13 (Virgin), the new album from England’s Blur, opens with a little country music. “Tender is my heart, you know, it’s screwing up my life,” croons Damon Albarn, Blur’s lead singer, cross-genre adventurer and unassumingly starry blond face. The tune, Blur’s current and best single, is entitled “Tender,” and Mr. Albarn and his three bandmates–guitarist Read More
A while back, Beth Orton, the winningly gloomy 28-year-old English folkie, managed the odd trick of somehow impressing ravers. “Once Beth Orton was indie strummer, chemical sister and- yawn -The Comedown Queen,” The Face recently explained in its February issue, referring to Ms. Orton’s calming appearances on the Chemical Brothers’ manic Exit Planet Dust and Read More
Singles 90/98 (Virgin), the Lamborghini of boxed sets, is a collection of 63 tracks by the Bristol, England, sound consortium Massive Attack. The set consists of 11 disks, each named for the single it presents, with up to five remixes. Some of the disks also contain slightly altered 7-inch versions of the original album versions Read More
The cognoscenti are wigging. “How did a 45-year-old ‘neurotic diva’ with one foot in Faulkner’s South and one foot in Garth’s make the year’s best album?” wonders a headline in Spin . “Perfect,” declares critic Robert Christgau in the July 9-23 Rolling Stone . “Courtney Love and Alanis Morissette could learn a few things from Read More
Every now and then, when only a few bands are able to engage large numbers of listeners with songs that advance the mighty cause of the electric guitar, some people howl that rock-and-roll is dead–or, to use that bratty current adjective for extinction, “over.” What with civic auditoriums full of techno acts like the Prodigy Read More
Pushing her voice to surge and sparkle in ways it just doesn’t want to, Sheryl Crow tries and tries to manage the choruses of “Tomorrow Never Dies,” the smart neoclassic James Bond ballad she and producer Mitchell Froom wrote for the new 007 movie. “Darling, you’ve won,” Ms. Crow purrs like a cat in one Read More
