Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Live Seeds

Live Seeds

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds – Live Seeds Mute CDSTUMM122 (1993)

Live Seeds, like most offerings from Nick Cave’s middle period, is an uneven affair.  “Ship Song”, “Papa Won’t Leave You, Henry”, “From Her to Eternity” and “New Morning” are all fantastic, but elsewhere Cave and company lean far too heavily on his songwriting to do all the heavy lifting.  In a way, that saps all the energy out of the songs.  Maybe it’s a common trick artists use to regroup during a live set.  But that doesn’t help the album at all.

In short, Live Seeds is an improvement over some of Cave’s previous few studio albums, but it pales in comparison to his earliest solo albums and the best material he produced about a decade later.

Johnny Cash – The Mystery of Life

The Mystery of Life

Johnny Cash – The Mystery of Life Mercury 848 051-2 (1991)

By the early 1990s, it seemed like the world had given up on Johnny Cash.  Well, at least his record labels had all given up on him.  In an autobiography, he later claimed Mercury pressed only 500 copies of The Mystery of Life (Cash mistakenly called it The Meaning of Life), though it did scrape the bottom of the country charts.  That’s a shame, because Cash was clearly interested in recording.  His vocals sound clear and impassioned in a way that was totally lacking on most of his recordings from the late 1970s through just about all of the 1980s.  If Water From the Wells of Home was supposed to be his comeback, then it says something that this album is a step up.  It’s no winner.  It’s still a rather middling affair.  Producer “Cowboy” Jack Clement burdens this with heavy-handed production values that make all the instruments sound synthetic and artificial.  But on top of Cash’s strong vocals, the band plays well enough (if you can look past the way they are recorded).  Although the standard narrative is that Cash’s career was on the skids for decades before Rick Rubin revived it with American Recordings, this album is worth a look for fans to see that Cash was still in good form as a singer, but was always held back by everything else dumped into his records and a lack of promotion.  That is to say Rick Rubin didn’t change much when he came along, he just recorded Cash without the other clutter and otherwise let Cash himself do basically exactly what he was doing here — particularly for Unchained — and actually promoted him.  This one’s an interesting curio for those who’ve already heard Cash’s more acclaimed efforts and want to go back and fill-in some of the gaps to round out the picture.

Kathy Kiely – Author Thomas Frank Talks Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and His New Book, “Listen Liberal”

Link to an interview of Thomas Frank by Kathy Kiely:

“Author Thomas Frank Talks Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and His New Book, ‘Listen Liberal'”

Bonus links: “Thomas Frank on How Democrats Went From Being the ‘Party of the People’ to the Party of Rich Elites” and “How the Democrats Left the Door Wide Open for Donald Trump”

Tom Slee – The Sharing Economy’s Dirty Laundry

Link to an article by Tom Slee:

“The Sharing Economy’s Dirty Laundry”

Bonus links: “Raw Deals” and “Uber’s Consumer Democracy” and “Is Uber’s Business Model Screwing Its Workers?” and “NYC Taxi Driver Kills Himself at City Hall After Condemning Uber & Politicians for Financial Ruin” and “‘The Gig Economy’ Is the New Term for Serfdom” and “Meet ‘Sledgehammer Shannon,’ the Lawyer Who Is Uber’s Worst Nightmare” and “What’s Really New About the Gig Economy?” and “Uber’s Big Lie” and “Striking for the Future” and “Uber Takes a Hit in London” and “Amazon’s Last Mile” and “#DeleteUber for Good” (“Uber is … also about using its ‘tech’ branding to raise massive amounts of capital — so much that it could lose $5.2 billion just in the last quarter — to engage in a form of predatory pricing to drive traditional transport operators out of business and force regulators to remake existing laws in its favor. That fight is finally coming to a head.”) and Lehigh Valley Coal Co. v. Yensavage, 218 F. 547 (2d Cir. 1914), and “Why Courts Across the World Are Ruling That the Gig Economy Is Paving the Road to Serfdom”

Ryan Adams – 1989

1989

Ryan Adams – 1989 Pax Am PAX-AM 057 (2015)

Ryan Adams covers Taylor Swift‘s entire album 1989.  The basic sound here is the increasingly slick 1970s rock flavored alt country that Adams has favored on recent studio albums.  That is fine, unto itself.  But if there was anything to like about Swift’s original album it certainly wasn’t the douchebag narcissism and malevolent mythologizing that sustained its songwriting.  So Adams keeps that part and jettisons the rest.  It kind of would have been more interesting if Adams had written new lyrics and sung them over the same music as Swift’s album.  But Adams tends not to have good ideas like that.