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Music Room
Funk This
CDImage:
Artist:
Chaka Khan
Label:
Burgundy Records
Review by:
Chaka Khan
Ever since her early days fronting the band Rufus, when she implored us to “Tell Me Something Good,” Chaka Khan has had unmistakable pipes. The funk equivalent of Gladys Knight, Khan has been an underrated vocalist for most of her career. Sure, she has eight Grammy awards, but what good are tiny golden gramophones when your music isn’t getting out to the masses?
How good is she? Well, she’s probably the only woman capable of taking a Prince song and making it her own. She proved this with the 1989 single “I Feel for You.” She proves her jaw-dropping interpretation was no fluke on her new CD, Funk This, where she takes on The Purple One’s “Sign O’ The Times.”
Coming in at just over an hour, Funk This is a solid collection of R&B ballads and sexy dance tunes. You’d have to be dead not to want to get up and dance to this 13-song collection.
Featuring guest performances by Mary J. Blige, Tony Maiden and Michael McDonald (who performs a duet with Khan on a surprisingly soulful remake of Carly Simon’s “You Belong to Me”), Funk This shows that
Khan can still tear it up!
Sunseed
CDImage:
Artist:
Hayley Sales
Label:
Universal
Review by:
Cindy Filipenko
Like any right-thinking 20-year-old hipster, Hayley Sales counts among the musicians she admires Jack Johnson, Ben Harper and Dave Matthews. The difference between Sales and her contemporaries is that she is competition
for any of aforementioned singer-songwriters.
Sales’ first major-label release, Sunseed, is a triumph. With a feel-good message, philosophy-light lyrics and fancy fret work, the first single, “What You Want,” is Jack Johnson meets Norah Jones. Sales also sounds suspiciously like Jones on “Wish You Were Here,” as well as on Sunseed’s other more obviously adult-contemporary offerings.
However, unlike Jones, Sales employs a phrasing that pays homage to ’40s jazz—and, surprisingly, it works. In fact, this album is so well produced that, while it may offer nods to the familiar, it never veers into cloying or derivative territory.
With a guitar style reminiscent of Johnson, an attitude that echoes the cool of Harper, and Matthews’ sense of disenfranchisement, Sales is a talent to reckon with. The Vancouver Island resident lives on an organic blueberry farm that also houses the other family business, a recording studio relocated from her birthplace of Washington, D.C. The studio’s clients included Miles Davis, Sweet Honey in the Rock and The Grateful Dead.)
With a solid musical pedigree, groovy connections (Wavy Gravy still records at the blueberry farm) and right-on politics, Sales could be the post-millennial It Girl.
A debut to note.
Nothing is Free
in
CDImage:
Artist:
Carolyn Mark
Label:
Mint Records
Review by:
Cindy Filipenko
Nothing is Free reinforces the indisputable fact that Carolyn Mark is a simply superb songwriter. Period.
The standout here is “Pictures at 5,” the witty heartbreaker that features the refrain that became the title of her fourth CD, one that could proudly stand alongside the best of Mary Chapin Carpenter and Lucinda Williams:
“She was long, tall and blonde and drinking white wine/parked in the spot that used to me mine/ But I gotta confess, I was strangely impressed/I thought ‘Mmm, lace panties’ when I looked up her dress.”
A new-country departure from what is essentially a solid collection of alt-country weepers, this song could easily be a hit. Like label-mate and side-project pal Neko Case, Mark takes traditional country compositions and gives them a contemporary patina. She has an engaging vocal style—her smoky alto is a throwback to the likes of Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline and Brenda Lee.
The heavy string arrangements and clean production offer a timeless authenticity to songs like “The 1 That Got Away (with it)”—a hurtin’ song about traversing the grey area between being an exciting new mistress and a boring old wife.
Watch out for the tears in your beer when you put on Nothing is Free. And you’ll want to put it on often—it’s a beauty.
http://www.carolynmark.com
The Light Fantastic
CDImage:
Artist:
Cara Luft
Label:
Blue Case Tunes
Review by:
Cindy Filipenko
While Cara Luft may not be a household name, her sound will be familiar to roots audiences as one-third of the original Wailin’ Jennys. She has now ventured out on her own with The
Light Fantastic.
On songs like “Give it Up” and “No Strength,” Luft comes across like a grown-up rebel girl. On “Give it Up” she admonishes a faithless lover, singing “I’m too old for games honey/ But you know the old ones are the best/
If you ever find your way out of prep school you can call me….” These two guitar-focused songs tackle what it means to be a woman— and the refusal to suffer the same bullshit you did as a girl. Here, it seems, Luft fits the model of the dynamic yet sensitive girl with a guitar, along the lines of Shawn Colvin.
However, the idea of a viable country career is also within the range of possibilities for Luft. The twangy weeper “Down to the River” and the travellin’ song “There’s the Train,” with its pitch-perfect strings, are deceptive in their simplicity—like the best country music.
But the real standouts here are the album’s least commercial pieces. With its nod to philosophers Albert Schweitzer and Friedrich Nietzsche, the use of Eastern instruments and Luft’s hypnotic arrangement, the nearly six-and-a-half-minute, spiritually evocative opus “The Light” is quite simply stunning.
The Light Fantastic is the fulfillment of a talent hinted at on the Wailin’ Jennys’ second album, 40 Days.
http://www.caraluft.com
Large Bird Leaving
CDImage:
Artist:
Cori Brewster
Label:
Independent
Review by:
Cindy Filipenko
Large Bird Leaving is Cori Brewster’s fourth album, appearing almost 10 years after her critically acclaimed 1998 CD, Stones. In the meantime, Brewster, who became a mother along the way, has matured considerably as an artist. The 12 songs that make up Large Bird Leaving, notably “What Casanova Told Me” and “Broken Compass” have a tone reminiscent of Mary Chapin Carpenter’s gentle yet compelling storytelling. More country than folk, the string-heavy arrangements on Large Bird Leaving are pure roots. Born in Banff, Alberta, to one of the area’s long-established families, Brewster has always made the Rocky Mountains her home. This rich and dynamic landscape is as much a character in her songs as the people who populate her tunes. For example, on “Look for the Sun” she writes: “The magic of these mountains/Are nowhere to be found/When the clouds circle around them/The wind howls a ghostly sound.” Large Bird Leaving is an incredibly well produced album, with credit in that area being shared by Brewster and Murray Pulver. Pulver is an exceptionally talented producer whose previous projects include the Wyrd Sisters’ Sin and Other Salvation and Dominique Reynolds’ Coming Home. Like most country-folk-roots albums, Large Bird Leaving yields no obvious singles, but it does make for satisfying listening. Recommended.
Link: http://www.coribrewster.com/