Slow Sand

Steve Miller, Kirk Hammett, Warren Haynes, Little Steven.. those were some of the heavy cats in the crowd that night in New York at The Iridium as Jeff Beck and friends raucously saluted Les Paul with a tribute. Sporting a fat hollow-body Les Paul, Beck and the band appear in period attire like they were headed to a bowling alley in the Leave It To Beaver-era. They perform all covers of tracks originally featuring Les Paul or from the original rock n' roll period.

Pretty much every record released during the psychedelic era by EMI’s various satellite labels was honed and buffed to opaque perfection by the studio technocrats who were working for the company.

Lounge music is a type of easy listening music popular in the 1950s and 1960s. It may be meant to evoke in the listeners the feeling of being in a place, usually with a tranquil theme, such as a jungle, an island paradise or outer space. The range of lounge music encompasses beautiful music–influenced instrumentals, modern electronica (with chillout, and downtempo influences), while remaining thematically focused on its retro-space-age cultural elements…

For Otis Taylor's new release, Mato Nanji from Indigenous, joins him on six of the tracks. In addition to adding his dynamic guitar playing to the songs, Nanji joins in on vocals a first for Otis Taylor albums. My World Is Gone features Taylor's trance-like reflections on subjects of social injustice, including the early injustices of the Native-American plight.

Nearly 15 years after Ten, Pearl Jam finally returned to the strengths of their debut with 2006's Pearl Jam, a sharply focused set of impassioned hard rock. Gone are the arty detours (some call them affectations) that alternately cluttered and enhanced their albums from 1993's sophomore effort, Vs., all the way to 2002's Riot Act, and what's left behind is nothing but the basics: muscular, mildly meandering rock & roll, enlivened by Eddie Vedder's bracing sincerity. Pearl Jam has never sounded as hard or direct as they do here – even on Ten there was an elasticity to the music, due in large part to Jeff Ament's winding fretless bass, that kept the record from sounding like a direct hit to the gut, which Pearl Jam certainly does. Nowhere does it sound more forceful than it does in its first half, when the tightly controlled rockers "Life Wasted," "World Wide Suicide," "Comatose," "Severed Hand," and "Marker in the Sand" pile up on top of each other, giving the record a genuine feeling of urgency. (AMG)