Some recs

Album: Alison Krauss and Union Station
Lonely Runs Both Ways, ROUNDER

By Andy Gill

19 November 2004

A good trivia question: which female artist has won the most Grammys? No, not Whitney or Mariah or Celine or any pop diva, but the bluegrass fiddler Alison Krauss, whose three awards this year brought her total to 17. Appearances on the O Brother... and Cold Mountain soundtracks and performances at the Oscars and Ryder Cup have helped, but the main reason is obviously the sheer class displayed on Lonely Runs Both Ways, which sticks to the formula of 2001's New Favorite, with smart song-selection allied to the hottest band in country. Krauss essays heartbreaking versions of Gillian Welch and David Rawlings' "Wouldn't Be So Bad" and Sarah Siskind's "Goodbye Is All We Have", while the melancholy of Robert Lee Castleman's "Doesn't Have To Be This Way" could apply to her band Union Station: "You're at your best with that ache in your chest/ And that worn-out old song that you play". It's apt too for fellow vocalist Dan Tyminski (George Clooney's singing voice in O Brother...), whose lonesome high tones are most effective on Woody Guthrie's "Pastures of Plenty". Elsewhere, dobro maestro Jerry Douglas's deftly curling lines are about as emotionally articulate as a guitar gets without actually speaking.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Album: Gwen Stefani
Love Angel Music Baby, INTERSCOPE

By Andy Gill

19 November 2004

Gwen Stefani's appeal has always rested more in her status as style icon than in any intrinsic musical qualities in her band, No Doubt. Save for a couple of hit singles in 1997, they have generally, like the whole US ska revival, been greeted over here with a puzzled lack of interest. Despite - or perhaps because of - the array of A-list producers involved in Stefani's solo debut, there's little musical character to the album; just a series of borrowed styles she plays dress-up with: "Real Thing" is Gwen fronting New Order; "Bubble Pop Electric" and "Long Way to Go" are Gwen fronting OutKast; "Danger Zone" is Gwen fronting Depeche Mode; etc, etc. The band don't even have to be present, as long as the producer can effect a reasonable simulacrum of their style. The concept for the project was a kind of "guilty pleasures" homage to the cheesy Eighties electro-pop of her youth, and while the results will doubtless furnish plenty of chart fodder, there's little in the way of a moving experience. The best tracks are shuffled to the back of the pack - a cool-jazz instrumental mix of the single "What You Waiting for?", and the second of Andre 3000's tracks, "Long Way to Go". The latter's busy arrangement and its subject matter - interracial relationships - provide a glimmer of substance that throws the rest of the album into sharp, but shallow, relief.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd

Album: U2
How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, ISLAND

By Andy Gill

19 November 2004

There's something entirely appropriate about Bono appearing once again on the Band Aid single, singing the same line as before, since U2 seem to be stuck in some Time's Arrow-style situation, trapped in a bend of time arcing back towards their origin.

With 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind, the band in effect turned their back on their Nineties period of sonic exploration, and delivered a more solid, classic-U2 album, studded with strong, memorable cuts such as "Wild Honey", "Stuck in a Moment You Can't Get Out of", and "Beautiful Day". Now, with How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, the backwards process continues even further: Steve Lillywhite returns as head producer in place of Eno and Lanois, and the album's sound seems to have reverted to something more like their pre-Joshua Tree style. As Bono notes in "All Because of You": "I just arrived; I'm at the door/ Of the place I started out from."

But, crucially, there's nothing here anywhere near as memorable as the aforementioned tracks from the last album. The closest Atomic Bomb gets is the single "Vertigo", and even that sounds like an artificial euphoria - as if the band were deliberately trying to rediscover the drive of their earlier career. All of a sudden, U2 sound tired and washed-out, aping their own former glories in half-cocked anthemic hogwash like "City of Blinding Lights" and "Original of the Species", songs full of facile rhetorical tropes such as: "I want the lot of what you got/ And I want nothing that you're not".

Even the lyrics, it seems, are stuck in some Ouroboros-like circularity, devouring themselves in an orgy of self-negation. "City of Blinding Lights", for instance, opens with Bono observing cryptically, "The more you see, the less you know", and concludes later with the even more cryptic, "The more you know, the less you feel". Which leaves us... where, exactly?

The general drift this time round is more personal than political, with several songs pleading for forgiveness or reconciliation: even when, in "Love and Peace or Else", Bono asks "all your daughters of Zion, all your Abraham sons" to "lay down your guns", he actually turns out to be fretting over some romantic split, rather than the political conflict that immediately springs to mind. None of which would matter a jot, of course, if the music sparked the lyrics to life with the band's characteristic spirit and élan. But the familiar Edge arpeggios sound weary, and it's a dull U2 album indeed on which the most notable musical strategy is the flamencoid chording of "Fast Cars".

No, it simply isn't happening this time. Instead, How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb just offers a new benchmark of mediocrity.

© 2004 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd