Paste Magazine June/July 2010 : Page 84
STARS ELIZABETH COOK JIMMIE VAUGHAN N E W M U S I C STARS surging skyward with a sunny warmth that would inform their subsequent albums, Heart and Set Yourself on Fire. With their newest release, though, that flame has flickered into ash.On The Five Ghosts, the love-letters and sing-songy refrains of Heart are nowhere to be found; gone, too, are Fire's passions-set-ablaze. What's left is a world much graver, where lovers die just to haunt each other—and it seems like an abso-N ELIZABETH COOK Welder 31 TIGERS RELEASE DATE: OUT NOW Fermented goodness Elizabeth Cook’s last album, the Rodney Crow-ell-produced Balls, was straight up Dolly-wor-shippin’ country, full of stretchy pedal steel and yodel-peppered sass. But if that one was chilled-in-the-box strawberry wine, Welder is mulberry-flavored moonshine: homemade, delicious and completely unsanitary. First of all, there’s Cook’s twangy alto; it used to slip-slide through her ine years ago, Stars burst forth with Nightsongs, their intelligent, delirious debut. It was Leonard-Bernstein-does-Europop, without cheapening it. Stars' dramatic arrangements remain e Five Ghosts FT REVOLUTION RECORDS LEASE DATE: JUNE 22 nadian quintet’s sixth full ngth dials up the drama lutely natural progression for the band. Like the volatile relationships that Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell sing about, Stars' oeuvre has evolved from ebullient to frantic, and occasionally grim. And although autumnal moments have slipped into all of their albums,Ghosts is their first full-on plunge into dysphoria. Millan's exquisite voiceflits from smolder-ing on “Wasted Daylight” to angelic on “Winter Bones”; its beauty, coupled with the band's theatricalflair and a handful of punchier tracks, rescues the album from overwhelming ennui. Despite following the requiem of “I Died So I Could Haunt You," "Fixed" especially lightens the mood very much alive here, their instrumenta-tion gleaming—as always—with allusions somewhere between NewOrder's shim-mering waveforms andThe Smiths' guitar rock. Ghosts' 2007 predecessor, In Our Bedroom After the War, applied extrava-gant orchestral layers to poppy hooks; it was the band's most dramatic composi-tion to date, and the new album doesn't even attempt to compete. Instead, Ghosts skirts its predecessor's instrumental self-indulgence, allowing its tracks to swim in grandeur—but not drown. The album does have one bizarre moment of inconsistency. “We Don't Want Your Body” is egregiously glib for this otherwise careful record; after the mournful pageantry of the preceding tracks, it's discordant to hear Millan chirp words like “so you can have some sex with me.” Maybe the band's just having some fun amidst all the gloom. Can't exactly blame them, but they're better when they're moping. GRAY CHAPMAN 8.6 lyrics to sweet-as-peach-cobbler effect, but on this release, it’s more shrill and even more heavily accented. She doesn’t sing too much either; she chortles and spits and coos and chants. Previous releases were sprinkled with her characteristic wit, which has gone to seed and run wild here. On “Rock ‘n’ Roll Man,” she snarks a self-appointed rock-god boyfriend: “Wears a gold lightning bolt in one of his ears / Likes to talk about Elvis, but only in the Sun years.” Hilltop funerals, soup kitchens and backcountry hoe-downs become the stuff of legend in Welder’s expansive tales, and though it features pro-duction by Don Was and guest appearances by Crowell and Buddy Miller, this album is all about Cook finally finding her voice—warm and gritty as Appalachian soil. RACHEL DOVEY 8.4 JIMMIE VAUGHAN Blues, Ballads, and Favorites SHOUT! RELEASE DATE: JULY 6 Blues vet needs to step up his game The last time Jimmie Vaughan released a solo album, Barack Obama s a little-known state nator fromIllinois d the dot-com bubble d just burst. Though uch has changed over e past nine years, the ues remains the same. 2010, Vaughan is fashionably fash-84 PASTEMAGAZINE.COM JUNE | JULY 2010 ionable as ever, but something is lacking in these 13 songs—urgency, perhaps? It certainly doesn't bode well that this comeback album is a collection of covers. Blues, Ballads, and Favorites is full of lean, brassy selections that focus on taut, swinging grooves, wiry riffs and grunting baritone sax, but the album yields few surprises. Although Vaughan translates Willie Nelson’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” into a soul ballad, and turns over lead vocals to old friend Lou Ann Barton on Little Richard’s “Send Me Some Lovin',” the album runs out of momentum about halfway through. It’s an obvious labor of love for a man who has decoded the DNA of the blues strand by strand, but still not worth the near-decade wait. MATT FINK 6.8 !Elizabeth Cook photo by Kristin Barlowe
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