Shawn Mullins - "9th Ward Pickin' Parlor"(Vanguard, 2006)

Hear the music:
Shawn Mullins - "Cold Black Heart"

Note: The above mp3 is here courtesy of Vanguard Records. It will be removed from this site in two weeks, and is here to encourage you to visit http://www.shawnmullins.com, where you can purchase the entire album if you find his music appealing. Support indie artists by purchasing their work -- and help prove our generation's more than a bunch of thieves.

There's something to be said for returning to one's roots. Shawn Mullins had recorded seven solid folk records before releasing Soul's Core on Columbia in 1998. Suddenly "Lullabye," the spoken-word song that rocketed to fame, became synonymous with "Shawn Mullins" and it obscured the fact that Soul's Core was really the eighth record from an accomplished folk musician.

Instead of letting him follow it up with a ninth, Columbia had him release his "sophomore" album in 2000 with an aim toward radio pop, hoping to find a new "Lullabye." When the album flopped, he fell off the face of the earth. Thankfully he's found a new home at Vanguard, and 9th Ward Pickin' Parlor, recorded in New Orleans' ninth ward in the months before Hurricane Katrina, is his finest record since Eggshells.

9th Ward Pickin' Parlor is full of gems. "Cold Black Heart" revives the classic murder ballad, reconstituted in the form of an uptempo celtic melody supported by Mullins' impressive performance on Charango, an Andean banjo. "Solitaire" is a bare-bones acoustic melody that blends Norah Jones jazz vocals with a very Chris Thile-influenced picking style. This is an album where no song sounds alike -- which makes the complete listening experience all the more rewarding.

What would have hurt Mullins had he remained on Columbia -- the lack of singles -- is actually a benefit here. 9th Ward Pickin' Parlor is an album-lover's disc, a release that rewards the listener for sitting back and enjoying the entire entire thing in one sitting. While there are standout tracks, like the Black Crowes influenced "Faith" or Mullins' civil-war-meets-Iraq-war ballad "Lay Down Your Swords, Boys," you likely won't hear any of them on the radio any time soon.

All of which is perfectly acceptable, since Mullins has clearly rediscovered his muse on this album. His latest effort is liable to float under the radar of most listeners, but those who enjoyed Soul's Core beyond the initial singles are sure to find this album worth a purchase. Even for the uninitiated it serves as an impressive folk album on its own merit. Let's just hope he won't take another six years to follow it up with more.

Aceyalone - "Magnificent City"(Project Blowed / Decon, 2006)

Hear The Music
Aceyalone - "Supahero"

The world of Underground hip hop can be a mixed bag. On one hand, the lyricists tend to be overly poetic in a tacky overwrought sense, letting artistic hubris overtake actual quality of content. And beat producers often end up relying on album-length instrumental symphonies to garner them a reputation.

With this album, Aceyalone, one of Los Angeles' most acclaimed underground rappers, joins ranks with RJD2, a Philadelphia producer known for his multilayered instrumental compositions. The result is a mixed bag -- the sum of the parts forms a below-average album, but a handful of tracks on this release are better than most of what the hip hop world has produced in a long while.

Both Aceyalone and RJD2 stick with what they know best. On the songs in which their two unique styles meld, the result is sublime. "I want to love you 'cause that's my duty; it's not your booty, it's not your beauty," Acey raps slyly on "Supahero," over a beat so insanely layered with depth that I've never heard anything quite like it. The track, an anthemic ode to women from a flawed male character, succeeds because of its ear-catching beat and the spectacular syncopation of Acey's fast-paced lyrical assault. "Baby I'm your star but you're lookin' for a superhero. But Superman don't fly no more 'cause he ain't down with the people ... he ain't nowhere to be found when he should be fighting evil." The track runs the gamut from stylish hip to humorous, and it's such an ear-catching hook you won't be able to stop yourself from joining in on that chorus.

But not every song manages to mesh the two competing styles of Aceyalone and RJD2. "Moore" features a spastic electro beat melded matched up with a pretentious lyric about greed and gluttony that just never gets off the ground. "Solomon Jones" has a jazzy soulful beat that gets wasted on a spoken word story-poem about "big bad Solomon Jones." The song is one gigantic cliché and repetitive: "Back at the bar, playing cards, lookin' hard, was big bad Solomon Jones. And watchin' over his luck was the love of his life, this lady that was known as Simone." The entire song's like that. Sometimes bad writing's just bad writing. It's just hard to get behind a meandering lyric that, when it reaches it's lyrical punchline at the end, a new character suddenly appears, kills Solomon Jones and runs off with his girl. There's no reward, and it kills the momentum of the album.

The whole album's like that. As soon as a song grabs at your ears, it is replaced by an inferior one that leaves the listener wanting to skip around, pick and choose -- and when only a few songs end up being worth choosing, it's almost better to buy those songs online from Napster and leave the rest of the album behind.

What's disappointing is that this could have been a great record. The jazzy samples of "All For U" suggest Acey's got an interest in blending Will Smith vocal style with the music of Parliament Funkadelic. "Heaven" features a rock-metal beat that lifts from classic rock bands like Zeppelin, then morphs into an impressive lyrical feast focusing on a conversation between a man "rottin' in a stinkin' hole three hundred months" who makes a deal with the devil for a second chance.

Songs like these suggest that when RJD2 and Aceyalone get together and craft songs that blend their differing styles into something cohesive the songs succeed. When they rely on their pretensions, assuming that if you combine arty lyrics and symphonic beats, the two will work together and produce a higher form of hip hop.

Instead, those songs fall flat and destroy any chance of the album as a whole making any significant impression. The few superior tracks on the album are obscured by the mediocrity of the rest. What a shame.

For more information on Aceyalone, visit http://www.projectblowed.com

Rosanne Cash - "Black Cadillac"(Capitol USA, 2006)

Rosanne Cash has gone through a lot in the two years between her last album Rules of Travel and her latest effort Black Cadillac. She lost her stepmother, June Carter Cash, her father, Johnny Cash, and her birth-mother -- all in the span of 22 months. That depth of grief, loss and acceptance comes through loud and clear and makes Black Cadillac a multi-layered experience you have to hear many times before the true depth of the material begins to unravel.

The title track opens the album with a dark sense of mourning. "It was a black Cadillac that drove you away. Everybody's talkin' but they don't have much to say ... one of us gets to go to heaven, one has to stay here in hell," she sings as a pulsing bass and guitar set the backbeat, reminiscent of her father's signature style. "It's a lonely world," she says, "just a numbers game. Minus you, minus blood ... my blood." As dark as country has been able to get over the years, this tops it all. It's a raw track that really hits you hard and sets the mood for the rest of the album.

"I Was Watching You" features a beautiful melody anchored by piano, as Cash touches on life, love and childhood -- and how family suffers when a father's life is on the road. Cash paints her biography with hard strokes, digging deep and exposing decades of pain, and the result is stunning. "See those little girls dressed like China dolls, all for one then one by one they fall ... you never came back, but I know you tried." It all falls apart, but there's love -- that's the bottom line here, and Cash's heartfelt vocals really put the listener in her place.

Not all the songs are dark in the same way. "Burn Down This Town" opens with a chugging guitar line and ghostly background singers providing a haunting edge for a rocking number in which Cash sings of a haunted ghost town jail and a man's quest to burn it all to the ground. But Cash's best songs seem to be the quiet ballads. "God Is In The Roses" is a beautiful song of mourning and rebirth that starts out in the same vein as "I Was Watching You," then develops into an amazingly deep arrangement that echoes her pain through a complex melding of guitar, banjo and piano over which Cash adds layered harmony.

Black Cadillac is a dark and painful album to hear on first listen. Clearly a lot of soul searching went into crafting the dozen tracks that make up the album, and Rosanne Cash should be commended for being able to meld these painful lyrical memories into songs that contain so many layers of melody. This is as powerful as country music gets, and it should hold up as one of the best albums the genre's going to have to offer in 2006. It's certainly the best album Rosanne Cash has recorded in the twenty-five years since her masterpiece Seven Year Ache. And that's more than enough of a reason for every music fan to own this album.

Preview The Album
http://www.rosannecash.com/bchome/rcash_sampler/index.html

From the above link you can hear "Black Cadillac," "I Was Watching You" and "House on the Lake" in streaming audio. There's also a video linked from the same page.

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Kevin Montgomery - Cherokee City
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Kevin Montgomery - Way Back When"

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2nd Street: Danish Funk-Pop Groundbreakers

Everybody wants to be the clown
I'm the king but you wear the crown
Yeah, every sucker wants to be a star
You might win but you won't get far

- 2nd Street - "Every Sucker"

These two musicians define Scandanavian R&B. Bringing together the soul of Stevie Wonder and Bill Withers with the modern-pop sensibilities of Thicke, Maroon 5 and Daniel Bedingfield, Copenhagen's own 2nd Street are putting a new face on funk-hop. With intricate melodies that left me speechless, coupled with a spectacular vocalist who has some impressive lyrical skills as well to work with, 2nd Street is definitely on the cutting edge. I'll assure you right off the bat -- you ain't heard nothin' like this. Period.

Singer Ilang Lumholt and producer Thomas Stengaard produce all their music from their three-room Copehagen apartment, and they make the tracks sound like they've been recorded in the best studio money can buy. This is masterful recording, folks, cleverly packaged to feature enough dance grooves to keep the club scene happy, while adding a funk-soul element that should cross generational boundaries with the right promotion behind it. I don't use the word infectious lightly, but 2nd Street's songs fit the definition. You'll hear these songs and immediately want to spread the word. The hooks are beyond anything I've heard on top 40 radio in years.

But the duo has not recorded an album, they're not signed to a major label, and their page on myspace has yet to reach a major audience. Stengaard and Lumholt have produced eight tracks, all available for download from their official website, that rival the best music pop has to offer, and they've got nobody to stand up and shout from the rooftops. Hopefully that will change, but until then I urge you to download a track or two and spread the word. Great music's not dead -- and while it's true there's nothing new under the sun, it's hard to deny that 2nd Street has found a new twist to funk-soul-pop that's worthy of your time.

Hear The Music
2nd Street - "Every Sucker"
2nd Street - "Code Red"
2nd Street - "Work"
2nd Street - "Bitch of the Night"

For more, visit www.2ndstreetmusic.com

Jennifer Kimball - "Oh Hear Us"(Epoisse Records, 2006)

Jennifer Kimball experienced the peak of the folk-pop movement back in the mid-90s when she was headlining Lilith Fair shows with her band The Story. Now, a decade later, literate folk pop isn't finding the same radio audiences it once did when Tracy Chapman, Suzanne Vega and Rickie Lee Jones were revitalizing the genre in the late 80s and early 90s. But Jennifer's first solo album in eight years brings with it the promise of a new beginning. "Don't Take Your Love Away" is a stunning track featuring a lush backdrop of plucked strings and piano chords melted around the subtle strains of her smooth vocals. It's something radio would be playing if it wasn't all so corporate, but the hooks are there for those who want to hear.

Kimball's not breaking much new ground here, I'll admit that. Her sound borrows liberally from those who came before her -- even occasionally borrowing from herself, as it's not difficult to hear soft strains of The Story's album The Angel In The House sprinkled throughout the length of Oh Hear Us. No, what Kimball is doing here is building on that sound, smoothing it out and attempting to reach today's audience, an audience that seems to have already forgotten the days when folk was pop.

None of this is to say that Kimball doesn't change things up on us. "Is He Or Isn't He" features slightly dissonant harmonies and vocals that are rhythmic in a way that battles with the actual beat of the song -- all of which forces the listener to pay close attention to the nuances of the hook when the chorus arrives. It might be difficult to wrap one's head around at first, but the payoff is huge when a connection is finally made.

That's what sets Oh Hear Us from the pack. Kimball knows where she's been, and where others have gone before her. She takes what's been done and attempts to make it palatable to a new audience, all while challenging new and old fans alike to hear her new music in completely new ways. It's a complex listening experience, and through it is far from perfect, this is an album that pays off well upon repeated listens. Fans of Kimball's work with The Story, as well as those who enjoy the music of Chapman, Vega and Jones will definitely find this album indispensable heading into the new year.