Jeffrey Foucault – Ghost Repeater

Jeffrey Foucault – Ghost Repeater

Jeffrey Foucault’s Ghost Repeater is one of the most honest and most authentic works by a singer/songwriter I have ever heard.

It is a slice of life, or more correctly, a slice of American life that echoes with the sounds of a different time and a different place. Part Blues, part Country and part Folk; Ghost Repeater treads tenderly through rural America with eleven songs that seem like an old shoebox full of photographs from the twentieth century.

Foucault is an outstanding writer, with the gift of both lyric and melody. When listening to Ghost Repeater, the individual pieces of the songs; the lyrics, the melody, the music, seem to become transparent and fall away exposing the soul of the composition full with atmosphere and emotion.

Musically, Ghost Repeater is sparse and haunting with its wide open spaces filled only slightly with acoustic guitars, brushed drums and echoing pedal steel accents. Other instruments come and go with the only constant on Ghost Repeater being the acoustic guitar and Jeffrey Foucault’s voice.

Foucault has constructed an album with songs that feel traditional and arrangements to match. Ghost Repeater is sonically consistent, helping to carry that traditional feel from the starting notes of Ghost Repeater to the very last, lingering traces of Appeline.

I’ve been extremely lucky to discover a select few artists who are truly gifted in their musical pursuits. Jeffrey Foucault and his album Ghost Repeater are among the very best of them.

Barenaked Ladies – Barenaked Ladies Are Me

Barenaked Ladies – Barenaked Ladies Are Me

A while back, I wrote about the Barenaked Ladies podcast, “Live from the studio, Freaking Out.” The band began podcasting in February and has, with somewhat less frequency, continued to do so with their latest podcast that was released on August 31st. I listened to all of them and realized that I felt, for the first time in their career, that I really wanted to hear their new album. So, under the advice and/or mind control of BNL frontman Stephen Page, I pre-ordered the Barenaked Ladies Are Me: Super Duper Fantastic Morally & Socially Redeeming Deluxe Edition (actually it’s just called the Barenaked Ladies Are Me: Deluxe Edition).

Question: Was I a marketing push over? Did they, as they say, see me coming?

Answer: Possibly, but I prefer to think that I just had a lot of time invested.

Anyway, the Deluxe Edition of Barenaked Ladies Are Me has a whopping thirty tracks as opposed to the standard version’s thirteen…or fifteen if you buy it from the iTunes Music Store. You may be thinking that for someone who’s a casual fan of the band, thirty tracks seem like a lot.

Question: Was I duped by the evil and subliminal marketing strategies of the BNL sales juggernaut?

Answer: Most definitely, but you know what?

Barenaked Ladies Are Me is a really good album…not only the first thirteen “official” songs, but additional seventeen as well. That being said…

Here are my first impressions of Barenaked Ladies Are Me:

* With fear of sounding cliché, this album was recorded by a more mature BNL…not necessarily a more serious BNL mind you, just more mature.

* The album still has that signature BNL “tongue in cheek” feel, but it is not afraid to venture beyond that signature BNL “tongue in cheek” feel.

* The album seems to have a more raucous feel to it.

* There seem to be lots of guitars…lots of electric guitars.

* It feels like a more “electric” album than their past albums.

* There are very good instrumental and vocal performances by everyone.

* Bob Clearmountain did a great job mixing the disc.

* There seem to be infinitely more Ed songs on this album than usual…which is a good thing.

* Speaking of Ed…I love the line, “I was a baby when I learned to suck, but you have raised it to an art form” from Wind It Up.

All in all, I think Barenaked Ladies Are Me, in which ever form you find it; the normal edition, the normal edition with bonus tracks, the expanded edition, deluxe edition or the extremely rare and hard to find (not the least of which is because it doesn’t exist) supercalifragilisticexpialidocious edition; is a winner. By the way, you don’t have to feel too bad if you only managed to find a normal, thirteen song edition of Barenaked Ladies Are Me because the band has plans to release Barenaked Ladies Are Men, a follow up disc, in the new year that should contain most of the other tracks from the deluxe edition.

Peter Frampton – Fingerprints

Peter Frampton – Fingerprints

Peter Frampton’s new album, Fingerprints fits nicely into place following his last two studio albums; 1994’s Peter Frampton and 2003’s Now. The curveball comes when after the first few measures of Boot It Up, the first track from Fingerprints, you begin to realize there are no vocals. The man responsible for the best selling live album of all time, Frampton Comes Alive, and such legendary songs as Show Me the Way and Do You Feel Like We Do seems to have abandoned the microphone in exchange for his guitar and released the first instrumental album of his career.

Fingerprints is eclectic, carefully crafted, well played and most definitely a Peter Frampton album. Anyone who is familiar with Frampton as an artist can attest to his particular guitar “sound,” made up of his guitar tone and thoroughly influenced by his instrumental technique and musical phrasing. His sound is, just as the name of the album implies, a fingerprint and the longer a musician plays, the more defined that fingerprint becomes…and Peter Frampton has been playing for a long time.

It’s an interesting experience to hear an instrumental album from a musician who is intimately familiar with the workings of writing a song with both music and vocals. The songs on Fingerprints are more about being songs and less about the technique needed to play the instrument. The melody lines played by Frampton’s guitar are much more like vocal passages than your typical instrumental guitar album, which this is not.

The songs, while all identifiable as Frampton, are all unique to each other. Each of the fourteen tracks is a composition unto it self. Fingerprints is not disappointing in it’s variety; you have full on rockers, contemplative acoustic pieces, blues, a little jazz and even a French vignette courtesy of the album’s closer, Souvenirs de Nos Peres.

Some may look at Fingerprints as being a work of self-indulgence, in that Peter Frampton has chosen to only focus on his passion for guitar. However, a different argument could also be made. Fingerprints may just be a small jewel in the vast career that Peter Frampton has had.

John Mayer – Continuum

John Mayer – Continuum

I had these two ideas for the John Mayer review. I couldn’t decide, so I included them both…you pick.

Review #1:

Having written at length about John Mayer and the songs on Continuum previously, I am left with only two things to say about Mr. Mayer and his new album:

1 – Thank whichever God applies that John Mayer started his career early. That God willing, he will be with us to a ripe old age and making music all the while.

2 – Stop reading this and proceed with one of the following:

A – Log in to iTunes and buy a copy of John Mayer’s Continuum right now.

B – Get in your car, drive to your favorite place to buy music and buy a copy of John Mayer’s Continuum right now.

Review #2:

Having written at length about John Mayer and the songs on Continuum previously, I am left with only one thing to say about Mr. Mayer and his new album:

fan-F$%#ING-tastic