), I waited a couple of weeks and bought a hard copy of Jukebox to see how it compared.  Happily, each of the previously faded-out tracks had an additional 15 seconds attached to the end, and ended as if the band knew what they were doing.  Now, we’re talking!  Jukebox is full of surprising re-interpretations, notably the opening “New York, New York” and Billie Holiday’s “Don’t Explain.”  Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” is a near-recitation of the lyric over a swaying piano and organ pulse.  “I Feel,” by the rap group Hot Boys, is a revelation in a stripped-down and barely recognizable piano and voice version here (it is included on the 5-track bonus CD in the deluxe version of the album).  The band hits a steady groove throughout, much like the session musicians did in The Greatest, minus the Memphis horns.

Curt Perkins / Get Something Started

While attempting to uncover the mystery of “Where Are We Going” (see this previous post), I landed on this album by Curt Perkins, sometime member of the Josh Rouse band.  Curt was in the band that played this tune at the October 2003 Workplay gig, and apparently had been saving it for inclusion on his own Get Something Started, released mid-2007. 
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The album is a chilled-out retro-fest, owing an obvious debt to the laid-back soul and soft rock that was also an influence on Rouse’s 1972 and Nashville albums.  Combine a Curtis Mayfield groove (“Can’t Stop”) with a Stephen Bishop radio vibe (“California”) and a creamy mid-range vocal style reminiscent of Teddy Thompson, and you have another terrific collection of backward-looking pop-rock similar to that being explored by Perkins’ contemporaries David Mead and Daniel Tashian.  An enjoyable listen.

Get Something Started is available for download at amazon.com ($7.99, below) and iTunes ($9.90).  Amazon also sells a hard CD version ($14.25).