Ken Tucker

Slaid Cleaves: 'Still Fighting' With Smart Lyrics And Stories

Ken Tucker — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 16:03:00 +0000

Raised in South Berwick, Maine, and residing in Austin, Texas, Slaid Cleaves is no one's idea of a music-industry insider. He writes and sings songs primarily about working-class people and romantics both hopeful and hopeless. That said, it's also not difficult to hear another element of the fortysomething Cleaves' past: He was an English and philosophy major at Tufts, and his lyrics are underpinned by both a fine sense of meter and moral perspicacity.

Jason Isbell: Literary, But Keeping An Edge On 'Southeastern'

Ken Tucker — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 18:42:00 +0000

When Jason Isbell was part of Drive-By Truckers, his guitar contributed to the band's sometimes magnificent squall of noise, while his songwriting contributed to the eloquence that raised the band high in the Southern rock pantheon. But the group was led by two other first-rate songwriters, Patterson Hood and Mike Cooley.

Vampire Weekend Comes Of Age In 'The City'

Ken Tucker — Tue, 28 May 2013 16:02:00 +0000

The New York City band Vampire Weekend has carved out a sense of immaculate melancholy for our era as surely as Steely Dan once did for Upstate New York in the '70s. Characterized most immediately by the earnest, concise, sometimes surprisingly expansive vocals of Ezra Koenig, Vampire Weekend makes atmospheric music.

Daft Punk: Accessing Electronic Music's Humanity

Ken Tucker — Wed, 22 May 2013 15:14:00 +0000

I freely admit that, until the new Random Access Memories, I wasn't much of a Daft Punk fan. I could appreciate the craft and imagination that went into creating the French duo's mixture of electronic genres — techno, house, disco — but the mechanical repetitions and heavily filtered vocals didn't turn me on in any other way.

But now, Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo have come up with an album that exposes the human side of their musical impulses.

Dawes Knows Where It's Been And Where It's Headed

Ken Tucker — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:07:00 +0000

If you heard the Dawes song "Just Beneath the Surface" and said, "Somebody's been listening to their old Jackson Browne albums," you're not exactly insulting Dawes. The band has actually backed Browne on tour — and Browne has sung backup on at least one of its songs — so you could say that Dawes comes by its riffs and phrasing honestly.

Natalie Maines: A Country-Music Rebel Rocks On Her Own

Ken Tucker — Wed, 08 May 2013 15:30:00 +0000

Natalie Maines doesn't hesitate to make audacious moves, and wresting away "Mother" — Roger Waters' hymn to oppressive maternal authority figures from Pink Floyd — is the biggest one on her first solo album. Maines takes the "Mother" from Pink Floyd's The Wall and deconstructs it, emotional brick by emotional brick.

Caitlin Rose: A Singer Grounded In The Details Of Yearning

Ken Tucker — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:39:00 +0000

"Pink Champagne," a song on Caitlin Rose's second album The Stand-In, presents Rose's voice in its sparest purity and veiled shrewdness. She sends her voice skyward, the notes as buoyant and light as the bubbles of the pink champagne she's singing about. Her high trills could, with only a slight shift in tone and attitude, become self-conscious with a Betty Boop coyness, as they do once or twice on The Stand-In.

Brad Paisley's 'Wheelhouse' Of Good Songs — And Intentions

Ken Tucker — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 15:52:00 +0000

Brad Paisley's Wheelhouse is yet another very good album from a singer, songwriter and guitarist who's made a bunch of them in a row. It features a slew of shrewd songs about finding pleasure and comfort in a frequently unpleasant, uncomfortable world.

Kacey Musgraves: Country's Blunt And Poetic New Voice

Ken Tucker — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 18:25:00 +0000

Kacey Musgraves is something of an anomaly. A Texas native in her mid-20s, she fits most easily into the contemporary "country" category, but the work she co-writes with a variety of collaborators is really a throwback to an earlier era of singer-songwriters — as much influenced by rock and folk as by country.

Justin Timberlake Returns To Music With Enthusiasm and 'Experience'

Ken Tucker — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 17:17:00 +0000

The orchestral swirls, the transition to a soul-man groove, the falsetto croon — there you have some of the key elements to Justin Timberlake's album The 20/20 Experience.

Tegan And Sara Reach Out To New Audiences With 'Heartthrob'

Ken Tucker — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 16:52:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9e9NSMY8QiQ

David Bowie Awakens To 'The Next Day' Of His Career

Ken Tucker — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 17:33:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH7dMBcg-gE

Ashley Monroe Is 'Like A Rose,' Briars And All

Ken Tucker — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 17:37:00 +0000

The high lonesome sound of Ashley Monroe's Tennessee voice in "Like a Rose" serves as a clear signal that she's working within a tradition that extends back well beyond her twentysomething years on Earth. One of Monroe's collaborators in that song was Guy Clark, a seventysomething Texas country veteran who's often too tough-guy romantic for his own good.

Guards: Anthems With Gravitas

Ken Tucker — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 17:24:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcCarUGWBBQ

Richard Thompson's New Album Examines 'Electric' Love

Ken Tucker — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:39:00 +0000

Delicate phrasing, with both voice and guitar, has always made Richard Thompson a musician worth hearing — and sometimes even liking on a personal level. For a man who can make such pretty music, it's to his credit that he prefers to show his thorny, stubborn, cranky, even mean side in many of the songs in his solo career.

Paloma Faith's 'Fall To Grace' Is A Keeper

Ken Tucker — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 17:51:00 +0000

In culling through albums released late last year that I still play with pleasure, Paloma Faith's Fall to Grace was a real keeper. In contrast to my joy, Faith was singing about her agony: her broken heart, her wracked sobs about ruined affairs, her choked goodbyes to lovers who'd left her. She made all this sound tremendously intense and exciting.

'Nashville' Soundtrack Stands On Its Own

Ken Tucker — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:54:00 +0000

"Telescope," the fictional hit single by the fictional country star Juliette Barnes on Nashville, is sung by the actress who plays Juliette, Hayden Panetierre. If it didn't become a real-life hit when the song was released a few months ago to country radio stations, it wasn't for lack of catchiness, courtesy of producers T-Bone Burnett and Buddy Miller.

Ken Tucker's Top 10 Albums Of 2012

Ken Tucker — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 17:03:00 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bIlLq4BqGdg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNBD4OFF8cc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0DkddeTSEM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfhBHu6yFQA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lIqNjC1RKU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPXfwgKd208

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-ejyHzz3XE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgJpXjrhK8Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mns9VeRguys

A 'Warrior' Looking For Legitimacy

Ken Tucker — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 18:22:00 +0000

Ke$ha uses a dollar-sign instead of an "s" in the middle of her stage name. It's one of those gestures that's meant to bait her detractors — suggesting before anyone else does that she's only in it for the money. It turns out, though, that like pop stars ranging from Madonna on back to Chuck Berry, Ke$ha wants it both ways: mass-audience success and artistic acknowledgment. For Ke$ha, that's what her album title Warrior means: She's fighting a war on multiple fronts.

To continue the war metaphor Ke$ha introduces on Warrior, sometimes combatants die on the battlefield.

Tracey Thorn: 'Secular Carols' For The Holidays

Ken Tucker — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:17:00 +0000

Tracey Thorn's interpretation of "Maybe This Christmas," by the Canadian singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, is typical of her new holiday album, Tinsel and Lights: It's simply arranged, emphasizing Thorn's lovely, delicate voice and bolstered by a firm intelligence; it avoids the fatty treacle that weighs down lots of Christmas albums.