Feed: Rolling Stone Album Reviews - AggScore: 80.1
Artist:
Sheryl Crow
Review:
Before she became the omnipresent babe at grizzled-rock-star
reunions, Sheryl Crow was a Missouri gal with a big voice, a
mutable country-rock countenance and a lust for pop hooks. The
loping "Leaving Las Vegas" launched her eclectic Grammy-sweeping
1993 debut, which also had L.A. folk funk, piano-bar blues, even a
Dylan-cum-R.E.M. "rap" ("The Na-Na Song"). The bonus disc doesn't
exhume her never-released 1992 album (try the Internet), but it has
worthy takes on Eric Carmen's 1975 power ballad...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Date Published: Nov 09, 2009 - 11:23 am
Artist:
Leona Lewis
Review:
Call Leona Lewis a diva of the old-fashioned variety: a singer
who uses her rafter-rattling voice to dramatize female suffering.
On her second album, the U.K. belter delivers synth arrangements
that arc skyward, toward Simon Cowell's mountaintop redoubt. Lewis
is technically flawless, but behind lyrics about "the scars on my
heart," there's little personality — you miss a little of
Mariah and Whitney's supersize ego.
Rating:
2.5 Stars
Date Published: Nov 09, 2009 - 11:03 am
Artist:
Paul McCartney
Review:
Forty-four years after the Beatles first played Shea Stadium,
Paul McCartney returned to Queens to play the first concert at Citi
Field. With an exceptionally well-preserved voice, Macca plows
through Beatles and Wings hits, plus solo gems. This is McCartney's
sixth live album since 1990 — most with a nearly identical
version of "Hey Jude" and "Live and Let Die." Skip to a blazing
version of "Day Tripper," which hadn't been touched since the
1960s. Best is "A Day in the Life," featur...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Date Published: Nov 09, 2009 - 10:17 am
Artist:
Dave Rawlings Machine
Review:
Recorded largely in Nashville's famed RCA Studio B, Dave
Rawlings' solo bow is as rooted in old-timey verisimilitude as his
work with Gillian Welch. His tenor and understated acoustic-guitar
work carry songs like "Ruby," which packs a Seventies Topanga
Canyon vibe. The head-turners are the unplugged "To Be Young (Is to
Be Sad, Is to Be High)," written with Ryan Adams, and Conor
Oberst's "Method Acting": songcraft as soul-baringly timeless as
Twenties Delta blues.
Rating:
4 Stars
Date Published: Nov 09, 2009 - 10:16 am
Artist:
Norah Jones
Review:
When you've sold 36 million albums, you can afford to reinvent
yourself endlessly. But Norah Jones' blessing, or curse, is how she
remains her imperturbably chill self in any of her guises, be it
hip-hop soul diva (Q-Tip's "Life Is Better") or jilted lover
drifting through an art film (My Blueberry Nights). For
her fourth LP, her liveliest, she rolls with producer Jacquire King
(Tom Waits, Modest Mouse) and hires feisty session men, including
guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Joey Waronker....
Rating:
3.5 Stars
Date Published: Nov 09, 2009 - 10:10 am
Artist:
Snow Patrol
Review:
Snow Patrol found a wide audience as a kind of Coldplay minus
the world-conquering aspiration. The Irish lite rockers' glistening
atmospherics and genteel grandiosity made sweeping melancholy feel
fragile and private. This two-CD best-of draws mostly from the
three albums they've made since 2004, when singer-guitarist Gary
Lightbody jettisoned his low-fi Belle and Sebastian side on the
austerely gushing Final Straw. Lightbody sums up his
worldview on Snow Patrol's biggest hit, "Chasing Cars":...
Rating:
3 Stars
Date Published: Nov 09, 2009 - 11:10 am
