Records To Die For

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Brian Damkroger

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Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band: Ultimate Hits: Rock And Roll Never Forgets
Capitol Records 509999 41298 23 (Qobuz). 2011. Bob Seger, Punch Andrews, prods.; Brian Gardner, Robert Vosgien, engs.

My first choice this year was Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band's 2020 LP Live Farewell at Madison Square Garden. It's a fantastic showcase of what makes Bob Seger so great, and we of a certain age find ourselves singing along with everyone in the audience. Unfortunately, it's a bootleg (albeit widely available), so out it went, and I set about picking from among his compilation albums. Navigating the multidimensional matrix of content, sound quality, and formats got me to Ultimate Hits and the streaming-only package, Greatest Hits (Deluxe). The former got the nod. To my ears, its versions of some songs have a bit more depth, richer tonal colors, and a more tangible presence, all the things that make a recording work for me.

Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band: The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts
Columbia Records/Legacy Recordings 194398925 (2 LPs). 2021. Bruce Springsteen, prod.; Rob Lebret, Bob Clearmountain, engs.

At the risk of losing my serious-audiophile cred, I'll admit that when I listened to the 1979 No Nukes album, I usually started by queuing side 5 and carefully lowering the stylus at the very start of the fourth cut. It's Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band ripping through the "Detroit Medley," and without fail, I'd be swept up and hurtled forward. Year after year, decade after decade, there just wasn't anything like it. Then in 2021 the heavens parted, or anyway Columbia's master-tape Archives opened, and Sony's Legacy Recordings released Bruce's entire No Nukes sets. All I can say is that this is what 1979-vintage Springsteen, and by extension rock'n'roll, is all about.

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Tom Fine

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Jenny Lewis (with the Watson Twins): Rabbit Fur Coat
Team Love Records 08 (CD). 2006. Jenny Lewis, Mike Mogis, M. Ward, prods.; Larry Crane, Mike Mogis, Fred Kevorkian, engs.

I first heard this while perusing the LP racks at Record Archive in Rochester, New York. Suddenly, Lewis's cover of the Traveling Wilburys' "Handle With Care" filled the large store. Who is that? I asked the clerk. She showed me the CD box. I completed my LP shopping and, as I checked out, asked if I could buy the CD. The clerk ejected it from the player midsong, put it in the jewel box, handed it to me and said, "On the house."

Aside from that great cover tune, Lewis's jangly narrative alt-rock is a series of stories about life and love going or gone sideways. Her voice is front and center, and the music alternates (because it's "alternative") between rock and other genres without veering toward pretentiousness.

Melvins: Houdini
Atlantic 82532 (CD). 1993. GGGarth Richardson, Kurt Cobain, Melvins, prods.

The Melvins' dark grunge-metal onslaught (described by Wikipedia as "sludge metal") caught me by surprise as I thumbed through vintage spoken-word records in a basement corner of Bleeker Street Records in Manhattan. "Oh, look, a minty copy of Man On The Moon Narrated by Walter Cronkite." I was standing under a large old speaker mounted near the ceiling, a JBL L100 or something similar. Houdini's opening track, "Hooch," thundered down, almost knocking me backward. Wait, what's that? I hurried to the counter and inquired. The clerk showed me the CD case. May I buy it? "Not till it's done playing," he said with some annoyance. Fine, I'll keep flipping through the crates. I walked out of there with a load of records I hadn't known existed, plus the Houdini CD.

The Melvins are one of those groups you either like or you don't. Houdini is a good way in.

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Larry Greenhill

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Branford Marsalis Quartet: Belonging
Branford Marsalis, saxophones; Joey Calderazzo, piano; Eric Revis, bass; Justin Faulkner, drums
Blue Note Records 00602475486596 (CD). 2024. Branford Marsalis, prod.; Rob "Wacko" Hunter, Justin Armstrong, Greg Calbi, engs.

For their Blue Note Records debut, the Branford Marsalis Quartet played a whole-album tribute to Keith Jarrett's 1974 album Belonging. The original and the cover album contain the same songs in the same order, but these are very different records. The Jarrett album has an ethereal, calm, serene quality, even though the tempos are varied. The Marsalis album kicks the tempo up with punchy, catchy rhythms and intense percussion, as heard on the opening track, "Spiral Dance." Marsalis's cover of the title track, "Belonging," extends and amplifies its melancholy mood. The six tracks on Belonging—the Branford Marsalis version—retain "the potency of the material at hand while achieving a certain kind of expressive liftoff that makes them more than just rote covers," Hank Shteamer wrote in his New York Times review.

"The Windup" is my favorite due to its roller-coaster, twisty, boogie-woogie theme, driven by Justin Faulkner's drumming and marked by an explosion of rhythms on drums and cowbells. The song's excitement and sense of delight are heightened by the contrast between Marsalis's free-form jazz cadenza and the structured main theme that follows.

Scala & Kolacny Brothers: "Creep," from the Album Dawn
Scala, Stijn Kolacny, conds.; Steven Kolacny, piano
Atlantic Rhino ASIN: B004LSJCFG. 2011. Steven Kolacny, prod.; Filip Heurckmans, eng.

The best covers intensify the original's emotional impact even as they transform it. Consider Scala & Kolacny Brothers' cover of Radiohead's breakthrough single, "Creep," a live version of which is included on the 2010 album Dawn.

Scala is a Belgian women's choir. Scala & Kolacny Brothers is Scala with a Kolacny brother conducting and another on piano. They cover popular songs. Scala & Kolacny Brothers first recorded "Creep" for the 2010 EP Dawn, which also included covers of "Every Breath You Take" and "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The group has also covered songs by U2, Depeche Mode, Metallica, and Peter Gabriel, among others. The Scala/Kolacny cover of "Creep" gained notoriety when it was used in the trailer for the 2010 film The Social Network. Critic Alex Ross was struck by "its obsessive lyrics that depict the self-lacerating rage of an unrequited attraction." The music, haunting and sad, swells with each chorus, making Scala and Kolacny's "Creep" a record to live for.

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Alex Halberstadt

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Roy Orbison: The All-Time Greatest Hits Of Roy Orbison
Monument KZG 31484 (LP). 2022. Fred Foster, prod.; Bill Porter, Paul Richmond, engs.

"The pure products of America go crazy," wrote the great New Jersey poet William Carlos Williams. Crazy is as apt an adjective as any to describe these three-minute pop operettas. Many of the gems in this collection begin with a strummed guitar and Orbison's heavy-cream baritone; two minutes later, what sounds like half an orchestra and a martial kettle drum are lashing the singer, who has climbed two octaves into a worrying falsetto range and a realm of pure musical fantasy. Nothing like these productions has existed before or since; in their precise strangeness, they sound like a fragment of an unsettling dream. Like many of us, I can't stop listening to these tracks: They work less like songs and more like hauntings.

The Shaggs: Philosophy Of The World
Third World Records TCLP 3001 (LP). 1969. Austin Wiggin, Jr., prod.; Bob Olive, eng.

In 1965, a New Hampshire mill hand named Austin Wiggin, Jr., decided that his teenage daughters would form a band and become famous. The daughters had no interest in or aptitude for music, but Wiggin's late mother had predicted their fame while reading his palm, and her other predictions had come true. This is how the Shaggs came to record their first and only studio album. Dot and Betty's cheap Avalon guitars are out of tune, Helen's drums seem to be playing a different band's music, and the sisters sing in a mind-stopping quasi-unison. Their sound brings to mind Javanese gamelan, Ornette Coleman, and the wilder moments in the operas of Alban Berg coupled with earnest lyrics about parents, Halloween, and a possibly imaginary entity named Foot Foot. The only word I can think of to sum it all up is delight.