Month: January 2004

  • Richard Thompson

    Despite a few lackluster albums during the nineties, we’re quite fond of Thompson’s studio releases—last year’s The Old Kit Bag stuck in our heads deeply enough that we wound up happily exploring further all the way back to his sixties work with Fairport Convention. But the deep-voiced king of British folk is really at his…

  • Ladysmith Black Mambazo

    You might know them best as Paul Simon’s backing band on Graceland, the smash 1986 album that was many Americans’ first serious dip into the wide ocean of world music. But South Africa’s top choral group has too much musical grace to need to stand behind anybody. They’ve been championing the complex, lilting harmonies of…

  • Sting

    Still wondering what to get your beloved for Valentine’s Day? Here are a few hints: white linen shirt, a trip to a tropical rainforest, perhaps a new Jaguar. Still no idea? How about this: rhymes with “bling.” Sting brings the North American leg of his Sacred Love tour to Minneapolis before heading home for a…

  • Huun-Huur-Tu

    Six or seven years after being completely knocked for a loop on first hearing the traditional music of the tiny Russian republic of Tuva, we’ve still heard nothing quite like it. Throatsingers, as they’re called, can produce up to four notes at the same time, layered one on top of the other, rumbling like an…

  • Norah Jones, Feels Like Home

    After 2002’s phenomenal Come Away With Me, one might expect Norah Jones to be weighed down by the challenge of following up such a debut…especially with that load of Grammys! But Jones claims that was never a concern of hers, and she describes the new album rather as a “snapshot” of where she is in…

  • Talkie Walkie, Available January 27

    It’s hard to know why these things happen, but this superhip French duo is more a living museum of genteel new wave than the bleeding edge of ambient electronica. Their chic debut of a few years ago, the moogy Moon Safari, rode the crest of a kitsch wave at about the same time we started…