Wilco: Summerteeth (Reprise)
Fresh from their acclaimed collaboration with Billy Bragg on last year's tribute to Woody Guthrie, Mermaid Avenue, Chicago's finest country-rock combo have left America's dusty past behind and zoomed off down their own rock 'n' roll highway. Summerteeth is the band's official follow-up to 1997's Being There, a bright, biting collection of fourteen songs which range from the Fountains Of Wayne fizz of Can't Stand It to the plangent prairie pop of When You Wake Up Feeling Old. Don't look for vestiges of country in Summerteeth - just enjoy the thrill of uncovering some fresh nuggets of Americana. Songs such as She's A Jar uncork the classical fluidity of Mercury Rev, and When You Wake Up Feeling Old doffs its beanie hat towards the Beach Boys.
Kevin Courtney
Jim O'Rourke: Eureka(Domino)
Ex-Tortoise collaborator Jim O'Rourke hasn't been slow to strike out on his own individual path, joining the likes of Palace's Will Oldham and Smog's Bill Callahan in writing a new language for American folk music, then refocusing it through an urban lens. Eureka is an album of discovery with O'Rourke taking offbeat routes through traditional country-rock terrain. A subdued sense of melancholy runs through the album, and a sense of dislocation is underlined by an eerie electronic undercurrent. Women Of The World is a gentle nudge towards gender re-balancing, Ghost Ship cruises merrily into the shadows of 1970s pop, while Movie On The Way Down conjures strange, loungey images of Stereolab and the High Llamas.
Kevin Courtney
Greg: Toy (Coral Bay) You've heard the radio ad for this debut album by Dubliner Greg Geoghegan, the one that goes: "this album should be heard". By whom it should be heard isn't made clear, and after spinning this CD a few times, I'm still none the wiser. Geoghegan, who manages his own computer business, put Toy together in his own private studio, programming all the keyboards and drums, and whispering in soft, ineffectual tones about everyday traumas such as surviving lunch and putting up shelves. The characters who populate songs such as Paper, Sonny, Talk, Crime and Bad Dream have been dealt a two-dimensional hand by the synthetic production, and Geoghegan's cold, detached delivery does little to draw the listener in.
Kevin Courtney
