Posted: Thursday, July 6, 2006 7:00 pm
The Hacienda Brothers - “What’s Wrong With Right” - 4½ stars
The award for cover of the year goes to: The Hacienda Brothers for “Cowboys to Girls.”
I’ve never heard of any kind of musical awards for cover songs, but if there was such a prize, the Haciendas would take it hands-down for their countrified version of Gamble & Huff’s soul classic.
A staple of the country soul band’s brilliant live show, “Cowboys to Girls” is just one of the killer tracks on “What’s Wrong With Right,” the band’s second release and the record its fans had hoped it would make.
Balancing covers, including a great “Cry Like a Baby” and a pair of Charlie Rich tunes, with a handful of originals, “What’s Wrong With Right” captures everything that makes The Hacienda Brothers one of those rare special bands.
The hard country of “The Last Time” rubs up against the Irish-tinged “If Daddy Don’t Sing Danny Boy Tonight.” Classic Memphis soul slides into the west on “What’s Wrong With Right,” and the twangy instrumental closer “Son of Saguaro” comes right out of a spaghetti western.
Such is the range of the band fronted by Chris Gaffney and Dave Gonzalez. While Gonzalez of Paladins fame takes the vocal lead on a few tunes, including the soul-drenched original “Keep It Together” and Rich’s swinging “Rebound,” Gaffney is the primary singer here — and his voice is pure soul, slightly gravelly and always connecting with heartfelt emotion.
Gonzalez’s Telecaster guitar leads the instrumental pack, which seamlessly combines the honky-tonk pedal steel with a Stax/Volt groove, creating a soulful mixture that’s perfectly blended by Dan Penn, the soul legend who co-wrote “Cry Like a Baby” and “It Tears Me Up” and whose sensibility perfectly fits The Haciendas.
If you’re among those who pack the Zoo Bar each time the Hacienda Brothers come through town, you’ll want to get “What’s Wrong With Right” right now. And if you haven’t heard them yet, the record is a perfect introduction to one of America’s great bands with a distinct, timeless sound.
— L. Kent Wolgamott
GZO
POP
Anjani - “Blue Alert” - 3 stars
Anjani Thomas is 25 years younger and has considerably more vocal range than her sepulchral-voiced, 71-year-old, singing-poet boyfriend, Leonard Cohen. And with “Blue Alert,” the Honolulu-born, half-Okinawan pianist does the melancholy Canadian bard a big favor, rescuing song fragments from the throwaway pile and turning them into 10 sultry torch songs imbued with Cohen’s world-weary romanticism. The stark arrangements are by Thomas, and the production by Cohen, with the former’s dusky voice and jazzy piano at the forefront. “There’s perfume burning in the air, bits of beauty everywhere/Shrapnel flying, soldier hit the dirt,” Thomas sings at the start of the opening title cut, and the stage is set for a tender affair in which everyone winds up wounded.
— Dan DeLuca
McClatchy Newspapers
Dashboard Confessional - “Dusk And Summer” -2 stars
Chris Carrabba wastes no time punching up the big choruses on “Dusk And Summer,” the fourth Dashboard Confessional full-length release. They come precisely 46 seconds into “The Secret’s In the Telling” and “Rooftops And Invitations” (and earlier on most others) and explode with the obviousness of a sledgehammer.
From his early days as a solo guitar troubadour and part-time punk singing with supposedly naked honesty, Carrabba has been the poster boy for emo. But starting with the U2-like single “Don’t Wait” that opens the disc, “Dusk is a relentless collection of power ballads: almost every track would segue comfortably into a Journey or Aerosmith hit.
The acoustic title track and the intriguingly percussive “Heaven Here” hint at what was and what might have been, respectively, but for the rest of “Dusk,” Carrabba seems desperate for the radio hits he’ll probably get.
— Steve Klinge
McClatchy Newspapers
Frank Black - “Fast Man Raider Man” - 3 stars
Maybe it’s age or growing sage. But the weirdest thing about this 11th solo record from the occasionally reformed Pixies’ front man is how settled Frank Black has become.
Not because, at 41, Black is neither writing nor singing the obtusely paranoid crunchers he did at 21 when Pixies began.
Rather, it’s because this Black seems so comfortable — muddling through shambling funky folk and crusty sophisticated soul — as if the other Black had never existed.
Stax/Dylan instrumentalists Steve Cropper and Spooner Oldham get joined by scads more session cats (Al Kooper, Levon Helm) to roar, roll, hoot and toot — gently, exquisitely — across smoothly complex roots jazz (“If Your Poison Gets You” is like Tom Waits fronting Steely Dan), huffy ballads (“Don’t Cry That Way”), cinematic folkies, and Cajun corkers. And Black? He’s just gruffly cooing, ruminatively but coolly, about adoration, coal miners, Katrina and parenthood, leaving the tweaked sorrows of that other Black far behind. If he ever was there to begin with.
— A.D. Amorosi
McClatchy Newspapers