From getreadytorock.me.uk on Johnny Cash: Forever Words:

The poems collected two years ago in Johnny Cash: Forever Words were unsung, in every sense of the word. Gathered from handwritten letters, notebooks, journals, and manuscripts that Cash left behind when he died in 2003, the verses had never been set to music, as far as anyone could tell. Yet turning the pages of that 2016 book, it was impossible not to hear them delivered in Cash’s asphalt-dark voice, sung or spoke-sung, accompanied by his low-slung guitar and the railroad-rhythm drumbeat he favored.

Those lost songs have now become real with this 16-song tribute album, on which Cash family and friends (Rosanne Cash and Carlene Carter; Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson) as well as artists less closely associated with his legacy (Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello) accept the challenge of putting music to his posthumous poetry.

It’s a formidable task: Despite the plainspoken quality of his gruff, gothic delivery, Cash flat-out owned his songs, and the number of good Cash covers in the world is fairly low. (Little Richard, Ray Charles, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, and Bruce Springsteen are among the standout exceptions.)

The central question of this album is whether the artists assembled can do for Cash what he famously did for Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” bringing new life to the material beyond the limits of time, self, and place. But they are also charged with the task of supplying song where music never existed—to paraphrase Paul Muldoon, the editor of Cash’s collected poems, to deliver “that missing boom-chicka [that] will allow it to be completely what it most may be.”

Nelson and Kristofferson, Cash’s surviving fellow Highwaymen, lead off the album with “Forever/I Still Miss Someone,” with Nelson’s guitar Trigger wandering through a forlorn melody as Kristofferson intones what is billed as the last poem their friend wrote, anticipating his own death: “You tell me that I must perish/Like the flowers that I cherish.” What unfolds is a kind of Great American Songbook approach to Johnny Cash, traversing the country and western, mountain bluegrass, blues, and Scotch Irish balladeer range of his own work. Musgraves does a misty, harmonizing duet with her husband, Ruston Kelly, working from a letter the singer wrote to wife June Carter Cash, who died four months before him. Elvis Costello’s swoony, string-laden rendition of “I’ll Still Love You” feels like that letter’s postscript, and Carlene Carter’s “June’s Sundown” completes the romantic trio.

Some poems are aptly translated: Dailey & Vincent’s gospel bluegrass sound fits the hymnlike lyrics of “He Bore It All,” including Cash’s prelude verse from the Book of Matthew. (Cash, an ordained minister, recorded an audio version of the Bible in his lifetime, and left behind a study of Job among his papers.) In choosing “The Walking Wounded,” a bitter ballad which Cash wrote in the 1970s, Rosanne Cash gives stark voice to her father’s legacy of singing the music of the forgotten—Native American and rural and working people and those drafted in Vietnam, especially: “We make the steel, we cut the trees…You may not know us, but you’ll see/There are more than you’d believe.” In a video shot around the cottonfields of Cash’s childhood home, she wanders the present-day landscape of Dyess, Arkansas. The song also features her half-brother John Carter Cash, who co-produced the album; it’s only the second time they’ve collaborated.

Most of the songs were recorded in Cash Cabin Studios in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Allison Krauss & Union Station’s bluegrass translation of “The Captain’s Daughter” feels most true to that setting. The central character in “Jellico Coal Man,” by T-Bone Burnett, could be a Cormac McCarthy creation plodding through a Tennessee mining town, in a song that’s at once Biblical, bluesy, and brazenly dirty.

At times, the accumulation of so many voices weighs heavy on this album. There’s little room to breathe in Brad Paisley’s “Gold All Over the Ground.” It makes you yearn for the simplicity of a strong, space-giving voice, like Jamey Johnson’s barrel-chested belt on “Spirit Rider,” or Chris Cornell’s cathartic howl on “You Never Knew My Mind,” where the late grunge singer unleashes the pent-up anguish of a 1967 breakup poem by Cash.

Jazz pianist Robert Glasper delivers one of Forever Words’ most transformative moments with “Goin’, Goin’, Gone,” turning Cash’s drug confessional into a stunning R&B groove built around the refrain “Liquid, capsule, tablet, powder.” (“I was trying to describe the hell of trying to stay alive,” Cash explains in a sampled interview.) It recalls the imagination and generosity of Cash’s own work as a covers artist, suggesting his music and words as an enduring Great American Songbook in their own right, ripe for new interpretations. As he concludes in the last poem he wrote, voiced here by Kristofferson: “The trees that I planted still are young; the songs I sang will still be sung.”

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From glidemagazine.com on Paradox:

Neil Young has something of a checkered past when it comes to films—see Journey Through the Past and Human Highway—but it still might be accurate to say virtually all of the Canadian icon’s albums serve as backdrop for mind movies, even if the title in question is not an actual soundtrack as is Paradox.

Whether or not a listener’s seen this Daryl Hannah film of the same name, the relative strengths and weaknesses of this album remain and revolve around Young’s work with his most recent accompanists’/collaborators, Promise of the Real. And yet Neil and the group including Willie Nelson’s sons Lukas and Micah don’t just play familiar material, original and otherwise, on this set available on vinyl, digital and CD.

There are tunes from various stages of Neil Young’s career, including one of his earliest explorations into time and space, “Pocahontas,” as well as the arguably high point of the title, an all-instrumental ten minutes-plus improvisation on the main motif of “Cowgirl in the Sand.” But those inclusions combine with the cryptic inclusion of the Turtles’ 1967 hit “Happy Together” and bonafide blues in the form of “Baby What You Want Me to Do” (shades of Neil’s Blue Notes aggregation of the eighties) to evoke a markedly different, yet no less vivid past than this piece of cinema evokes in its Wild West motif.

Still, there’s contemporary continuity here too and not just by the presence of POTR, successors to Crazy Horse as Young’s most regular collaborators in recent years. Honed since his earliest solo days after departing Buffalo Springfield, this dyed-in-the-wool iconoclast’s well-established duality of acoustic/electric style runs throughout Paradox: loud, distorted electric guitar such as “Paradox Passage 1” links not only to similar sounds, but also the strains of pure ‘wooden music’ like “Paradox Passage 2.”

The album also gains substance in its reflection of the topical concerns that have earmarked Neil Young’s most recent work, sans his tendency to preach. “Show Me” is clearly rooted in the ‘#metoo’ movement and while “Diggin’ in the Dirt,” in all its one-minute-plus duration, croakily intoned by Lukas Nelson (in one of his multiple lead vocals here), doesn’t specifically touch upon environmental/ ecological issues, anyone familiar with the 2016 live album Earth will pick up the inference. And it’s important to note that the carefully-structured sequence of twenty-one tracks here nurtures the spontaneity pervading the music.

Snippets of dialogue like those which precede “Angel Flying to Close to the Ground” also prevent any listener from taking this all too seriously or making too much of the sociopolitical themes implied within numbers like “Peace Trail.” Rather, these laughing references to ‘sippin’ a joint’ and ‘smokin’ a beer’ are indicative of the loose, freewheeling camaraderie existing between Neil Young and Promise of the Real, a virtue so prevalent that this record becomes borderline compelling listening even though it is not a formal album per se. Paradox (Original Music from the Film) actually presents the idiosyncratic figure that is Neil Young in so disarming a fashion, it may very well be hard to resist playing repeatedly after the charming likes of “Tumbleweed” fades away at the end.

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From spillmagazine.com on By George By Bachman:

This is an odd one, or maybe just unexpected. Bachman has been issuing solo albums for many years, and By George By Bachman is Randy Bachman’s first studio release since 2015’s Heavy Blues. By George By Bachman is a tribute album of sorts to George Harrison. I say ‘of sorts’ as this is not our typical tribute album.

Bachman is a Beatles fan. He played with Ringo Starr and his All Starr Band in 1995 (you can hear him with that band on Ringo Starr and His Third All Starr Band, Volume 1, released in 1997) . He has often demonstrated the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night”, and he has played The Beatles (both solo and as a band) on his weekly radio show. He has covered the Beatles in the past with Burton Cummings on the 2007 release On Jukebox  (they covered “I’m Happy Just To Dance With You”). He loves The Beatles, so a tribute album to a fellow guitarist is not the odd part of this release. It is how he has decided to interpret the songs. He does not stick to the original arrangements at all, and often, one is left wondering what song it is until he starts singing.

Sometimes this works, his version of “You Like Me Too Much” is quite intriguing and works very well. He actually ties in hints of “In My Life” in slide guitar played in a very Harrison style. And he turns “Don’t Bother Me” into a Bachman Turner Overdrive rocker.  It works, as Bachman puts his own stamp on the songs while maintaining what is brilliant about the song.

Where it does not work, it really does not work. The reggae tinged version of “Here Comes The Sun” is an example, as it loses the beauty of that classic guitar riff. The same with “Something”. While I understand the intent, it just does not do justice to the song. But these songs demonstrate Bachman’s attempt to reinvent the songs. He takes the originals as a framework and bends the songs to his own shape. This allows him to play with genres and styles.

Bachman and drummer, Mark LaFrance have done an excellent job with the production of the song, incorporating many different instruments and sounds. Joining Bachman and LaFrance are Mike Dalla-Vee on bass and keyboards and Brent Knudsen on additional guitars. Walter Trout provides some intense guitaring on the thundering version of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

Bachman wrote one song for the album, the opening and closing track, “Between Two Mountains”, perhaps the highlight of the album. A heartfelt song that is more influenced by Harrison than about him. The sitar adds a great deal and the song is simply beautiful.

By George By Bachman was released very close to Harrison’s birthday, and in many ways is a fitting tribute to the legendary guitarist. Harrison himself did not always stick the traditional arrangements when he covered songs (listen to his version of “Bye Bye Love” on his 1974 release, Dark Horse as an example), so Bachman interpreting the songs as he hears them is right in line with Harrison. I would have like Bachman to do more solo Harrison, as the album focuses on his days with The Beatles, and although he wrote some pretty amazing things with The Beatles, he wrote equally stunning material as a solo artist.

I don’t know how run of the mill Beatle fans will take to this, nor do I know how Bachman fans are going to feel about his experimentation with genres throughout this album. For me, it is was a fascinating and interesting listening experience and an album I will return to figure out Bachman’s intention with each song.

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From folkradio.co.uk on Like A Radio:

Forty-eight years on from their debut album, Iain Matthews has reconstructed his first project after leaving Fairport Convention, putting together a new line-up, or, to be more accurate, the same Dutch line-up from 2010 but with acoustic guitarist Eric De Vries replacing Elly Kelner on vocals  alongside multi-instrumentalist Bart Jan Baartmans and keyboard player Bart de Win. All three of them have a hand in co-writing material, De Vries’ contribution being to the late night jazzy vibe musing on modern life, The Age of Isolation. Likewise, de Win shares credits on the equally mellow Chasing Rainbows, a love song to California which, featuring electric sitar,  references both Daydream Believer and Good Vibrations. Baartman has three co-writes, the first being album opener The Thought Police, a moody observation of today’s Big Brother society built around acoustic guitar and eerie background electronics. While Phoenix Rising is a melodically gentler affair, an accordion-coloured  number with Baartmans delivering a resonator guitar solo, about a singer who found fame but is now, in the eyes of the world,  a faded memory “with nothing of substance to say.” The third, which comes as one of three bonus tracks, is A Heartless Night, a West Coast-suffused laid-back ballad about a predatory femme fatale “working the room like a bitch in heat.”

There are three other shared credits, frequent collaborator Egbert Derix his co-writer for Been Down So Long, a mid-paced, bluesy five and a half minute number about oppression and exploitation that starts and ends by referencing Cortez’s invasion of the Incas. It expands to take in a wider picture of how disenfranchisement and intolerance will eventually spill over into unfocused retaliation. A post-relationship slow country waltz, Right As Rain teams him with Austin-based songwriter Michael Fracasso while the title track is another lengthy blues-tinged number about a toxic relationship, which, built around piano and clicking percussion, and sounding somewhat different from the material usually associated with Clive Gregson.

Matthews takes the solo credit on a number of tracks: the uptempo, playful, brushed drum, jazzy and woozy Jive Pajamas, a swipe at over the top Los Angeles lifestyles. The slow blues bonus track state of the world closer Your Cake and Eat It and Bits and Pieces, electric guitar and mandolin bringing a rockier sound to a number about displacement rewritten and reworked from its original form fifteen years ago as Plainsong number called A Fool For You.

The remaining three tracks also come with MSC history, a revisitation of songs from the band’s second two albums released, as was the debut, in 1970. From the sophomore release, Second Spring, comes Darcy Farrow, here recast as a sedate piano ballad to reflect the downbeat nature of the lyrics, a far cry from the jaunty, pedal-steel led original. The remaining bonus track, an electric guitar restyling of James Taylor’s Something in The Way She Moves, is taken at a slightly slower pace but with less of the original’s airy touch. While I may be imagining it, there’s a musical hint of George Harrison’s Something, the opening line of which borrowed Taylor’s title.

Finally, from the aptly titled Later That Same Year comes its opening number, Goffin and King’s To Love, reworked from the original surfing rock ‘n’ roll arrangement into a slightly slower, swampy guitar blues and country groove that more readily conjures the Everly Brothers. The band and the sound have, like the bourbon, mellowed warmly with age, but the kick is still there.

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