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CD Reviews |
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Rolling Stone Album Reviews
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From the latest releases to archived favorites, here's the final
word on all the music that matters, from the editors of Rolling Stone.
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Phish - At The Roxy
Artist:
Phish
Review:
Recorded in 1993 during a three-night run in Atlanta, this
mammoth eight-disc box captures Phish right when they were putting
a spit-shine polish on the live improvisation that would make them
kings of the Nineties jam-band scene. At the Roxy is a must-have
for one reason: the second show on February 20th, where Phish
unleashed their most experimental set to date. On Disc Five,
guitarist Trey Anastasio, keyboardist Page McConnell, bassist Mike
Gordon and drummer Jon Fishman play for 60 nonstop...
Rating:
4 Stars
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Blake Shelton - Startin' Fires
Artist:
Blake Shelton
Review:
It's not hard to figure out why Blake Shelton is leading
country's next generation of stars. He's a blue-eyed CMT dreamboat
with a famous girlfriend (Miranda Lambert), and he's equally adept
at schmaltz-dipped ballads and laugh-out-loud novelty hits. His
fifth album leans toward slow, thoughtful stuff, like "Home Sweet
Home," in which Shelton flees the Nashville circus for the comforts
of a breadbasket backwater. But he's at his best in funny songs
like "Green," a proud-to-be-a-redneck anthem...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
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Belle and Sebastian - The BBC Sessions
Artist:
Belle and Sebastian
Review:
Fans of Belle and Sebastian's witty bookworm pop are an
obsessive lot, and no doubt they'll snap up this cherry-picked
collection of BBC recordings from 1996 to 2001. The draw for
devotees is four rare songs from a 2001 session, including a
hilarious fan letter to kindred indie-pop intellectuals the
Go-Betweens ("Shoot the Sexual Athlete") and a kind of hushed
farewell sung by Isobel Campbell, who left the group soon after
("Nothing in the Silence"). Otherwise, aside from a breezy
glockenspiel...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
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The Doors - Live at the Matrix
Artist:
The Doors
Review:
The Doors were still a club band in the late winter and spring
of 1967 — not yet stars, not quite spectacle, reliant on
blues and R&B covers to get through a whole evening on the
bandstand. Stuck in a long limbo between the January release of
their debut album, The Doors, and the summertime explosion
of their second single, "Light My Fire," the group played
discothèques in Los Angeles and New York and, during a
legendary engagement that March, more than a dozen sets over five
nights...
Rating:
4 Stars
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Nickelback - Dark Horse
Artist:
Nickelback
Review:
What's a poor rock band to do when your last album sold 8
million copies at a time when nobody buys CDs anymore? You can hire
a guy who produced AC/DC, Def Leppard and Shania Twain albums that
sold even more. On Dark Horse, "Mutt" Lange lightens
Nickelback's dreary post-grunge plod, applying guitar shimmer to
prom ballads and detonating big beats under frat-party shouts and
raplike vocal parts. Lyrics revel in dorkitude, hair-metal style:
"No class/No taste/No shirt/'N shitfaced." The two...
Rating:
3.5 Stars
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Guns N' Roses - Chinese Democracy
Artist:
Guns N' Roses
Review:
Let's get right to it: The first Guns n' Roses album of new,
original songs since the first Bush administration is a great,
audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record. In other
words, it sounds a lot like the Guns n' Roses you know. At times,
it's the clenched-fist five that made 1987's perfect storm,
Appetite for Destruction; more often, it's the one
sprawled across the maxed-out CDs of 1991's Use Your Illusion
I and II, but here compressed into a convulsive
single disc of...
Rating:
4 Stars
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