Aha Shake Heartbreak may have blown open the doors of fame for Kings of Leon, but their third full-length album (named for a United Pentecostal Church ministers' conference) could well usher the Nashville foursome directly to rock and roll's zenith. There's hardly a change in plans for the three Followill brothers and their cousin, and that means producer Ethan Johns, a smorgasbord of ...
Manufacturer: Columbia
Manufacturer: Commercial Marketing
An astonishingly intense and ambitious album, Elbow's Cast of Thousands is relentlessly experimental. Having toiled for 10 years over their spellbinding Mercury-nominated debut Asleep in the Back, the maverick Bury five-piece--who were initially hailed as the new Radiohead--have produced a worthy sequel in a comparatively short two years. While mirroring their debut's melancholy ...
While it's tempting to position Elbow next to the sardonic likes of Badly Drawn Boy--mainly because of their proximity to the city of Manchester and their way with an acoustic guitar--Asleep In The Back, their frighteningly competent debut album, bears not the joker's smile. Instead, it comes straight from Manchester's simmering, ugly dark side--eleven tracks of rain-sodden misery, blown up ...
Joel and Ethan Coen have long established themselves as film stylists without peer: from Blood Simple to Fargo, their movies have never been less than fascinating, and there has never been any question that their films could not have been made by anyone else. In T-Bone Burnett, the producer of the soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, they have finally met their match: ...
Manufacturer: Mercury Records Ltd (London)
Typecast them as rootin', tootin' cowboy rockers if you will, but Aha Shake Heartbreak shows the Kings Of Leon have more to offer than beardy rock classicism. Indeed, for all the talk of Neil Young or Creedence Clearwater Revival, the outfit this Nashville-based band of brothers (and one cousin) resembles most is New York new-wavers The Strokes: it's there in Nathan Followill's minimal, ...
Manufacturer: Handmedown/RCA
This is the one jazz record owned by people who don't listen to jazz, and with good reason. The band itself is extraordinary (proof of Miles Davis's masterful casting skills, if not of God's existence), listing John Coltrane and Julian "Cannonball" Adderley on saxophones, Bill Evans (or, on "Freddie Freeloader", Wynton Kelly) on piano, and the crack rhythm unit of Paul Chambers on bass and ...
Manufacturer: Sony Jazz
Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and bluegrass crooner Alison Krauss may not be the likeliest of musical combinations. But on this welcome collaboration album, they work beautifully together, wringing a kind of magic from other people's songs. The key to the album is its versatility. Between them, Krauss and Plant can handle a vast repertoire on their own, and here they take on the lot, from ...
Manufacturer: Decca
Manufacturer: Universal Classics
Called "the Black Album" by many (due to its monochrome cover), Metallica marks the group's entrance into the mainstream, with shorter songs, simpler song structures and slower tempos overall. That said, this is an excellent album, featuring some of the best songwriting Metallica has ever done. "Enter Sandman", "Wherever I May Roam" and "God That Failed", despite being slower and more ...
