Joan Osborne Relish Blue Gorilla/Mercury, 526 699-2 (61 mins) Dial-a-track code 1 201
One commentator recently used a verse from a song by Joan Osborne to highlight how "kooky" her lyrics are. You know the song One Of Us, a big hit, in which she asks "What if God was one of us, just a slob like one of us/Just a stranger on a bus, trying to make his way home/Back to heaven all alone". That's "kooky"? Not according to my book, or the slightly surreal, but nonetheless valid, mode of self expression favoured by many new female singer song writers, from Alanis Morissette through to Osborne, who have, incidentally, 13 Grammy nominations between them this year. For their "kooky" lyrics? Not exactly.
Relish is nominated in the album of the year category, while One Of Us is in the running for best single.
And if you had the inclination to happily hop on board that particular bus with Osborne, this album provides many similar, deliciously provocative, and sensual stops along the way. Particularly if you turn to liquid at the sound of the blues, an influence which ripples to the fore on Osborne's cover of Sonny Boy. Williamson's Help Me and suffuses many other tracks, like Ladder. And, yes, it is a political and musical victory of the highest order to have a white woman reclaim the normally sexist blues in this way and take on, and match, Dylan in her cover of Man In The Long Black Coat.
But it's her own roller coaster vocals and co writer Eric Brazilian's guitar lines that lift this album way beyond the travelling pack of pedestrian singer songwriters. Especially in terms of the blend of sexuality and spirituality, which Osborne apparently regards as "closely related Indeed, albums such as this prove that Fem(ale) rock rules, okay.
The Cowboy Junkies "Lay It Down"
Geffen, Ged 24952 (51 mins)
Dial-a-track code 1311
Starts off sleepy, languorous with Margo Timmons's crystalline vocal floating along "the echoey acoustic depths" before "the surge of electricity sends the song soaring"? What surge? Michael Timmons's electric guitar, which "heralds the band's return to their core sound", according to the press release that accompanies this album. Crap. To those of us who were partly led back to "cowboy" country by discovering the Junkies nearly 10 years ago, it's business as before merely deepened and made musically more multi layered and richer by the passing of time.
Songs like the opening track, Some thing More Besides Me, are still fundamentally duets between Margo and Michael Timmons, musically and in terms of the history they share as brother and sister. He puts words to her longings, and she turns his longings into song poetry. In tracks like Just Want To See they also capture what Dylan Thomas would undoubtedly describe as their mutual rage against the dying of the light". But then that's the landscape the Cowboy Junkies have always delineated. And better still, celebrated. With this album the celebration continues, in shades of grey.
Maria McKee "Life Is Sweet" Geffen, GED 24819 (50 mins) Dial-a-track code 1421
Same territory, different singer. And any femrocker who dares to cover Scott Walker's taking on of Camus's novel, The Plague, clearly deserves serious attention. Sadly, that's on a Geffen Rarities release, but here the atonal guitar sound that defined Walker's recording is mirrored in the shape of the ghost of Bowie's guitarist, Mick Ronson, which Maria claims dominates this album. A swathe of guitars certainly slices through the opening track, Scarlover, which is propelled into the strangest of spatial relationships by Maria's own guitar licks, particularly during the song's final notes. Likewise, her guitar work and forceful vocals bind all disparate elements of Life Is Sweet in a manner that was absent from previous albums, which too often were hit and miss affairs.
Best of all, however, on this album, are those tracks in which she allows her muse to breathe, as in What Else You Wanna Know. On the other hand, such forces are dispelled by a dissonant mess such as the final track, Afterlife. But, overall, a brave and challenging album.
