Western Stars
Bruce Springsteen
Western Stars
Columbia Records
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Seems like the Boss has taken a circuitous route to his newest material. I’ve aged considerably in the five and a half years since his last studio release. Just ask my forehead. I reckon he’s been busy plotting, then implementing, then celebrating his Broadway Takeover. Hats off, Bruce. That guy has put the work in. His latest is called Western Stars, and it’s unlike anything I’ve heard from him before. The press has pretty consistently referenced the late 60s/early 70s California Country Gold and “folk-pop balladry” as obvious influences on the sound, but I don’t hear it. Maybe because I don’t know what any of that means, I can’t quite put my finger on what I am hearing. I mean, I can’t get a handle on my feelings for it despite multiple, multiple listens. I’ll try it. It’s high time.

I know this much: I enjoy the record as a whole, but there’s not a song on Western Stars that sends me sprinting to the turntable for repeated listens. The album is certainly greater than the sum of its songs. If I’d heard “Sleepy Joe’s Cafe” by itself, I’d have been in danger of dismissing the rest of the work out of hand. And I’d have missed out on “Drive Fast (The Stuntman).” Western Stars is a cinematic experience, and that one’s the crux of the story in my book. “I got two pins in my ankle and a busted collarbone / A steel rod in my leg, but it walks me home.” (Lyrics reprinted without permission.) Those are objectively well-written lines. I don’t think anyone’s fool enough to debate me about the Boss’s acumen when it comes songwriting time. He communicates, “pushing on in the face of insurmountable odds and weariness,” as well as anyone I can think of. Hell, he’s made a legendarily successful Rock and Roll career out of that. Western Stars just puts that character in a different costume. And gives him some Viagra along with “two raw eggs and a shot of gin” in the title track. Whatever gets you through the shoot, cowboy.

Here’s the thing: there’s no E Street Band blasting the doors off the frame during Western Stars.

But there’s a glockenspiel, a flugelhorn, and a bassoon. Mostly, there are strings. That is to say entire “string sections.” Two of them, according to the liners. That would normally send me screaming for the volume knob in an attempt to mitigate my exposure, but I’ll be damned if Ol’ Bruce hasn’t pulled it off. I’ve purchased Bruce’s last three studio releases, but neither Wrecking Ball nor High Hopes were retained. I’ll be keeping Western Stars though. At least long enough to form a cogent opinion of it. I’m not ready to fork over the deed to my saloon in exchange for the master tapes, but it’s certainly a compelling sound.

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Western Stars is a solid listen, both from a song quality standpoint and from a quality of vinyl perspective. Which is great news because I picked up a long-anticipated vinyl copy of the Ghost of Tom Joad reissue a while back, and I was embarrassed by the quality of the pressing. No such issues with Stars. The two discs are deeply silent where they need to be, which allows all those cinematic sonic landscapes to materialize unadulterated as they gallop past your eardrums. Western Stars might not be my favorite Bruce album, but it’s better than no Bruce at all.

Let's Rock
Black Keys
“Let’s Rock”
Nonesuch
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Doesn’t it seem like the Black Keys used to be amongst the most prolific popular Rock outfits of all time? I mean, they were producing records at a 1960s pace, and you couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing their music as the soundtrack to the commercials. All of the commercials. You couldn’t go to a sporting event of any description without hearing the Keys blasting from the PA system along with some asshole telling you to “make some noise!!!” Then, they disappeared. I was starting to think that they’d cashed in, retired to a remote island, and were lighting their cigars with flaming hundred dollar bills. And they may have done those things, but they didn’t turn the lights out all the way. They’ve just released an album called “Let’s Rock.” The quotation marks are built into the album title; they’re not meant to clarify the content of the sentence preceding this one. It’s a direct quote of a man’s last words before the authorities switched on the electric chair that he was sitting in. This happened in Tennessee, where the Black Keys and every other musician in the world seems to live now. To drive the point home, the band chose an image of the offending device as their cover art. What does it all mean? I don’t know. I know it doesn’t mean what I thought it did, though — not a bit.

I was advised that “Let’s Rock” was a return to the band’s roots. But when I think of the early days, I think of the time that I saw the Black Keys at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, GA. There were two players onstage, and they were cranking sludge through their vintage equipment in a way that might have made Mississippi Fred McDowell throw back a shot of moonshine and start juking on a clapboard dance floor with a feather in his hatband. Fans that came onboard before the Keys’s first collaboration with Danger Mouse as their producer (on Attack and Release from 2008) might enjoy similar remembrances. “Let’s Rock” ain’t that. It’s closer to what was found on the mega-selling El Camino (from late 2011) or Brothers (from 2010) minus the keyboards and synthesized sounds. But this is still an elixir for arena rock time-out crowd chanting. There are a couple of songs that jump out as keepers, but they mostly just bleed together and sound like much of what’s come before. And that’s alright. It is, after all, the “Black Keys sound,” and they’ve carved out a nice career for themselves with it. But “Let’s Rock” saw the band returning from a hiatus the likes of which they’d never before experienced. Seems like it would have been a good time to take things out a whole new door or get back to the Blues. I, personally, would have preferred to hear the band retread their earliest aesthetic rather than just run it back to the start of this decade. I have to imagine that the duo can churn out these types of songs with very little effort by now. And it seems like that’s exactly what they did. Maybe there were challenges that are not immediately evident.

Maybe they just wanted to get their feet wet and didn’t want to get too bogged down plotting their comeback. Still, there’s just not a lot to show for the five years that have passed between “Let’s Rock” and Turn Blue. The Keys are still making unoffensive music with catchy hooks that reward more passive than active listening. Maybe that’s just what works in 2019.

Help Us Stranger
The Raconteurs
Help Us Stranger
Third Man Records
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The Raconteurs have been releasing new material with the speed and capacity of an eye dropper since their recorded debut in 2006. They spent 11 long years out of the ring before their most recent assault, Help Us Stranger. The band’s material has always been amongst my favorite iterations of Jack White’s wild imagination, and I still think that Broken Boy Soldiers is one of the finest albums of the last 20 years. We’ve known that Stranger was coming our way for a while now, but I deliberately avoided listening to any of the material in advance of the album’s official release because I wanted to have something to look forward to. Now, it’s here, and I’m looking forward to catching the band live for the first time in a few short weeks. There’s certainly much to explore on Stranger, and much of it is writ large. The material should translate well to the stage. Here’s why…

If Broken Boy Soldiers was a zippy little deuce coupe, then Help Us Stranger is an updated 1970s mean muscle car. It’s probably powered by healthier fuel than what the band was running on previously, and it’s much crunchier than what I’d come to expect from the Raconteurs. The upshot is that it’s not as far removed from White’s solo aesthetic as previous Racs records were. I can even hear echoes of White’s much-maligned Boarding House Reach material in spots. The outside influences are a little easier to tease out too. It sounds like the band resurrected Freddie Mercury, reunited him with the other members of Queen, then funneled them all into the vocal booth to sing over the top of “Shine the Light On Me.” That’s followed immediately by “Somedays (I Don’t Feel Like Trying)” which sounds like some space aged mash-up of “Tuesday’s Gone” and “She’s So Heavy.”
I had a hard time telling Jack White and Brendan Benson apart when they were sharing vocal duties during the band’s earliest era, but they’ve either changed in ways that make them easier to identify, or I’ve become a more discerning listener. They don’t seem to be trading songs so much as trading parts within the same songs now. One might take the lead vocals on a song’s bridge while the other handles the verses and chorus, for example. The similarities are still obvious, but the nuances are now more pronounced too.

The one thing that is clear and obvious on Stranger is Jack White’s guitar work. That is not hard to spot. His pedal that ups the octaves on his solos has almost become his signature as a guitar slinger. This is not a man who is content just playing the same old crap. An album so obviously influenced by history’s Rock Royalty still sounds new blasting from his hands and amps. Help Us Stranger doesn’t submerge itself in the waters of retrospective idolatry, but it nods at some Classic Rock monuments.

You’ll nod too. I can almost guarantee it.

Third Man Pressing knocked it out of the park again on Help Us Stranger. It’s reputed to be a high-tech environment with climate control and the whole schmear. They’ve clearly got their quality control in place, and the uptick in quality since they vacated the forsaken presses at United Record Pressing is conspicuous. This is a fine, old-fashioned single disc Rock and Roll record that sounds pretty good, lasts for about 45 minutes and leaves you wanting more. Ladies and gentlemen, start your engines…

On the Line
Jenny Lewis
On the Line
Warner Bros.
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Jenny Lewis is a bit of an enigma to my ears. She came to me by way of a young lady that I dated shortly after I’d moved to San Francisco in late 2005. This was around the time of Lewis’s solo debut, Rabbit Fur Coat, which was made with the Watson Twins on vocal accompaniment. It’s pretty great and has held its shape over the intervening years. My love for that record has far outlived my brief time with the girl that introduced me to it. I got to see Lewis with the Watsons at one of Neil Young’s Bridge School Benefits a while back, and the acoustic presentation was perfect for a blanket-on-the-amphitheater-lawn kind of day. I’d lost track of Lewis during the interim. She’s all the way back on my radar with her latest long player, On the Line. It’s an altogether different kind of fur coat.

One designed in the 1980s, maybe. That’s not meant to be negative in this instance. There were maybe four great albums made in the 80s, and On the Line would have been a really good one. In the blighted wasteland that is a popular culture in 2019, it counts as a masterpiece. As usual, Lewis has employed a cavalcade of heavy hitters to help her flesh out her sound, and Benmont Tench’s work on the keys stands out as a highlight of the whole work. His single note piano plinking at the start of “Red Bull and Hennessy” mimics the ubiquitous synth sounds from 1983, but with a more earthy, organic timbre. The same could be said of On the Line as a whole. Tench’s B3 solo on “Heads Gonna Roll,” however, sounds like the guillotine itself. Razor sharp, dangerous, and frighteningly beautiful in its angular design. Ringo Starr, Beck, and Jim Keltner drop by to help out too. (So does Ryan Adams, but he’s anathema now.)

Above it all, Jenny Lewis’s voice alternately slinks, prods, lilts, and roars. She’s got some athletically powerful pipes, but she only lets them take the field on special occasions. By contrast, the power and skill in her lyrics are on display throughout. I’m more impressed by her songcraft now than I was when we explored her sophomore release, Acid Tongue, way back in February 2009. The intervening decade (!) has seen Lewis move through a variety of sounds and musical partnerships, and now she’s landed right On the Line. She’s touring in support of this one, and I’d love to see how she pulls this material off live. I’m picturing big hair, glitter, neon, and platform shoes. A boy can dream, right?

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On the Line plays out on a single, well-pressed disc with a deep soundstage filled by a wide variety of interesting textures and sounds. There’s a forest of dense lyrical content to explore, but that damn voice always takes and steals centerstage eventually. I’d been having a hard time finding new releases that are compelling enough to warrant multiple listens, but we’ve got a couple on the line this month. Jenny Lewis’s latest is right up there with the best of them. It’s the sonic equivalent of sugary breakfast cereals for adults. If there were such a thing. Jenny Lewis is her genre.

Tuscaloosa
Neil Young and Stray Gators
Tuscaloosa
Reprise Records
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Golly, it’s a good time to be a Neil Young fan. And unless you are a Neil Young fan that’s been living under a rock with a blindfold on and your fingers jammed in your ears, you probably already know about how stellar the bulk of his Archive releases have been. It’s a giant series that’s been subdivided into smaller ones. Some involve reissues of well-known studio titles (Official Release Series), some document never-before-released studio titles (Special Release Series). My favorites are the warts-and-all live takes from the Performance Series. My favorites of those (so far) are the Fillmore East set from 1970 with Crazy Horse, the Roxy show in celebration of Tonight’s the Night from 1973, and now the one that we’re here for. That would be Tuscaloosa. It’s a quick listen that casts a massive shadow.

Tuscaloosa gives Neil fans everything they’d want in a live set… unless they want Crazy Horse. The first two songs are solo acoustic Neil, and the rest involve the Stray Gators. That band might not have had as much Horsepower on the straightaway, but it probably handled a little better around the curves. Somehow, the Gators carry the anvil grade Rock stuff (“Time Fades Away”) as easily as the feathery Country material (“Old Man”). Mind you; this is the same outfit performing on the same tour that spawned the immediately maligned, then eventually revered, Time Fades Away. That album was mastered from a soundboard recording that was made on one of the earliest digital consoles. It might also be the album that pushed Neil firmly and forever into the analog realm. It is a charming chronicle of a tour that was by all accounts tumultuous. And it sounds like something’s ass not so with Tuscaloosa.

Tuscaloosa was recorded in a basketball arena in the early 1970s and still sounds like a million dollars. Ben Keith’s pedal steel notes waft out of the fray like they’re trying to quell a riot. And Neil’s voice is as endearingly cracked as you’d expect, but there’s no evidence of the need for the reinforcements that were eventually called in to help him complete the tour. I mean, at some point they switched drummers and brought Graham Nash and David Crosby onboard to buoy the vocals. (Can you imagine willfully adding David Crosby to an already tempestuous tour? Like gas on a forest fire. I guess Axl Rose wasn’t available at the time.) The difference between Tuscaloosa’s vibe and Time Fades Away is the difference between shooting a bullet and throwing one. I love them both, but Tuscaloosa shines brighter for sonics and quality of performance. I think you’ll agree.

Tuscaloosa is a three-sided affair with an (increasingly ubiquitous) etching on the fourth. The pressings are flawless (who can we thank for that?) and Neil went to the original analog tapes for mastering. Some notes sting and some notes soothe, but they all have jobs to do. Tuscaloosa is a blue collar, bring-your-lunch-pale-to-work kind of affair. I’m so glad it found its way onto the payroll.