Alternative Rock music reviews

Rarities, B-Sides and Slow, Sad Waltzes marks the rebirth of Latent Recordings, the label created by the Cowboy Junkies to release their first two landmark albums, Whites Off Earth Now!! and The Trinity Session. Though they've already released a best-of package--Cowboy Junkies: Studio--this is somehow a more fitting tribute to the particular and peculiar vision of the Junkies' music. Comprised of one-offs, rare tracks, and lost demos culled from a decade of recording, it features all the elements that produce Cowboy Junkies junkies. They've never strayed far from their trademark formula, playing stripped-to-the-bones, kinda rockish, kinda countryish, kinda bluesy songs at a somnambulant pace and at room temperature. Even when they get a bit noisy, as on "I Saw Your Shoes," it's a sparse noise, made more by volume than by density. Part of what the Junkies have always done best is applying their aesthetic to songs lifted from others' fakebooks, and their rollicking run-through of Bob Dylan's "If You Gotta Go, Go Now" and their slow-as-molasses lope through Jerry Garcia's "To Lay Me Down" stand among the album's highlights. And there's always the pleasure of Margo Timmons's distinctive voice, which carries much of the Junkies' appeal. Somehow she manages to sound both distant and intimate, kind of like a drowsy lover. Everything she sings sounds as if it's recorded in a vast, dark, and empty room, and she makes the most of it on "River Waltz" and "Sad to See the Season Go"--both lovely, lovely songs. If these are indeed the Cowboy Junkies' castoffs, it proves they're a band that can do no wrong. --Tod Nelson

The '80s folk revival yielded a diversely talented generation, some reared on the aesthetic and ideology of punk, some on their '60s singer-songwriter predecessors. They were looking for the directness of expression and connection with audience that stripped acoustic music promised. Michelle Shocked built an audience through her strident activist messages and raw, almost naked songs; she had the sincerity that the audience craved. Despite the militant cover--in which a cop is seen choking a protesting Shocked--the record is memorable for its reveries of childhood, its simple sense of hope, and Shocked's minimalist guitar and hoarse, youthful voice. --Roy Francis Kasten

In 1990, the Saw Doctors, an obscure band from the rural backwater of County Galway, topped the Irish charts with their second single, "I Useta Lover." It remained in the No. 1 slot for nine weeks and became the biggest selling Irish single ever at that point. They play the sort of roots-rock that has seldom dented the American charts since the E Street Band disbanded, but the Saw Doctors' roots include a large dose of Irish folk music as well as American rockabilly and British pub-rock. By 1997, the group had gone on to release three hit albums and an EP, scoring three Top 30 British hit singles in the process. Even though they toured America three times, the Saw Doctors never had a U.S. release until Sing a Powerful Song was released late in 1997.

Culled from their previous Irish releases, this 17-song compilation makes a strong case for the Saw Doctors as one of the world's most appealing roots-rock outfits. The quartet plays with a loose-knit affability that de-emphasizes flashy solos and sonic innovation in favor of joyful gusto. This could easily lapse into bar-band clichés, but the songs written by the band's two singer/guitarists are too good for that. Davy Carton and Leo Moran have a sharp eye for mixed emotions and lyric detail, which they marry to bouncy melodies. They lionize Ireland's "N17" in much the same way Bobby Troup once celebrated America's "Route 66," but Carton and Moran are smart enough to balance the romance of the road with an acknowledgment of the price it demands. In "To Win Just Once," they have crafted an anthem for the losers of the world, and in "Same Oul' Town," they have mixed affection and frustration in their portrait of their provincial hometown. --Geoffrey Himes

Pearl Jam's unprecedented documentation of their Europe 2000 tour has done more than offer their fans an affordable alternative to music pirates; it effectively ensures their stature as one of rock's greatest live acts. Recorded before an unusually ecstatic audience at Milan's Fila Forum, the album finds the band playing off the crowd's good vibe with wild, sometimes antic abandon. Building from one of the tour's favored openers, Binaural's "Of the Girl," with the crowd hanging on every word, the vibe grows as the crowd joins in on "Small Town" and a number of others. The band seems unusually energetic, with Mike Mcready repeatedly giving in to the temptation to make like a soaring guitar god. Eddie Vedder introduces a driving version of "MFC" from Yield by telling the crowd that he wrote it in Italy after falling in love there. "But," he notes, "she had four wheels and was called a Mini." A great feel-good show from a band once notorious for its dour shoe gazing--maybe it really is the dawn of a new millennium. --Jerry McCulley

After producing groundbreaking albums for, and often with, Peter Gabriel, U2, Robbie Robertson, and the Neville Brothers, Daniel Lanois's self-produced debut album proved at once familiar in its thick, swampy sonics and startling in its pared-down, intimate scale. Lanois's song cycle is steeped in the francophone cultures both of his Québécois heritage and of his adopted New Orleans home, mixing English and French as easily as Lanois himself alternates from soulful croon to plainer folkiness. Populated with rural characters, his detailed stories evoke a lost time through two-step acoustic love songs, narrative ballads, and a hushed, propulsive prayer; "The Maker" features a ghostly, restrained harmony vocal by Aaron Neville. The underlying historical link between old Acadian culture in his title and its descendant Cajun culture surviving in Louisiana's bayous and backwoods gives the songs and these performances a haunting, and haunted poignancy. --Sam Sutherland