Recyclables

BRUCE COCKBURN
Anything Anytime Anywhere: Singles 1979-2002
Rounder

It's been sitting there since a few months after 9/11, waiting for the moment I needed it, and with the Archbishop of Denver and the Southern Baptists and their nondenominational ilk doing their damnedest to overrun the electoral system, this is it. Both modernist and high church, Cockburn's disdainful Christian dudgeon is a vast improvement on fundamentalist blinderdom even if you're a convinced populist. Singing about love or imperialism (though he's better on imperialism), he assumes a moral vantage whose cleansing clarity is a comfort on nights when the future's so dark you gotta wear a miner's hat. And sufficient unto the day is the musicality thereof.

PHOEBE SNOW
The Very Best of Phoebe Snow
Columbia/Legacy

Great round rough funky voice. Better writer than editor. Air of mild chronic dysfunction. Coulda been a diva, wasn't tough enough. True New York liberal type. Why pay cover charges for white lounge blues when you can order this online and never leave your studio apartment? Oh, I get it--unlike Snow, you want to leave your studio apartment. Like maybe to vote.

Village Voice, Oct. 26, 2004

Dec. 14, 2004

Dec. 14, 2004