Music Review: The Pogues -- If I Should Fall From Grace With God

Article first published as Music Review: The Pogues — If I Should Fall From Grace With God on Blogcritics. Another in my Dark Elf Essential Performances series.

Sure'n, here's a bit of the blarney to wet yer whistle, me boyo:

But rather than focus on Shane MacGowan’s manic insistence on assuming the mantle of the stereotypical tortured Irish artist in search of a besotted Gaelic muse — following, like Brendan Behan before him, a wanton path to an early death — let us instead focus on the music. Because, after all, MacGowan is not dead yet, and perhaps he, along with Keith Richards and cockroaches, will survive global warming, nuclear detonations, or whatever disaster will consume the rest of humanity.

Enjoy!

'Friday Night in San Francisco' Music Review

Available for your perusal at blogcritics.org, another album review in my Dark Elf Essential Performances series:

Music Review: Al DiMeola, John McLaughlin, Paco DeLucia — Friday Night in San Francisco

Here is an excerpt from the review:

As a longtime guitarist and bar-band blues bludgeoner, all I can tell you is that I am in awe of the technical ferocity, incredible dexterity, and concordant reciprocity by which these three musicians blend and bend. And to make this album all the more intriguing, these virtuoso guitarists are not shredding the old-fashioned way, with the ubiquitous and almost obligatory Stratocaster or Les Paul; on the contrary, they are frying the frets of acoustic guitars! This “unplugged” concert predates the staged versions on MTV by nearly a decade, and 'Friday Night' certainly eclipses anything from that overrated, overblown series, save perhaps the outstanding performance by Eric Clapton. But alas, poor Eric! For all his vaunted "Slowhand" moves, he couldn’t keep up with these three players with a vast quantity of anabolic steroids and an eight ball of coke.

Enjoy.

Post-script: The reviews for Friday Night in San Francisco and Will the Circle Be Unbroken have both been selected as an 'eds-pick' (editor's selection) over at blogcritics.com! I thank the editors for their sagacity and evident good taste.

Album Reviews For Jethro Tull's 'Aqualung' and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's 'Will the Circle Be Unbroken'

I've recently joined blogcritics.org in order to spread my snarky, but devilishly charismatic, curmudgeonliness further across the tediously tepid World Wide Web. After all, the crabbed and constipated Internet is need of an expository enema -- or perhaps a peripatetic pimp slap upside the blogoshpere. In either case, I will be doing long-form album reviews over there, essays on this blog and shorter reviews on RateYourMusic.com  .

I will be strictly reviewing albums I deem important to their genres or music in general over at blogcritics.org, in a series entitled Dark Elf Essential Performances (or, if you prefer snazzy acronyms, DEEP). The series will touch on a wide range of music (rock, country, jazz, classical, blues, etc.), with the defining factors being the uniqueness, the virtuosity, the excellence of the concept or thematic continuity, and the compositional excellence of the recordings -- all the things that make these sublime albums worthwhile for you to listen to, even if you have been living the life of an ascetic ensconced in a hermetic cell within a desert monastic community and have yet to hear them. Consider it an ascetic emetic.So, without further ado, the first two reviews for you:

Jethro Tull -- Aqualung
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band -- Will the Circle Be Unbroken

Enjoy.