TINSLEY ELLIS 5/22, FITZGERALD’S Just as between love and hate, there’s a fine line between blues and blues rock. Atlanta guitarist Tinsley Ellis walks it with a compelling, sometimes vertigo-inducing lurch, giving everything a slight Allman Brothers shading and inviting the occasional really frightening guest to play on his albums (R.E.M.’s Peter Buck was on 1992’s Trouble Time). On his latest, Fire It Up (Alligator), Ellis’s mastery of his instrument is clear. It’s issues of taste that provide the suspense: the solo on “Diggin’ My Own Grave” is wanky enough to get him arrested in Georgia, but his cover of Los Lobos’ “I Walk Alone” is indisputably classy.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
HUM 5/22, VIC I’ll say this for Hum’s latest, Downward Is Heavenward (RCA)–it’s big. Recorded hot, with fat chords and atavistically simple melody lines reaching upward for, if not the sky, then at least the ceilings of ever-larger venues. Its naked grandiosity–which gives the quieter, “introspective” bits a weight they’d never have on their own–is almost appealing, in the same way that imprudent Nietzsche-quoting is almost cute coming from a 16-year-old. But even taking into account the tendency of a roomful of swaying bodies to absorb a lot of sound, it still seems like a futile exercise at this late juncture to keep pretending that size matters so much.
THE FRANK & WALTERS 5/23, SCHUBAS Grand Parade (Setanta), the debut full-length from the Frank & Walters of County Cork, is overstuffed with the kind of pure-pop sparkle that makes the top of your head seem to be lifting off. There are no rallying cries of “English out of Irish pop music” here–these guys get giddy with sheer Britpop, rhyming “ocean” and “devotion” and piling on the string arrangements as if Yum-Yum never happened. (Oops, I forgot, it didn’t.) Look out, though, ’cause too much of this stuff will leave you feeling shaky, like living for a week on Peeps.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): World Gone Mad photo by Tamara Staples.
