Pete Seeger
American Favorite Ballads
(Smithsonian Folkways)
When Bruce Springsteen released We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions in 2006, he joined a long list of performers inspired by Pete Seeger. Seeger is now an elder spokesman and cultural icon, but this 28-track collection of Seeger chestnuts from the 1950s and '60s captures him at the height of his powers, when he was a banjo-toting peripatetic troubadour with an Americana repertoire that mixed Appalachian favorites, spirituals, slave songs, Irish songs, novelties and Broadway. The recording also harkens back to simpler times when the studio was just singer and instrument, and engineers left in voice cracks and small flubs. Forget the history lesson; all of this sounds refreshingly honest.
—Rob Weir
Marilyn Manson
Eat Me, Drink Me
(Interscope)
It's been six years since The Onion's classic "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People" piece, and yet there he is, making CDs like everybody hasn't figured out he's more annoying than scary. His voice is lethally irritating, his music forgettable. I thought Marilyn Manson's fans had all graduated high school, gotten a tan, a haircut, and a job at a car dealership already. Reportedly, the single is available through Hot Topic, so if Rodney Dangerfield were alive, he could say, "Nice song. Did you get a free pair of bondage pants with that?"
—Adam Bulger
Mushroom with Eddie Gale
Joint Happening
(Hyena)
Trumpeter Eddie Gale has played with legends like Sun Ra and Cecil Taylor, but he seems to have found eminently well-suited compatriots on this outing with Bay Area psychedelic post-jazz outfit Mushroom. This is pensive yet trippy, cerebral yet funky music that unspools itself at what will strike some as a glacial pace (only one tracks is under seven minutes). Think Tortoise, Can, some early Santana, In A Silent Way-era Miles Davis, and you've got an idea. Unlike much outward-bound exploratory jazz, Mushroom gets visceral without eggheadisms.
—John Adamian
Ian Hunter
Shrunken Heads
(YepRoc)
Though Hunter has "gone solo" for six times as long as he fronted seminal rockers Mott the Hoople, his individual output has largely been given short shrift. Too bad, because Shrunken Heads only adds to a powerful back catalog that the world will eventually pick up on. For this, Hunter enlisted the help of Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Connecticut's Christine Ohlman (Hunter himself lives near New Milford) and others. There's an elegiac quality to the songs here. Happily, he's no longer being the aging rocker, more the cranky elder statesman ("I Am What I Hated When I Was Young").
—Alan Bisbort
