PWAC Victoria: Jeff Bateman, Writing Sample

The Reading Room

A selection of music reviews

by Jeff Bateman © 1979-2004

A random selection of my CD reviews. I'm currently responsible for an album-of-the-month pick for Western Living magazine. From 1991-2001, I wrote well over 1,500 reviews for The Record, Canada's weekly music industry magazine, and edited three times as many. My critiques, which generally lean towards hyperbolic praise and rarely go for the jugular, have also appeared in (among others) Vancouver Magazine, Teen Generation, Music Express, The Ottawa Revue and deep within the virtual pages of Amazon.com.

Western Living

Bottleneck
Late Nights, Early Mornings
Black Hen/2003
Mercifully not another monochrome folk-roots band, this young quartet has a delightful split personality that keeps the music fresh and the listener guessing. Scott Smith's songs swing with lilting country and rock accents, while Robyn Kerrigan flashes blues, cabaret and Celtic influences on her equally sublime half of the disc. When the two team up to sing You'll Get By, they even suggest a west coast answer to the classic recordings of Richard and Linda Thompson.

Sarah McLachlan
Afterglow
Nettwerk/2003
Our fair lady of Lilith surfaces with her first album of new songs in six years. No surprises, no major departures, and that's just fine: The lush, richly detailed production is the stuff of a pre-Raphaelite fever dream and the lyrics are aflame with her favourite "into the fire" metaphors. As for The Voice, it remains an instrument of singular purity.

Harry Manx & Kevin Breit
Jubilee
Northern Blues Music/2003
Salt Spring Island bluesman Manx teams with the k.d. lang/Cassandra Wilson guitarist to reinvigorate the folk-blues tradition. Their blend of charbroiled vocals and virtuoso six-string artistry is tailor-made for the wee small hours at patio parties this summer.

Nelly Furtado
Folklore
DreamWorks/2004
There's a trace of her Cadboro Bay, B.C. roots here, notably one song (Saturdays) that references a teenage job at a Victoria motel. But Furtado, 25, is now a global star redefining worldbeat in her own likeness with this mature, thrillingly buoyant second album. Guest turns from New York's classical moderne Kronos Quartet and banjo maestro Bela Fleck hint at Furtado's ambition. Bravo!

The Be Good Tanyas
Chinatown
Nettwerk/2003
The littlest birds still sing the prettiest songs, though on their second album the wonderful Vancouver-based trio is trilling a darker if no less melodious tune. Acclaimed in the U.K., beloved by neo-traditionalist folkies, they belong in your nest, too.

Vancouver Magazine

Philip Glass The Secret Agent (Nonesuch). The minimalist goes for maximum impact with this breathtaking score for the recent film of Joseph Conrad's novel.

The Pixies Death to the Pixies (4AD). Terrific memorial to the iconoclastic Boston quartet (1987-91) doubles as an alternative-rock Rosetta stone.

Katell Keineg Jet (Warner). Art songs with folk underpinnings from a remarkable Welsh singer who can shift from beatific to banshee in a heartbeat.

Tarnation Mirador (Reprise). Gothic twang from south of the Mason-Dixon. Like Patsy Cline in a high-noon gundown with Ennio Morricone and the Cowboy Junkies.

The Moodsong Project Music for TV Dinners (Caroline). A snappy, sassy collection of TV background music circa the late 1950s. Equal parts high camp and dime store anthropology.

Supergrass In It for the Money (Parlophone). Where Oasis is slavishly imitative and Blur too clever by half, these Oxford upstarts get the Britpop equation right with soaring tunes and cheeky swagger.

Primal Scream Vanishing Point (Reprise). Thick swaths of dub, superfly funk and cheesy electronics redefine what was once quaintly known as "head music."

The Byrds Sweetheart of the Rodeo (Columbia Legacy). The genre is called alt.country nowadays, but this 1968 landmark is where American rock first bedded down with Nashville. The phenomenal choirboy yodel of the great Gram Parsons never sounded so sweet.

The Record

Ekova
Heaven's Dust
Six Degrees/Outside/2001
One of the more entrancing worldbeat fusions of recent vintage, the Paris-based Ekova mixes the multilingual vocals of transplanted American Dierdre Dubois with the fiery acoustic work of a pair of North African musicians. There's a light dusting of electronic programming, too, but it's much more subtle than is the norm these days. Dubois is a wildly dexterous singer who fires off lightning-quick flurries of words (often in Arabic) that dissolve into chants, wails and sacred testimony. For their part, Mehdi Haddab and Arach Khalatbari bring on the casbah vibes with oud, kalimba, clarinet, cello and percussion.

Diana Krall
When I Look in Your Eyes
Verve/Universal/2000
The five marquee tracks here augment Krall's world-class trio with an orchestra conducted by the legendary Johnny Mandel. And with the Vancouver Island singer/pianist in typically sultry voice, standards like Let's Fall in Love, I've Got You under My Skin and Let's Face the Music and Dance haven't sounded this fresh and seductive in a long time. Krall is smiling on the cover of this elegantly packaged CD, and that's a pleasant about-face from her usual sullen pout. Even better, a similarly upbeat mood infuses a disc that will keep her at the peak of the jazz vocal game.

Steely Dan
Two Against Nature
Giant/Warner/1999
Older, ostensibly wiser and just as cranky, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan slip back into their classic sound without breaking a sweat. The result is an album that sounds like just another day at the office, which is too bad given that it has been 20 years since they last recorded under a name famously borrowed from author William Burroughs. Fagan's voice has held up well, the clinically sleek jazz/pop fusion is consistent with the latterday Aja/Gaucho period, and the lyrics exhibit the pretzel logic that disciples know and love; Cousin Dupree, for example, is a seemingly innocuous pop single, smooth and catchy, until one catches the menace beneath the deadpan vocals ("what's so strange about a down-home family romance?" pleads Dupree). Equally sardonic are What a Shame about Me, Almost Gothic and Gaslighting Abbie, all coolly rendered slices of tuneful black humour. That the formula has stayed pat, however, makes Two Against Nature less an event than a stale reprise.

Patricia Barber
Companion
Blue Note/EMI/2000
Last year's Modern Cool CD generated hot notices for this Chicago singer/pianist, who inhabits the same turf as Cassandra Wilson and Holly Cole. Now this live set (recorded last summer at the Green Mill, a fabled hometown bar where Al Capone once swilled bootleg whiskey) captures her sass and smarts in winning fashion. In the past she's set music to lyrics by e.e. cummings, Maya Angelou and Virginia Woolfe. Playing piano and Hammond B-3 organ, she retains her drop-dead poise even when remaking less literary fare like The Beat Goes On and Black Magic Woman. Her crack band--guitarist John McLean and percussionist Ruben Alvarez are standouts--shine on the instrumental Like JT, a Barber original dedicated to Jackie Terrasson. And for the woman's sense of humour, check If This Isn't Jazz . . ., where she poses a series of questions: "Is this the real thing, or is it a fake?/Is this smoke in my lungs, or is this a lifestyle mistake?/Will the New York Times say I'm too white or I'm too black?/Shall I complicate the rhythm, shall I give the money back?" Nobody's asking for refunds at this point in her career.

The Rheostatics
The Story of Harmelodia
Perimeter/Universal/2000
Child-like wonders never cease from the Rheostatics. Harry Nilsson's charmingly adult The Point (1971) is an apt reference for a "children's album" that is less for kids than for adults with an active imagination and taste for whimsy. The deluxe package carries the read-along storyline (which concerns the adventures of two characters named Dot and Bug in the Dr. Seussian world of Harmelodia). "It was soft and sad and it soothed her like a warm balm," Dot says at one point, and that sums up the album's mood neatly. The narration weaves through a typically quirky, invariably hummable numbers beginning with Martin Tielli's I Fab Thee--"a happy song," muses Dot, "that doesn't sound like it was dug out of a tomb"; it instantly joins the long list of Rheos tunes playing in high rotation on that great jukebox in the sky (if not commercial radio). Dave Bidini's I Am Drumstein and Tim Vesely's The Music Room end part one in giddy style, while part two is highlighted by the Munchkin-voiced Bee Sky Opus in Magenta and a pair of tracks sung by Sarah Harmer. Leaps of fancy like this are rare indeed, and it's rarer still that the "there's no place like home" conceit is rendered with such vital originality.

Chantal Kreviazuk
Colour Moving and Still
Columbia/Sony/1999
After an assured 1997 debut, the young Winnipeg singer/songwriter begins to assert her personality in a more focused, emotionally resonant way here. Producer Jay Joyce (The Wallflowers, Gillian Welch) trades the conservative piano-based pop of the first album for a far edgier canvas of sounds. That's the case with the upbeat numbers--Dear Life, the acoustic-based lead single Before You, the funked-up Soul Searching--as well as more atmospheric tunes such as the opener Blue and the Kate Bush-like Eve. "So much of today's society is geared towards an unattainable goal of youth, beauty and wealth," she says in the album notes. "This record explores love, loss, hardships and the experiences in life that I think are real and true." Statements like that suggest she has something to offer teens ready to replace their Backstreet Boys posters with Monet prints.

Fountains of Wayne
Utopia Parkway
Scratchie/Warner/2000
The concept: A human-scale ode to growing up in suburbia that does for New Jersey what Pet Sounds did for southern California. The band: An acclaimed crew of pop-rock smart guys led by Chris Collingwood and Adam Schlesinger. The songs: Tight, deliriously tuneful, harmony-laden and built for the ages. The likely result: A lost classic that will generate most of its sales as a reissue a decade hence. If you're a Big Star disciple, you'll get it immediately. And if you're not, just try to resist Amity Gardens, The Valley of Malls, A Fine Day for a Paradise (featuring Ron Sexsmith) or lead single Denise.

Ricky Martin
Ricky Martin
Columbia/Sony/1999
Ole! The latino pop explosion is set to go sky-high with this English-language debut by the ex-Menudo singer (who is followed in early June by the debut album from Jennifer Lopez). And, like it or not, this man be unavoidable for the next nine months minimum. The good news is that rather than a salsa counterpart to the average pin-up star, the 25-year-old has a surprisingly adult appeal that recalls George Michael. The opening one-two of Livin' La Vida Loca (the instantly massive lead single) and Spanish Eyes are tailor-made for top-down summer radio. Shake Your Bon-Bon is dumb fun for the club crowd. And the subtle mix of flamenco with William Orbit's electronics makes Be Careful, Martin's duet with Madonna, a joy for listeners fed up with tonsil-baring dramatics of the Andre Bochelli/Celine Dion variety.

Len
You Can't Stop the Bum Rush
WORK/Sony/1999
Full of in-jokes, between-song goofs, self-referential lyrics, vocordered vocals, Fat Boys imitations and loving shout-outs to their pals, this packs a lot of fun and games into 44 hip-hopping minutes. CHR is warming up fast to Steal My Sunshine, which rates as an early candidate as one of the summer's definitive tracks. Kraftwerk gets its due on the catchy The Hard Disk Approach, and it along with the riff-rocking Feelin' Alright and the '99 party anthem Cold Chillin' rate as future airplay candidates. Yes, there's as much silliness here as bona fide tunes, but Len is undeniably its own thing--and that's a rare quality that counts for plenty when you're dealing with the same demographic that worships the Beastie Boys.

Jeff Bateman
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Last updated: February 1, 2004 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/batemn03.html