Ken Tucker reviews Stories Don’t End, the third album from the LA-based, West Coast folk rock-influenced band Dawes:

If you heard the Dawes song “Just Beneath the Surface” and said, “Somebody’s been listening to their old Jackson Browne albums!,” you’re not exactly insulting Dawes. This band has actually backed Browne on tour and Browne has sung back-up on at least one of their songs, and so you could say they come by their riffs, licks and phrasing honestly. You could, that is, if you want to pigeon-hole this quartet as a throwback to Southern California ’70s soft-rock, which would be a mistake. Why, on the very next cut on their new album Stories Don’t End, they sound like East Coast ’70s soft-rock, on the Steely Dan-ish “From a Window Seat.”

Ken Tucker likes Stories Don’t End, the new album from Dawes and thinks you might too:

I kid Dawes about their influences — I kid because I like the way these boys carry those influences with their own good humor, and with a loose assurance that their distinctiveness will shine through. On the lovely title song “Stories Don’t End,” singer-songwriter-guitarist Taylor Goldsmith talks about the ineffectiveness of talk — how words cannot express all that he wants to say about the woman he’s describing, the feelings he has for her. For that, he requires not only words, but the slightly fuzzy timbre of his voice and the gentle drumming of his brother Griffin Goldsmith. He gets closer, in this way, to suggesting how complex a story one song can tell, because as the title reminds us, the stories of a relationship, once launched, don’t end. We impose a narrative — a beginning, middle and end — upon them.

Image via Dawes

Ken Tucker on how Natalie Maines’ new solo album Mother can be seen in light of the ostracism she experienced after criticizing the Iraq invasion on stage with the Dixie Chicks in 2003:

When Natalie Maines remarked from a London stage in 2003 that the Dixie Chicks were “ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas,” she was criticizing Iraq War policy in a manner that would earn her instant condemnation and worse, even as her take on that war would eventually become a majority opinion in the U.S. No matter: What she and her group-mates felt in immediate response wasn’t just an overreaction from a segment of the country-music audience. It was also the cowardice of a music industry running scared from blunt political ideas in a perilous industry economy. There’s a tendency, therefore, to hear every song on this album as some sort of response to Maines’ life-altering remark and her subsequent public retreat. It lurks here and there, to be sure, but after the first few listens, Mother becomes the work of a mother, wife, feminist, teammate and solo artist taking her place in the public square once again, making stubbornness sound like a kind of freedom.

Image via Blacklisted Journalist

Our pop music critic Ken Tucker on the title track from Natalie Maines’ new solo album, Mother:

Natalie Maines doesn’t hesitate to make audacious moves, and wresting away “Mother” — Roger Waters’ hymn to oppressive maternal authority figures from Pink Floyd — is the biggest one on her first solo album. Maines takes the “Mother” from Pink Floyd’s The Wall and deconstructs it, emotional brick by emotional brick. She rebuilds the melody and radically alters the vocal intonation of the lyric to render it resilient enough for new interpretations. “Mother” becomes a plea for understanding; to come to terms with difficult relationships through love and trust. Which, among other things, could be heard as Maines’ attempt to reach out to Dixie Chick fans, both present and former, loyal and hostile.

Critic Ken Tucker weighs in on the controversy over the song “Accidental Racist” on Brad Paisley’s new album, Wheelhouse:

The biggest sin of “Accidental Racist” is that its good intentions topple over into sentimentality too easily — and that its melody, something Paisley usually constructs with a firm complexity bolstered by his superb guitar playing, is here merely a languid loop designed to let the words take precedence.

Image courtesy of Schmidt Relations

Ken Tucker shows some love for Kacey Musgraves’s new album, Same Trailer Different Park, on the show today:

One reason she strikes some folks in Nashville as a fresh voice is that she’s here to remind people in the 21st century that a big chunk of the country she knows best hasn’t moved on from — or has regressed back to — the moral strictures of the ’50s or even further, if you want to thump a Bible. She also makes vivid the kind of lives her subjects lead. Where other country artists fill stadiums by giving their fans reasons to escape from their 9-to-5s, Musgraves brings poetry to cigarette breaks, double shifts and fading dreams.

Pop music critic Ken Tucker reviews the new Justin Timberlake album 20/20 Experience:

Timberlake has always been a hard worker, and an early adaptor to the notion of marketing himself as a brand. Perhaps as a side benefit to what has proven his invaluable grooming and training as a Disney Mouseketeer, Timberlake knows that presentation and promotion need not degrade the product. From his own good taste, he knows that product can be transmuted into art. And by instinct and ambition, he wants to showcase that art-product to reach the maximum audience.

Image via the artist

Ken Tucker reviews Heartthrob, the new album from Canadian identical twin sister duo Tegan and Sara:

As openly gay women who’ve never made their sexuality or their sexual politics the subject of their material, Tegan and Sara have always created romantic music about falling in love and living through relationships both good and bad. In the past, it was frequently possible to distinguish between the songs each wrote — Tegan’s were often tempestuous and fulsome; Sara’s more poppy. But the material on Heartthrob is very much a collaboration of sounds and sensibilities, and these women are united in expressing the joys and the agony — the often luxurious, languid agony — that anyone who’s been in love can identify with.

Image of Tegan and Sara

Ken Tucker on the song and video (starring Tilda Swinton) for “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” off of David Bowie’s new album, The Next Day:

The song “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” proceeds from the title pun to suggest that stars — celebrities — haunt the lives of us ordinary folk, and that they are as jealous of our lives as some of us are of theirs. The video for this song, co-starring Bowie and Tilda Swinton, finds them playing a happily aging couple who grocery shop and chuckle unironically at TV sitcoms, even as their mundane activities are observed by young, glamorous people literally dying for such contentment. The music of “The Stars (Are Out Tonight)” is all guitar and drum-driven urgency, with Bowie yelling with deliberate hoarseness over the instruments, his voice a metaphor for the exhausted dread contained in the lyric.

Ken Tucker on the new David Bowie album, The Next Day:

In general, I find the structure of The Next Day significant, because it plays like a collection of discreet singles — songs each in a different style, genre, mood — very much in the current mode of consuming music, downloading one hit, or potential hit, at a time. Yet the music also coheres as an album in the classic-rock sense: a unified statement that can be listened to at full length, to tell a story about one man’s progression through innocence, experience, arrogance, cynicism, doubt, redemption, and inspiration. Yes, that’s overstating it a bit, but not much. Yes, some of these steps falter in melody or in sustaining the desired effect. But in general, The Next Day is a thriller, not merely a return to form — partly because David Bowie never took one form to begin with.

Image via Mr.Garcia/Flickr

Ken Tucker reviews the new album from Ashley Monroe, Like A Rose:

The high lonesome sound of Ashley Monroe’s Tennessee voice on the title song of her album there serves as a clear signal that she’s working within a tradition that extends back well beyond her twenty-something years on Earth. One of Monroe’s collaborators on that song was Guy Clark, a 70-something Texas country veteran who’s often too tough-guy romantic for his own good. But “Like a Rose” takes what could have been a treacly organizing premise — that the singer has had a rough life but come thru it smelling like a rose — and avoided the cliché I just used.

Ken Tucker reviews the debut album from the New York trio Guards:

The band clears vast sonic terrain, creating billowing melodies that sweep across a song with reverberating vocals and guitars that bellow and chime, ringing out in long, sustained notes. There’s a grandness of intent that connects Guards to groups as varied as U2, Arcade Fire and Smile-era Beach Boys. Guards isn’t up to the level of those acts in terms of songcraft yet — words are employed primarily as additional sound effects rather than vehicles for any sort of complex thought.

Image courtesy of Guards

Ken Tucker on the new album from Richard Thompson, Electric:

“Another Small Thing in Her Favour” is a lovely song about breaking up with not a little rancor. As the title makes clear, the narrator will give the woman some credit, but only grudgingly. When Thompson isn’t working in peak form, this recurring theme can become tiresome. But this time around, working with producer Buddy Miller, who mostly favors spare settings for Thompson’s guitar and voice, the new songs have a crisp clarity that wrings out most of the self-righteousness. Two songs stand out in particular. The first is “Stony Ground,” in which the 63-year-old Thompson imagines a codger older than himself, still feeling goatish and erotically greedy, and still getting poked in the nose for his urges. The result is what might happen if Philip Roth wrote the lyrics for a song with roots in British folk music.

Image by Pamela Littky courtesy of New West Records

Ken Tucker on Paloma Faith’s new album, Fall to Grace:

Inevitably, as a young white female British singer with R&B and classic pop influences, Faith has been compared to both Amy Winehouse and Adele. She falls somewhere in the middle of the two: less blood-and-guts soulful than Winehouse; aspiring to the anthemic pose that Adele achieves with ease. On stage, she tends to dress very formally, with long brocaded dresses; when she appeared on David Letterman’s show, her hair was done up as though she planned to go uptown to attend the opera at Lincoln Center after the taping. If Paloma Faith can maintain the quality of the music she’s making, she’s going to have lots of fans following her every musical and social cue.

Ken Tucker on the duet “If I Didn’t Know Better” sung by actors Clare Bowen and Sam Palladio on the Nashville soundtrack:

In the real world, that beautiful song wouldn’t be a country hit, either — these days, the mainstream industry doesn’t like tangled and dark, it likes lighter anthems. No matter: exploring the various strata and struggles of the music industry is what makes Nashville a compelling TV show. And this album displays a few superlative match-ups between actor and material.