From their earliest days as a band, the members of R.E.M. always had a Keen sense of how they wanted to be perceived visually, even when it sometimes seemed as if they didn’t want to be seen at all…
With the outfit's four members hailing from Stockholm, Åmål, and Gothenburg, My Brother The Wind is a fully improvisational cosmic rock collective consisting of members of widely known Swedish acts Makajodama, Magnolia, Animal Daydream and most notably Anekdoten, one of the more widely recognized names in the 1990s prog rock revival. Those who frequent the works of Popol Vuh, Amon Duul, Sun Ra, Träd, Gräs Och Stenar, Ash Ra Tempel, Gong, Pink Floyd and other visionary, psychedelic rock artists are advised to investigate this act.
On his third album, Jackson Browne returned to the themes of his debut record (love, loss, identity, apocalypse) and, amazingly, delved even deeper into them. "For a Dancer," a meditation on death like the first album's "Song for Adam," is a more eloquent eulogy; "Farther On" extends the "moving on" point of "Looking Into You"; "Before the Deluge" is a glimpse beyond the apocalypse evoked on "My Opening Farewell" and the second album's "For Everyman." If Browne had seemed to question everything in his first records, here he even questioned himself. "For me some words come easy, but I know that they don't mean that much," he sang on the opening track, "Late for the Sky," and added in "Farther On," "I'm not sure what I'm trying to say." Yet his seeming uncertainty and self-doubt reflected the size and complexity of the problems he was addressing in these songs, and few had ever explored such territory, much less mapped it so well. "The Late Show," the album's thematic center, doubted but ultimately affirmed the nature of relationships, while by the end, "After the Deluge," if "only a few survived," the human race continued nonetheless. It was a lot to put into a pop music album, but Browne stretched the limits of what could be found in what he called "the beauty in songs," just as Bob Dylan had a decade before.
On 1993's HAPPIER BLUE Smither returned to the full-band recording approach after more than 20 years. While that album's production proved a little too genteel for Smither's earthy blues-folk style, it set the stage for '95's UP ON THE LOWDOWN, arguably the finest recording of Smither's long career. Perfectly produced by guitarist Stephen Bruton, the album wisely focuses on a tougher, leaner small-band sound than its predecessor. The arrangements have just the right combination of bluesiness and delicacy to complement both Smither's Mississippi John Hurt leanings and his more lyrical side. As always, Smither's the master of redefinition, tackling Dylan's "What Was It You Wanted" and Jesse Winchester's "Talk Memphis" successfully. His compositional muse is also at its apex here, as on the introspective "I Am The Ride" and the elegant, bittersweet "'Deed I Do".