Music » Indie Music

There's a smart balance of traditional Hawaiiana and contemporary tunes on this CD. There's heart-tugging warmth along with unexpected chuckles. The end result is a candid, honest reinforcement of his vocal breadth.

Songbird is a posthumous anthology culled from the album Live At Blues Alley and her other solo release, Eva By Heart, along with one track from her 1992 duet album with Chuck Brown titled The Other Side. Blix label.

20 classic hits released by United Artists, Reprise and Warner Bros. From 1965 to 1987. features the hits 'Sundown', 'If You Could read My Mind', 'The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald', 'Carefree Highway' and many more!

Less successful when it's sentimental (Waylon Jennings' "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys") than when it's wry (Willie Nelson's myth-puncturing "Me and Paul"), this cash-in compilation of previously released cuts was just in time to grab the first platinum record ever awarded a country album. It's not bad, but both Jennings' contemporaneous Dreaming My Dreams and Nelson's Red Headed Stranger are more nuanced tastes of the good-bad-but-not-evil-ol'-boy lifestyle. (Not to mention much of Tompall Glaser's own Outlaw compilation.) This 1996 CD reissue adds nine more tracks from the era as well as a new Jennings-and-Nelson version of Steve Earle's "Nowhere Road." --Rickey Wright

new songs * enhanced arrangements * unplugged performances * on a cd-rom featuring photo gallery, bio, national and local press coverage, IZ sightings, screen saver and catalog

This is a production rife with odd pairings: English actor Daniel Day-Lewis joining up with the Mohawks; James Fenimore Cooper adapted by Michael Mann; disparate composers Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman teaming up. This last pairing seems a suspicious attempt to endow the score of this modern film adaptation of a junior high school literary evergreen with both a golden age of Hollywood dramatic bent (Jones) and a '90s-slick guitar-muzak veneer (Edelman). A strange amalgam that doesn't quite work. --Jerry McCulley

Release Date: 1998-02-10, Audio CD, Merge Records

Recorded live at Blues Alley, Washington, D.C., Jan. 2, 1996, where the late folk singer/songwriter had a loyal following. 13 tracks, including four that appeared on her breakthrough 1998 album, 'Songbird'. Blix Street.

Radiohead's third album got compared to Pink Floyd a lot when it came out, and its slow drama and conceptual sweep certainly put it in that category. OK Computer, though, is a complicated and difficult record: an album about the way machines dehumanize people that's almost entirely un-electronic; an album by a British "new wave of new wave" band that rejects speed and hooks in favor of languorous texture and morose details; a sad and humanist record whose central moment is Thom Yorke crooning "We hope that you choke." Sluggish, understated, and hard to get a grip on, OK Computer takes a few listens to appreciate, but its entirety means more than any one song. --Douglas Wolk

With Sleepless, Peter Wolf strips away any pretense to fashion and warmly embraces the R&B, soul, and country blues that inspired his legend in the first place. Not that Wolf has strayed very far from those roots, either when fronting the J. Geils Band or in his rewarding, if often fitful, solo career, but Sleepless presents the singer's ethos at its most naked and warmly Dylanesque. Whether revisiting Otis Rush's "Homework," seasoning William Bell's Stax track "Never Like This Before" with a dash of Muscle Shoals, palling around with the Glimmer Twins (Jagger on "Nothing but the Wheel"; Richards, along with Geils's Magic Dick, on Sonny Boy Williamson's feisty "Too Close Together"), or matching Steve Earle twang-for-twang on "Some Things You Don't Want to Know," it's an album filled with a spirit of warm remembrance and generosity. But more than mere love letters to his roots and heroes past, Wolf's performances on collaborations with Will Jennings and other writers have a timeless, bittersweet edge that undercut his previous instinct for blues caricature to great effect. Traditions die hard. This is a compelling testament why--and one of Wolf's most outstanding solo efforts. --Jerry McCulley