Yesterday, I wrote about a few books on my desk that slipped to the back burner. Here are a few albums that met the same undeserved, neglected fate: Phil Spector Presents the Philles Album Collection (Sony Legacy): Those who know Phil Spector-produced artists by their singles and hope to find pirate treasure in their album [...]
Tag Archives: Review
The Reading List: Oil and Water, Portishead and the Stooges
January 31, 2012 – 4:47 pm
We’ve spent most of the last month dealing with Christmas, the February issue and the Best of the Beat. Here’s some of the stuff that landed on my desk that I really wanted to write about but couldn’t quite get to: Oil and Water by Steve Duin and Shannon Wheeler: This graphic novel tells the [...]
An Inventive Romeo and Juliet
December 8, 2011 – 11:26 am
The strength of the Nola Project‘s Shakespeare productions has been their homemade inventiveness. The company has used it wits and creativity to overcome budgetary restrictions, usually to effective results. In the production of Romeo and Juliet that opens tonight at the New Orleans Museum of Art, the cast circumvented the cost of scabbards by sheathing [...]
Prospect.2: Sophia is Here
October 27, 2011 – 1:53 pm
One of the site-specific pieces in Prospect.2 didn’t make it in time for opening weekend. Francesco Vezzoli‘s statue “Portrait of Sophia Loren as the Muse of Antiquity (after Giorgio de Chirico)” was held up by U.S. Customs, but it is now in its place in Piazza d’Italia, and it’s the sort of installation that makes [...]
Van Hunt: Thinning the Herd
September 30, 2011 – 10:43 am
Last night’s Van Hunt show at Tipitina’s presented easily the most uncompromising popular music I’ve heard since Sparks. He found his audience through his self-titled debut album that presented him as a retro-soul singer—an identity he furthered by singing “Family Affair” with Joss Stone for a Sly and the Family Stone tribute album. Since then, [...]
Nothing Pretty
September 29, 2011 – 1:16 pm
His time in New Orleans was transitional for Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. In Pretty Hate Machine, Daphne Carr examines not the early days of the band but its impact on individual lives. The book is part of Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series, and Carr uses the album as the focal point to consider the [...]
Stax in the ’70s
September 14, 2011 – 10:44 am
Concord Records has been reissuing the Stax Records catalog since acquiring it in 2004, but if it’s releasing them in a systematic way, the system has eluded me. Nonetheless, I scored a yahtzee one day last week when Rufus Thomas’ Do the Funky Chicken (1969), the Dramatics’ Whatcha See is Whatcha Get (1971) and Shirley [...]
New from Piety: Faithfull and Laurie
September 2, 2011 – 2:18 pm
Last year, Marianne Faithfull and actor Hugh Laurie (star of House) made pilgrimages to Piety Street Recording to cut albums, each with some measure of New Orleans beyond the studio they were cut in. Faithfull’s Horses and High Heels was cut with a core band of Carlo Nuccio on drums, George Porter, Jr. on bass, [...]
Marquee Girls? Some Moon?
August 30, 2011 – 3:05 pm
While New York tries to clean up from Hurricane Irene’s devastation—newspaper boxes almost tipped over!—it seems appropriate to review two New York-centric entries in Continuum Books’ 33 1/3 series: Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman and Some Girls by Cyrus R.K. Patell. The two NYU professors conceived of their books as loosely paired, one looking at [...]
