Artist: Album (label, release date) 1-5 stars
Dead Can Dance: Momento: The Very Best of Dead Can Dance (Rhino, October 25, 2005) ****
Josh Joplin Group: The Best of the Josh Joplin Group (Artemis Nashville, October 18, 2005)***
Susan Tedeschi: The Best of Susan Tedeschi (Tone Cool, October 18, 2005) ***
Boy Sets Fire: The Day The Sun Went Out (Equal Vision, October 18, 2005) ***
Dead Can Dance: Momento: The Very Best of Dead Can Dance
In some respects, I've always been resistant to Dead Can Dance. I always thought of them as exotica more than anything else; languid grooves with a smorgasboard of sounds and textures copped from the world; worldbeat for people who can't take the real thing undiluted. However, after encountering them in enough sets and settings in a variety of situations, I've come to appreciate their experimentation and their studio obsessive fusion of eastern and western motifs. So "The Ubiquitous Mr. Lovegrove" is sultry and sinister, and Brendan Perry's vocal has some soul. "Enigma of the Absolute" is wrapped around chiming keyboards and a string quartet, buried like ghosts under layers of studio haze. "The Song Of The Sibyl" benefits from Lisa Gerrard's vocals, which mixes middle-eastern call-to-prayer touches with Gothic European. "Neirieka" offers a stew of eastern cues that is ominious and invigorating, with its cutting vocal and forward leaning percussion. It all still adds up to a lot of signifying that probably means nothing. But it ain't pop music, and its studio accomplishments are pretty breathtaking. And nothing wrong with exotica either, you just have to be in the right frame of mind. Momento: The Very Best of Dead Can Dance is a handy fifteen-track sampler, probably all a non-convert needs. For those wanting more, Rhino's earlier multimedia box Dead Can Dance 1981-1998 offers a complete portrait at a heftier price tag.
Josh Joplin Group: The Best of the Josh Joplin Group
If R.E.M. deserves credit for inspiring many 80's roots-rock and jangle-pop bands, they should also be credited, for better and worse, for inspiring many 90's adult alternative acts, too. Josh Joplin's (no relation to Janis, nor Scott, for that matter) voice is almost a ringer for Michael Stipe, and his group has the guitars-with-muted-textures-in-back of 90's era R.E.M. The lyrics tend towards impressionistic and vague, and the production is always tasteful. However, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The semi-hit "Camera One" is an excellent piece of radio fare; "Human" is an acoustic epic with a lilting melody and nice guitar work on the fills that builds into an almost psychedelic crescendo, the lyrics are overambitious but don't trip themselves up. However, "I Am Not The Only Cowboy" opens with a ridiculous spoken rap over acoustic guitar before Joplin, sounding like Stipe again, sings the opening of the first verse, earnestly, "I am not the only cowboy in this one horse metaphor". Then, the ridiculous rap returns after the verse. An enormous-sounding strings production wells up before the third rap. The rest of this displays similar pros and cons; some good vocals, some bad ones, some good ideas, some bad ones. The playing is solid throughout, even if the production gets a little corny. An apt comparison might also be Dave Matthews, who is a lot better. Best of Josh Joplin Group is kind of a misnomer; it collects only material from two of his five albums.
Article comments
1 - godoggo
"It all still adds up to a lot of signifying that probably means nothing."
Sounds as though their mamma may have beat them with a nonsensical stick.
2 - uao
She should have hit them with her rhythm stick.