Auditory stimuli
I've been trying to buy music in discrete clumps rather than buying continuously, mostly in hopes that this new strategy will result in greater restraint. I realized it isn't working, as a shipment from Amazon.com arrived earlier this week and I made an emergency trip to Tower before choir practice on Thursday. In any event, here are some of the highlights.
The second of U2's decade retrospectives is out (The Best of 1990-2000). As with the previous collection there are two versions of a new song (this time around it's "Electrical Storm"). While I don't enjoy all of the remixes on the first disc, there's an awful lot of music there, almost all of it in its original form. The second disc is worth having, too, especially if you hadn't been collecting singles along the way. I already had all of the material on the second disc, but "North and South of the River" alone is worth getting the second disc for. Oh, and it comes with a DVD with some music videos and stuff. All in all, this is a value-packed set.
The Wallflowers, one of my favorite bands from the late 1990s, have a new album out, Red Letter Days. I've been enjoying this album for a few days now. Jakob Dylan and his cohorts continue to craft hook- and tuneful songs even in the breach left by guitarist Michael Ward. "If You Never Got Sick" is one of the nicest lovestruck songs I've heard since R.E.M.'s quiet, beautiful "At My Most Beautiful" (off the underappreciated Up). A review in Sound and Vision dinged the album for being too monotonic, but I find it to be a lot more variegated than Pearl Jam's latest, Riot Act. As Sonya put it, Riot Act has two halves, each of which sounds pretty much the same. Pearl Jam has three guitarists by now and I'm glad they can still rock, but I could have gone for a bit more texture. Okay, a lot more texture. (Which reminds me: I need to get my copy of No Code back from Andy.)
Britt steered me towards Spoon's Kill the Moonlight and I now do unto others. Sometimes goofy but never silly, this is indeed some of the best rock I've heard this year. This is rock with passion, humor, and verve.
Posted by ned at November 16, 2002 01:42 PM