Fastball
The Harsh Light of Day
hollywood records
Buy it at Amazon.com
A lot of ink has been spilled over Fastball's success, with 1998's platinum album All the Pain Money Can Buy, the Grammy nominations, the high-profile tours, and the fact that a few months before the out-of-left-field hit single "The Way" took off, the threesome was still working day jobs in Austin. All the Pain was the ticket to fame, and Fastball got more than a year of mileage out of it. The question is, Can the band repeat that phenomenal success? When the follow-up, The Harsh Light of Day, hits stores on September 19, fans will find a group polished by incessant touring and a lengthy stint in the studio. Singer-guitarist Miles Zuniga, singer-bassist Tony Scalzo, drummer Joey Shuffield, and co-producer Julian Raymond tinkered with these songs for four months, and at times it's as if they've been cut loose in a candy store. Case in point: "Love Is Expensive and Free," replete with Brian Setzer's unmistakable guitar stylings and Jose Hernandez and his orchestra's mariachi backing. It's a great song, even if it's oversweetened by the Ray Conniff treatment. "You're an Ocean" is a breezy, guilty pleasure with the word "hit" written all over it. Riding the waves of Billy Preston's pumping piano, Scalzo sings, "You're an ocean, you're an ocean, settle down, settle down, what's the commotion?" with absolutely unaffected giddiness. Zuniga's uncharacteristically dreamy noir ballad "Vampires" segues into Scalzo's "Wind Me Up," a thinly veiled ode to Elvis Costello, all cascading piano and herky-jerky time changes. The eight remaining tracks are laced with hooks, sprinkled with Beatles-esque harmonies, and sweetened with strings and horns. If their last record was all meat and potatoes, The Harsh Light of Day is the rich dessert.
New Bohemians
The Live Mantuak Sessions
(Listen)
Buy this at newbohemians.com
Edie Brickell never seemed to like her fifteen minutes of pop stardom very much, so perhaps it's fitting that the return of the original New Bohemians should end up such a well-kept secret. The same lineup that helped revitalize Deep Ellum in 1985—and made "What I Am" one of secretary-rock's first anthems—has ever so quietly regrouped and gone the indie route to offer up
The Live Mantuak Sessions, a collection of eight new tunes written and recorded in a five-week span last summer. Brickell has admitted they are simply "jams we managed to lasso enough to call songs," but therein lies the beauty: Without commercial expectations or major-label pressure, these tracks are easily the New Bohemians' most intuitive recordings yet. Brickell's voice is as brooding as it is soothing, and the band seems to be taking fewer steps to find a rock-steady funk pocket. Better yet, they've avoided the temptation to trip back to their neo-Dead roots (only the deserving "Spanish Style Guitar" clocks in at over five minutes). All told, it's quite a blueprint for a comeback and more proof that sometimes a band's best work comes when nobody's looking.
Ronald Shannon Jackson & the Decoding Society
Earned Dreams
knit classics
Ronald Shannon Jackson makes a loud and messy brand of music; overabundant notes gush like an uncapped fire hydrant. Like his mentor Ornette Coleman, the Fort Worth drummer is first and foremost a composer. His music, while superficially linked to forgettable jazz-rock fusion creations, pulls a memorable sense of purpose and structure from its depths.
Earned Dreams, along with two others in this nine-title Knit Classics series of hard-to-find Jackson recordings, comes to you live from Fort Worth's Caravan of Dreams, where adventurous fare was once given free reign. Driven with electro-funk impetuosity, Jackson's skintight rim shots rivet a groove under both electric and acoustic bass along with a variety of violin-trumpet-sax-guitar voicings. Jackson's Decoding Society has played home to such notables as saxophonist Zane Massey and guitarist Vernon Reid, both of whom appear here. Reid would go on to fleeting pop stardom with Living Colour. Yet Jackson has stayed his course, rewarding those patient and diligent enough to seek out his work, as this missing chapter from his all-too-infrequent recording career amply demonstrates.
Rodolfo "Fito" Olivares
Zoológico Tropical
f.o.g. sounds
With more than thirty albums under his belt, it would seem that Rodolfo "Fito" Olivares, Texas' king of the tropical sound, is taking a giant leap with his first concept album,
Zoológico Tropical. Not necessarily so. The Houstonian frames his signature alto sax over his trademark cumbia beats in songs that pay tribute to the animals in the zoo, but for all the paeans to kangaroos ("El Paso del Canguro"), frogs ("La Ranita"), and snakes ("Cumbia de la Cobra"), the best thing about the CD is that it provides Olivares an excuse to reprise one of his greatest hits, "La Gallina," the chicken song.
Zoológico Tropical affirms why Olivares remains a dance hall favorite in Texas and Latin America: Sometimes simplicity is more than enough.
Blue October
Consent to Treatment
universal
(Listen)
Buy it at Amazon.com
Art-rock was never my cup of noise—so much so that I never even realized it had practically disappeared until this Houston quintet, currently based in San Marcos, sought to bring it back. With lyrics supremely neurotic and music nicely melodic, the band sounds both skeptical and outraged and uncharacteristically visceral, which effectively compensates for its embrace of several of the genre's clichés. Lead singer Justin Furstenfeld cuts some Michael Stipe moves (good) into his Genesis-era Phil Collins style (bad) shaded with Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson (worse). Lead guitarist Brant Coulter provides the requisite jagged-edged fuzz lines, but his fillips and filigrees on tracks like "James" are more interesting. On songs like "Libby, I'm Listening" Ryan Delahoussaye's violin adds warmth to lines that would normally be played on art-rock's cold, mechanistic synth. There's even a possible hit single in "Holler." If the group doesn't get too big too fast, Blue October should pump life into a dinosaur.
Michael Hall and the Woodpeckers
Dead by Dinner
aznut music
Buy this at michaelhall.org
Dead by Dinner (Aznut Music), the debut CD by Michael Hall and the Woodpeckers, arrives in stores this month. Hall has been an associate editor of
Texas Monthly since June 1997.
