CD Reviews: January ‘10 | The Beachside Resident

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Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
Summer of Fear
Saddle Creek; 2009

He may have four names, but you only need to call him by this one: unforgettable. I drove past my destination because I was so wrapped up in this album — not once, but twice. Summer of Fear is an album of pain and sadness; it’s the work of a man who’s worn his heart on his sleeve for most his life. Remembering the past with a reverence one can only have when they’ve spent a lot of time in it, he takes us through loss, relationships, childhood, humanity, death, and of course, fear. “The Sound” will have you at the first chord, “Shake a Shot” will make you remember, and “Gold and Grey” will make it all okay. Robinson’s lyrics are honest, raw, and kind of depressing, but all of that comes in contrast to some ballsy Americana-rock which begs to be played somewhere without fear of reprisals. The bare-bones writing on Summer is the work of an artist who calls it like it is and holds your hand while you work your way through it. Sounding somewhere between Dylan and Petty, Summer of Fear needs to be in your life because it’s about your life. – V. Bormann

The Avett Brothers
I and Love and You
Sony; 2009

I and Love and You, the Avett Brothers’ eighth full-length release, is the kind of album you put on to just focus on feeling. The title track will wreck you in all the right ways, “January Wedding” will make you wish you played the banjo, and “Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise” is a song for anyone who’s ever been scared to fall in love. “And It Spread” is a pitch-perfect ode to a broken heart, and “The Perfect Space” is about finding your place, while “Ten Thousand Words” is a pure writers’ song. And if “Kick Drum Heart” doesn’t make you dance, then you don’t have a pulse. “Laundry Room” is about the risks we take for love, “Ill With Want” will speak to anyone caught up in what they don’t have, and “Tin Man” is a theme song for the emotionally unavailable. Elsewhere, “Slight Figure of Speech” is a party song that will remind you of some of the Brothers’ greatest hits, “It Goes On and On” is about jumping off the cliff of emotion for someone else, and “Incomplete and Insecure” tells of being inspired to do better despite the urge for self-destruction. As always, the Brothers deliver a fully beautiful package. – V. Bormann

Paul McCartney
Good Evening New York City
Hear Music/Mercury; 2009

It’s not easy being a Paul McCartney fan. In the eternal battle being waged between the Lennon and McCartney camps, Paul usually comes out the loser, not so much for his sappiness, but for the pesky fact that he’s still drawing breath. How can he compete? With four times as many good tunes, is how. Despite their Tin Pan Alley schmaltz, McCartney songs, at their finest, have no peer. He still is the standard by which all songwriters should be judged, both for his prolificacy and his ear for catchy hooks. So how does he fare live? There’s little in the way of the spontaneity or off-the-cuff improvisation that makes the greatest live albums great, but the lack is made up for by the scope covered on this three-disc set (one’s a DVD). “Live and Let Die” appears, as do “Band on the Run,” “Hey Jude,” and “Let It Be,” but Good Evening is exceptional (it’s also his sixth live album since 1990) for its inclusion of comparative sleepers and rarities: “I’ve Got a Feeling”; the brilliant “Calico Skies”; “Mrs. Vandebilt”; “Eleanor Rigby”; “Paperback Writer”; “I’m Down”… the list goes on. At it’s best, Good Evening reminds us (again) that “The Cute One,” though jowly now, still has the power to move epic crowds in the way U2 will by proxy once he’s kicked the bucket. As it stands now, that’s Sir Paul you see up there on stage ruling the roost. – T. Bennison

Various Artists
In The Red Zone: The Essential Collection of Classic Dub
Shanachie, 1997

Dub was born in the early ‘70s of the Jamaican music business’s mean economic circumstances. It was cheaper to put one song on a single than two, so record labels encouraged engineers to liven up instrumental versions of the a-side with echoes, drop-outs, and all manner of studio trickery. The style caught on with the Jamaican record-buying public and expatriates took it to England, where it was championed by punks like The Clash and The Raincoats. Dub’s golden age ended in the early ‘80s when reggae producers turned to dinky-sounding computerized accompaniment, but in the ‘90s the crossover success of Massive Attack and the tireless championing of dub by post-rockers like Tortoise renewed interest in the style and spurred a plethora of reissues. If you want to sample the genre but don’t know where to start, consider this swell, clinker-free collection. It features all the key names and a few undersung obscurities, and it’ll give you a good handle on the virtues of dub as well as the variations worked by its leading practitioners. Using outrageously outmoded gear, Lee Perry processed horns and guitars into unrecognizably psychedelic sounds that swirled around steely bass lines and implacable drums. King Tubby preferred to accentuate unstoppable rhythm tracks by dropping everything else in and out of the mix, while Augustus Pablo essayed indelible melodica solos over gentler, more pastoral rhythms. –- B. Meyer