Editorial Product Review: :Those who remember Mike Farris as the frontman for '90s hard rockers the Screamin' Cheetah Wheelies will do a double take when they hear this unexpectedly moving comeback. The singer has radically overhauled his image, shifting from gin-soaked frontman to gospel shouter on this roof-raising release. What hasn't changed is Farris's powerful voice, even more potent since he cleaned up from various excesses in 2004. While the appropriately titled Salvation in Lights is a drastic musical departure from his previous band's swaggering, boozy approach, it's ...
Editorial Product Review: :Mississippi John Hurt recorded 13 country-blues songs for the Okeh Electric Records company in 1928. Then he vanished. Actually, he never went anywhere. Indeed, he never strayed from his hometown of Avalon, Mississippi. He simply put the guitar down. It was the Great Depression, times were tough, money was scarce, and he needed to work. Nearly 30 years later, a blues enthusiast tracked him down, took him back to Washington, D.C., and suddenly Mississippi John's musical career resumed as quickly as it had finished. He ...
Editorial Product Review:Album Description:2008 release. Maria Muldaur's roots are in the Folk revival of the early '60s, a time when figures like Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan were making bold statements about the civil rights movement, Vietnam, and other burning issues of the day. More than four decades later, in the face of political and social issues in which the stakes are equally high, Muldaur assembles a group of legendary female performers to lend their voices in a critical examination of where we are as a nation ...
Editorial Product Review: :The simple blues-informed pop charms of L.A. songwriter Kevin Moore remain unchanged on his eighth album. All twelve of these songs about romance and its triumphs and failures go down easy, thanks to his unhurried and unmannered singing, and arrangements that run slow and spare. That openness allows Moore's slide playing, perfected on the porch of Mississippi delta bluesman Eugene Powell, to add subtle, pretty decoration to tunes like 'Your Love' and 'Eileen.' He's got a sympathetic cohort in John Porter, who also produced Moore's ...
Editorial Product Review: :Other post-WWII Chicago bluesmen are better known, but the work of Elmore James holds up as well as any of theirs. If he never had the technical accomplishment of, say, Earl Hooker, he did have as much depth of emotional expression as Muddy Waters; just listen to the sweetness of 'I Need You' or the pain of 'It Hurts Me, Too.' The Sky Is Crying: The History of Elmore James contains some of the most important work of a man who still reigns as the ...
Editorial Product Review: :As its title makes clear, the 1991 sequel to Bonnie Raitt's platinum breakthrough on Nick Of Time takes nothing for granted. Raitt had achieved sobriety, renewed commercial focus, and then the payday that the prior album yielded, but Luck Of The Draw mirrors an even fiercer determination to make music as if her life depended on it. Again teamed with producer Don Was, Raitt surpasses herself with her best album to date: her wonderfully lush, blues-rimmed voice and sinuous slide guitar wrap themselves around a ...
Editorial Product Review: :This double CD collects not only Brother Ray's best-known '50s and '60s singles, but some choice semi-obscurities (the 1953 jump blues 'Mess Around,' his 1959 cover of Louis Jordan's 'Don't Let the Sun Catch You Cryin'') that earn their places next to 'What'd I Say' and 'I Can't Stop Loving You.' The man's originality and infectious feeling bleed through on each of these 36 tracks, whether he's transforming 'One Mint Julep' or 'America the Beautiful' or collaborating (separately) with Willie Nelson and Chaka Khan. --Rickey ...
Editorial Product Review:Album Description:'Comin' From Where I'm From' utilizes a copy-protection technology that allows the CD to play on nearly all standard playback devices, including CD players, DVD players, car stereos, boomboxes, PCs, Macs, Walkmans, and game consoles. Using the original disc, consumers can transfer this album to their personal computers. From their computer, consumers can also transfer the music to a secure portable device and burn three copies to CD-R. Mac users can transfer tracks to an iPod, but PC users can not transfer tracks to ...
Alienware's flagship gaming laptop, the Area-51 m9750, has plenty of appeal for high-end gamers, but the alien head aesthetic seems dated, and newer components are right around the corner.
Thanks to a rich set of features and some great new additions, Evite maintains its stature as the top service for issuing e-invitations —but competitors are catching up.
