Reviews 3 - The Second Disc

Holiday Gift Guide Review: “The Classic Christmas Album” Series

December 5, 2014 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

Johnny Mathis. Frank Sinatra. Perry Como. Steve Vai? Menudo? When it comes to Christmas music, Legacy Recordings doesn’t pull its punches. The label’s series of Classic Christmas Album releases has become a bit of an annual tradition, and this year’s batch of single- and various-artist anthologies once again draws on names both expected and unexpected. While the packages are bare-bones, with no liner notes (but happily with full credits and discographical annotation), the music most certainly is not. Johnny Mathis recorded his first Christmas album in 1958 and his most recent in…

Categories:

Holiday Gift Guide, Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Classic Rock, Country, Pop, Popular Standards/Vocal, Rock

Tags:

Barbra Streisand, Frank Sinatra, Il Divo, Johnny Mathis, Perry Como, Various Artists

Review: John Denver, “All of My Memories: The John Denver Collection”

November 7, 2014 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

“Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,” goes one of John Denver’s most well-known songs. In a little over five minutes – and even less in its single version – “Sunshine” touches on many of the themes most important to the singer-songwriter: nature, love, beauty. Throughout the course of a career sadly cut short when he perished in a plane crash in 1997 aged just 53, Denver revisited these themes over and over again, using his pure, crystalline tone to bring comfort and spread a message of peace. With his boyish good…

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Reviews

Formats:

Box Sets, CD

Genres:

Country, Folk, Pop

Tags:

John Denver

Review: Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, “Riding Your Way: The Lost Transcriptions for Tiffany Music 1946-1947”

August 26, 2014 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

“Pull another chair at the table,” comes the invitation that opens Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys’ Riding Your Way, the new deluxe 2-CD set from Real Gone Music (RGM-0244). “Make room in your heart for a friend,” goes the second song on this collection featuring 50 of the never-before-released Lost Transcriptions for Tiffany Music circa 1946-1947. You’ll want to pull up that chair, and make room for Wills, with this remarkable (and remarkably entertaining) historical find filled with good, old-fashioned cowboy music. Real Gone has given the royal treatment to the…

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Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Country

Tags:

Bob Wills

Review: Hank Williams, “The Garden Spot Programs 1950”

June 30, 2014 by Joe Marchese | 1 Comment

Hello everybody, Garden Spot is on the air/So just relax and listen in your easy rocking chair/Music for the family in the good old-fashioned way/I hope that we can please you, bring you sunshine every day! That bucolic, peppy introduction opened Naughton Farms’ Garden Spot radio program, “the show that brings you all your favorite folk music singers.” One such “folk music singer” in 1950 was Hank Williams. Omnivore Recordings’ new The Garden Spot Programs, 1950 (OVCD-87, 2014) preserves 24 tracks from four of these programs which haven’t been heard since their…

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News, Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Country

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Hank Williams

Holiday Gift Guide Review: Buck Owens, “Buck ‘Em! The Music of Buck Owens”

December 17, 2013 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

No less an eminent personage than American author William Faulkner once said that “a writer needs three things – experience, observation, and imagination – any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.” Country music legend and Bakersfield Sound pioneer Buck Owens, however, utilized all three of those key elements in his songs, which may help explain their timeless stature. Fifty of those recordings are anthologized on Omnivore’s new Buck ‘Em! The Music of Buck Owens (1955-1967) (OVCD-75), a two-CD alternative history of the…

Categories:

Holiday Gift Guide, Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Country

Tags:

Buck Owens

Special Review: Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb Conjure Old Ghosts On Two New Releases

September 11, 2013 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

Since 1967, it’s been difficult to think of Glen Campbell without thinking of Jimmy Webb – and vice versa. When the ace session guitarist interpreted the young songwriter’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” on the album of the same name, the result wasn’t just a Grammy-winning hit single, but the beginning of a partnership that’s survived through six decades. Campbell scored successes with a string of Webb’s songs in the late 1960s (“Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” “Where’s the Playground, Susie”), celebrated his friend’s ouevre with the 1974 LP Reunion, and tapped…

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News, Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Country, Pop

Tags:

Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb

Reviews: Buck Owens, “Honky Tonk Man: Buck Sings Country Classics” and Don Rich, “Sings George Jones”

January 22, 2013 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

With its two latest releases, Omnivore Recordings continues its great Bakersfield rescue mission. Texas-born and Arizona-raised, Buck Owens made his mark in that California city, answering the prevailing “countrypolitan” style with a return to a pure and unadorned honky-tonk sound. But that “natural” sound had roots that ran deep in Bakersfield. Yet Owens’ parallel career as the avuncular, perpetually joking co-host of television’s cornpone Hee Haw may have caused audiences to take his once-adventurous brand of music less seriously, a fact that reportedly wasn’t lost on Buck. Owens eventually was recognized for his towering…

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Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Country

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Buck Owens, Don Rich, George Jones

Review: Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb, “In Session”

October 10, 2012 by Joe Marchese | 2 Comments

What drew together the son of a sharecropper from Delight, Arkansas and the minister’s boy from Eld City, Oklahoma? They were separated by a decade; one conservative, one liberal; one singer, one songwriter; one an establishment country star, the other a long-haired pop wunderkind – the paths of Glen Campbell and Jimmy Webb first crossed when Campbell chose to record Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” in 1967. The Oklahoma kid had written the song as a young staff songwriter at Motown’s Jobete arm, where it was recorded by a…

Categories:

Reviews

Formats:

CD, DVD

Genres:

Country, Pop

Tags:

Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb

Review: Omnivore’s Legends of Music and Comedy, Buck Owens and Ernie Kovacs

June 20, 2012 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

In the pantheon of American comedy legends, you’d likely find Ernie Kovacs, the gifted, gone-too-soon (1919-1962) personality who carved out a niche in the early days of American television. Joining Ernie in that esteemed company might well also be Buck Owens (1929-2006), the influential guitarist and songwriter who made a second career out of joking, a-pickin’ and a-grinnin’ on the cornpone television variety show Hee Haw. However different these two gentlemen are, however, Omnivore Recordings has celebrated both of them in high style with two recent releases, Buck Owens’ Live at the…

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Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Country, Everything Else

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Buck Owens, Ernie Kovacs

Reviews: Three From Real Gone – Mick Fleetwood’s Zoo, Jerry Reed and Durocs

June 8, 2012 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

Real Gone Music has become known for its wide-ranging and eclectic releases, and today we’re looking at three of the most recent, from the countrypolitan stylings of Jerry Reed to the rock animals of Mick Fleetwood’s Zoo and the pure pop of The Dūrocs! Dūrocs, Dūrocs (Real Gone Music RGM-0058, 2012) Are you ready to hear one of the best albums you’ve never heard? Then head straight to the pig pen for the first-ever CD release of Dūrocs. Primarily written and produced by the team of Ron Nagle and Scott Mathews, fun…

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Reviews

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Genres:

Country, Pop, Rock

Tags:

Durocs, Fleetwood Mac, Jerry Reed, Mick Fleetwood, Ron Nagle

Review: Elvis Presley, “Elvis Country: Legacy Edition”

January 3, 2012 by Joe Marchese | No Comments

The title of Elvis Presley’s 1969 double album said it all: From Memphis to Vegas, or if you turned the jacket over, From Vegas to Memphis. Both sides of the singer were on display both on the album and in its title: the superstar showman who had triumphed at Las Vegas’ International Hotel and the onetime Sun Records prodigy who’d periodically returned to his R&B roots. Though no studio album was released in 1970, the singer returned in January 1971 with Elvis Country: I’m 10,000 Years Old, and again the artist was…

Categories:

News, Reviews

Formats:

Genres:

Country, Pop

Tags:

Elvis Presley

Reviews / Country