format:    16-bit CD performance:    1 sound:    6 released:    2007 label:    Hyena reviewer:    Charles Andrews Sometimes a man’s just gotta do what a man’s gotta do. These three disparate albums started circling my brain six months ago like Indian warriors swooping in on a doomed wagon train. Only, one was a Navajo, one a Mohawk, and one a … Lapp? Yes, very – very – different, these three, yet they came together and attacked my musical psyche in a united effort. They separated themselves from the pack, from all the other CDs-I’m-considering-reviewing and became a force to be reckoned with. I am finally surrendering. I must deal with them. But two of ‘em ain’t gonna be happy they got my attention. What a mystery! Why did this feeling persist that there was some connection among them? John Black – blues, from California; Olav Larsen – country music, from a Norwegian ...

format:    16-bit CD performance:    9 sound:    8 released:    2006 label:    Gotee reviewer:    Charles Andrews Sometimes a man’s just gotta do what a man’s gotta do. These three disparate albums started circling my brain six months ago like Indian warriors swooping in on a doomed wagon train. Only, one was a Navajo, one a Mohawk, and one a … Lapp? Yes, very – very – different, these three, yet they came together and attacked my musical psyche in a united effort. They separated themselves from the pack, from all the other CDs-I’m-considering-reviewing and became a force to be reckoned with. I am finally surrendering. I must deal with them. But two of ‘em ain’t gonna be happy they got my attention. What a mystery! Why did this feeling persist that there was some connection among them? John Black – blues, from California; Olav Larsen – country music, from a Norwegian ...

format:    16-bit CD performance:    3 sound:    6 released:    2007 label:    Cadabra reviewer:    Charles Andrews Sometimes a man’s just gotta do what a man’s gotta do. These three disparate albums started circling my brain six months ago like Indian warriors swooping in on a doomed wagon train. Only, one was a Navajo, one a Mohawk, and one a … Lapp? Yes, very – very – different, these three, yet they came together and attacked my musical psyche in a united effort. They separated themselves from the pack, from all the other CDs-I’m-considering-reviewing and became a force to be reckoned with. I am finally surrendering. I must deal with them. But two of ‘em ain’t gonna be happy they got my attention. What a mystery! Why did this feeling persist that there was some connection among them? John Black – blues, from California; Olav Larsen – country music, from a Norwegian ...

format:    16-bit CD performance:    5 sound:    7 released:    2007 label:    Capitol reviewer:    Matt Fink One of the great examples of a band whose early success raised expectations to impossible heights, Interpol hardly seem like the same band who created their breakthrough Turn On the Bright Lights in 2002. The irony, of course, is that they were so much the same band that made that album that 2004’s Antics suffered in comparison, the classic case of a group whose mastery of one brilliant shade of gray limited the options of what they could get away with in the near feature. The riffs were still jagged, the vocals were still brooding, but for a band who launched an army of bands searching through Gang of Four and Joy Division albums for clues to Interpol’s formula, it seemed like little more than the prelude to something else that must ...

format:    16-bit CDs (2) + Dolby Digital 5.1 DVD performance:    8 sound:    7 released:    2007 label:    RCA Legacy reviewer:    John Sutton-Smith It is probably fair to say that Waylon Jennings was the original outlaw. Willie’s a great American rebel, so is Merle, and Johnny was in a class of his own, but of the modern cowboy outlaws who turned Nashville on its ear, Waylon Jennings was the original brand. The artistic freedom that is taken for granted by contemporary country artists is due in great part to Waylon Jennings. His protest against the Nashville establishment, later joined by Willie and others, revived country music and kept it relevant to this day. On what would have been Jennings’s 70th birthday, RCA/Legacy has come up with Never Say Die: The Final Concert, a commemorative package of his last concert, at the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville in 2000. The three-disc ...