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GEORGE JONES
My Very Special Guests (Legacy Edition)
(Epic/Legacy)
I'd imagine cutting a duet with the greatest country singer in the history of recorded music would be a slightly intimidating experience. Yet the 35 acts who cohabitate with George Jones on this expanded (actually reconstituted) issue of his 1979 album sound almost uniformly comfortable—apparently something about the Possum's presence, physical or spiritual, sets his partners at ease. This relaxed mood frees Jones' '79 partners to respond to his rubbery call according to their idiosyncratic styles: They can generate intensity (an intricately soulful Elvis Costello on "Stranger in the House"), welcome camaraderie (a playfully rowdy Willie Nelson on "I Gotta Get Drunk"), or just harmonize sleepily (a barely existent James Taylor on "Bartender's Blues"). Granted, the tonkless young honkies with whom Jones recut his classics in 1994 on The Bradley Barn Sessions sound too relaxed, and Ladies' Choice duets with nonentities Janie Fricke and Lacy J. Dalton (what, was Juice Newton busy?) were unnecessary two decades ago. Still, several post-'79 cuts, including the tasteless Ray Charles romp "We Didn't See a Thing" and Shelby Lynne's 1988 potential-baring turn on "If I Could Bottle This Up," deserve salvaging. Had Legacy whittled this to a single disc—My Very Special Guests itself could stand to slough off Johnny Paycheck and Emmylou Harris—we'd have a worthy companion to Jones' collected pairings with Tammy Wynette and Melba Montgomery. Instead, George Jones fans, who have long accepted the inability of labels to compile him perfectly, will set this beside our many other imperfect collections. KEITH HARRIS
LISA BROKOP
Hey, Do You Know Me?
(Curb)
Mike Curb, whose label releases music by Tim McGraw, Jo Dee Messina, and LeAnn Rimes, once ran MGM Records, which he famously purged of "drug-oriented" bands, including the Velvet Underground, whose song "White Light/White Heat" and whose songwriter's later solo album Metal Machine Music were both about methamphetamine. Now, class prejudice has country fans and crank going together like furs and shiny leather boots, and this singer from speed-saturated Surrey, B.C., is the latest angel of Lou Reed's revenge. The songs with a Brokop credit are the best ones lyrically because they have twists in them—underneath the multiple, inexplicable pseudo-autobiographical references to Southern U.S. locations ("Okeechobee," "Beale Street") are moments of "crystal" clarity: "I'm a beggar on the street"; "So he starts stressin' out"; and a concise sketch of what sketchballs do all day, "Dance, though there's no music playin'." Surrey is also a hot spot for street racing and car theft (one's stolen every 84 minutes), which gives "Lime Green Pacer" ("A gift, if you could call it that") a smirking frisson, although even an "eight-track" (!) player wouldn't stay in the car the length of a stoplight up there these days. Every underclass eventually rises, and the meth-heads are handing over their untouchable-caste status to the "lith-heads"—those who prefer undiluted battery acid, sucking the juice from the power that generates portable music technology. Their AAs will probably die before they get to track four, "Ladylike," an update of Transformer-era Reed about "a woman redefined" that transliterates "camp" as "RV park," vogueing like it's about to drop a dime on Gretchen Wilson's trailer before the kitchen chem lab blows it up. In Brokop's Surrey, the fringe comes out on top. DAVE QUEEN
THE WILLOWZ
Talk in Circles
(Sympathy for the Record Industry)
The Willowz have more songs than you. A modest claim to squeak into the maelstrom of garage-rock boasts, where length-of-schlong or depth-of-record-collection often prevails. But unless you've got the scene connections to benefit from said length or depth, access to a bottomless punk-tune well is way more useful. Well, unless the bravado proves delusional: The 2005 reissue of this L.A. quartet's 2004 debut, The Willowz, added Are Coming and four new tracks, derailing the original's nine-song rush and slowing down to wonder, "Whatever happened to rock and roll?" So when one (of 20!) tunes on their (hour-long!) follow-up laments, "Those modern girls don't do it for me," suspicions that these deserving kids have mated the wasteful work ethic of Bob Pollard with the time-capsule tunnel vision of Bob Seger may be justified . . . but wrong. In fact, the band's formalism precludes dilettantism, just as their frisky lack of commitment counteracts their trad impulses. Sprinkled catchphrases like "You only get one chance/Don't blow it on romance" or "Angst is now boring/It's sex they're adoring" jostle one another with a contradictory restlessness befitting a string of journal entries: Each is deeply meant, if maybe only for the moment. And though singer Richie James Folin's thin timbre suggests taunt or whimper, he abstains from the self- centered jerkiness that would allow him to degenerate into either, balancing proud against rueful expertly enough to sketch a real consciousness behind a cool pose like, "Manipulation gets me through." KEITH HARRIS
CAROLYN MARK
Just Married: An Album of Duets
(Mint)
Who in their right mind could resist a good-time woman who takes no shit? On record, at least, that's Victoria, B.C., native Carolyn Mark's trademark—along with a throaty, casually huge voice that seems made for rock until you hear her twist a vowel or two in the name of a long-bygone Nashville. Maybe Mark is tired of comparisons with her best-known duet partner, fellow Corn Sisters member Neko Case: The highlight of "Vincent Gallo," from last year's great The Pros and Cons of Collaboration, was Mark smirking, "He was hanging out with me and Neko/And then Neko had to go, thank God." Either way, Just Married pairs Mark with a series of folks you've likely never heard of. None of them trumps Mark vocally or personalitywise, but most of them keep up. "Fireworks," sung with the honeyed-gruff NQ Arbuckle, is the sound of a tingle becoming a chill: "Said you like fireworks?/Well, I'll give you fireworks/Come on, you coward/Burn my schoolhouse down." "Done Something Wrong" is '60s Stax with an undermixed rhythm section, complete with horns-led bridge and Mark and co-vocalist Ford Pier joshing each other like a northern Otis and Carla, and with Pier's squalling soul-squeal near the end and Mark throwing in a nice modern twist: "We've been through this before/It's that stupid Internet." And when Mark and Luke Doucet cover the hoariest country standard of them all, Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," they do it slow and drunkenly, which is to say, honorably. MICHAELANGELO MATOS
