Listen To What The Man Said
“What’s this?” I asked. “A Paul McCartney tribute album benefitting cancer charities and featuring the Finn Brothers? Sign me up!”
Actually, this nice little selection, proceeds from which go toward the fight against breast cancer, has many good covers of Macca’s post-Beatles best. Owsley kicks things off with a picture-perfect reading of “Band On The Run” which doesn’t stray very far from the original Wings recording. SR-71 turns “My Brave Face” – one of my favorite latter-day McCartney solo tunes simply by virtue of the fact that it isn’t “Hope & Deliverance” – into a gleeful hard-rock thrash. Semisonic also faithfully replicates “Jet”, rocking it out a bit but not so much that it’s unrecognizable. The Virgos give a similar treatment to “Maybe I’m Amazed”, while the Merrymakers punch up “No More Lonely Nights” (another personal favorite) a bit. Some of the other renditions fly under the radar a bit – Matthew Sweet’s “Every Night” for one.
And as for Tim and Neil Finn? It pains me to say it, but their cover of “Too Many People” is a mess – it sounds like an unrehearsed one-take-and-that’s-it wonder, without much effort. The arrangement isn’t organized, the sound quality isn’t even up to the standards of the brothers’ admittedly (and intentionally) lo-fi Finn album, and the vocals just smack of a cover band that’s been asked to play something they’d mostly forgotten. Sad to say, the Finn Brothers, who drew my attention to this collection, turned out to be its biggest disappointment. I was stunned. I was also looking forward to the They 
Might Be Giants cover of “Ram On”, but it wasn’t so much disappointing as just inscrutably cryptic in its new arrangement.
Overall, a nice set – and one that truly turned my expectations on ear by introducing me to some excellent new artists while the known quantities gave me a wee bit of a let-down.
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- Band On The Run – Owsley (5:14)
- My Brave Face – SR-71 (3:00)
- Junk – Kevin Hearn, Steven Page and Stephen Duffy (2:56)
- Jet – Semisonic (4:15)
- No More Lonely Nights – The Merrymakers (4:11)
- Let Me Roll It – Robyn Hitchcock (4:21)
- Too Many People – Finn Brothers (3:43)
- Dear Friend – The Minus 5 (4:45)
- Every Night – Matthew Sweet (2:56)
- Waterfalls – Sloan (4:21)
- Man We Was Lonely – World Party (2:59)
- Coming Up – John Faye Power Trip (3:43)
- Maybe I’m Amazed – Virgos (4:14)
- Love In Song – The Judybats (4:04)
- Warm And Beautiful – Linus of Hollywood (3:08)
- Ram On – They Might Be Giants (2:40)
Released by: Oglio
Release date: 2001
Total running time: 60:30
The premise of this double-disc compilation is simple: various modern pop artists, most of them enjoying cult indie label status (and a few of them refugees from major labels too), revisit the songs of one of their musical heroes, ELO’s Jeff Lynne. Colorado’s own Not Lame Records has been teasing the heck out of this release for months, only to watch it be bogged down by politics (the father/son duo of Randy and Tal Bachman, each of whom were originally slated to contribute a song, pulled out) and delays (a printing error in the first run of liner notes booklets which caused the collection to slip well past its original pre-Christmas 2001 release date). And now that it’s here, was it worth the lengthy wait?
Overall, however, a nice treat for ELO/Lynne fans, and hey, your mileage may even vary on which songs worked and which ones didn’t. Highly recommended – and, in the face of Sony’s recent reticence to continue the promised remastering of the entire ELO catalogue, it may be the last ELO related treat we fans get for quite a while. Soak it up slowly and enjoy.
Kicking off with a lovely ballad which shares the album’s title, the first effort by John Lennon’s eldest son is almost eerie to listen to today, and it affected Julian’s career forever. Was he deliberately trying to sound like his father? Could he have avoided it even if he had tried? In the end, the questions are moot. “Valotte” – the song, not the entire album – sounds more like a lost John Lennon opus than either of the “new” Beatles songs created when the elder Lennon’s former bandmates “finished” incomplete songs in 1995. Julian’s vocals are spot-on perfect for the song and its subject matter, and it’s written and arranged in a way that echoes John’s songwriting and performance eerily. “Lonely”, a bluesy ballad which didn’t make it to single status, is another example of the haunting similarities. But there is another side to the album – several relentlessly ’80s pop songs (“Jesse” is especially guilty of dating itself). But overall, the good 
This is a rockin’ selection of hysterically funny covers of the immortal tunes from those educational animated shorts that used to give ABC’s Saturday morning cartoons such a distinct identity. ABC tries to brand itself with an incredibly annoying series of banana-yellow graphics these days, but that will never even approach the popularity or instant recognition factor that ABC had with the Schoolhouse Rocks cartoons. Schoolhouse Rocks officially ascends to the status of cultural icon with this cover album, featuring a series of often faithful (and occasionally way-the-hell-out-there) covers performed by alt-rock and rap artists. The original Schoolhouse Rocks theme opens the proceedings, and Deluxx Folk Implosion promptly crashes the party with a very good copy of “I’m Just A Bill”, adding the modern touch of vocals dripping with thick, syrupy sarcasm. It’s hard to bang one’s head and laugh out loud at the same time, but this is a good song with which to try. Other standouts include a very good homage to “Electricity, Electricity” by all-girl band Goodness, and Ween’s very accurate rendition of “The Shot Heard ‘Round The World”. The more rap-oriented 
Long ago in the mists of time, I started my humble radio career at KBBQ, then known as Q-101 (later renamed Q-100.7 for some reasons that probably have something to do with consultants and FCC regs). I was about to start my senior year of high school. And while rap and dance music were reigning supreme among my peers, I sat at the local broadcast end of a canned satellite radio service and soaked up music from the 50s through the 70s. It immediately rendered me astoundingly unhip at school, and locked me into a time warp that engulfed me until I left radio for TV, but I wouldn’t trade for anything the musical education I absorbed by osmosis during that period. I just sat in the room, ran local commercials during breaks in the satellite schedule, and sleepily intoned the weather forecast twice an hour, and spent the rest of the time listening intently. Sure, there were plenty of songs that got on my nerves, but one of the songs I loved more than most was The Left Banke’s “Walk Away Renee”, a string-drenched, Beatlesque pop tune with great vocal harmonies and an instantly memorable hook. So, when I happened to spot a single (and actually very inexpensive) CD purporting to be the complete recordings of The Left Banke, I picked it up pretty quickly.
This is really my favorite Ray Lynch album, but I’m afraid that isn’t saying much. I find so much so-called “new age” music to be repetitive, meandering, and in many cases just plain boring. No Blue Thing is often repetitive and meandering, but at least it barely avoids the trap of being boring. By adding a small chamber string ensemble to some of the largely synthesized pieces, Lynch’s music takes on a much more interesting quality than usual. Sadly, that’s the exception rather than the rule. 
It’s not very often (in fact, hardly ever) that I recommend an entire album on the strength of its one good song, but the singular worthwhile cut on this album is well worth the price of the whole thing. While the rest of the album seems to sound like a step backward for Lynch, “Ivory” is the best neo-classical piece to hit my ears in a long time. A relaxing piano-flute duet, it makes one ask why the whole album couldn’t have been done in this manner. Nevertheless, even if 
It’s a crime that this album, Lynne’s first solo effort after his ELO years and the Traveling Wilburys, wasn’t promoted better, because this album is much better than even most of the favorable reviews gave it credit for. With a comfortable distance between his current sound and the days of ELO, Lynne weaves an easily listenable combination of his thick trademark harmonies, the occasional string section, his more laid-back Wilburyish tendencies, and even a few surprises like the Indian percussion on “Now You’re Gone”. His ability to come up with a catchy and unpredictable combination of melody and harmony is as strong as ever, and the much more acoustic feel of this album (in comparison to ELO or even George Harrison’s Cloud Nine album) benefits from Lynne’s sharp production. “Lift Me Up” and “Every Little Thing”, the two 
This is a handy collection of some of the earliest recorded works by my favorite performer/songwriter in all of rock ‘n’ roll, Jeff Lynne of ELO fame. Even in the late 60’s tunes he wrote for his band Idle Race, it’s easy to hear the Lennon/McCartney influences – actually not so much easy to hear them, but impossible to miss them. In some cases, the quirky melodies and harmonies almost hit one over the head with their Beatle-ish-ness – at this early stage in his career, Lynne probably had yet to incorporate musical influences other than his beloved Fab Four into his work. Still, while much of the Move and ELO music on this album can be heard elsewhere (and, indeed, are reviewed elsewhere here), the 