Steve Wynn (photo by Guy Kokken)The Best Singer-Songwriter Albums of 2008
PopMatters Picks: The Best Music of 2008
[10 December 2008]
by Michael Keefe
Steve Wynn’s Crossing Dragon Bridge is an unusually acoustic-leaning and sophisticated sounding release for him. Though he’s clearly a talented songcrafter, Wynn tends to funnel his strongest works through a rock setting. Since disbanding his excellent 1980s group, the Dream Syndicate, his more rockin’ efforts (with the Miracle 3) have tended to be his best. Here, however, he channels Leonard Cohen, Jacques Brel, and other great singer-songwriters who have a flair for incorporating European melodies into their tunes and string arrangements into their recordings. Wynn traveled to Slovenia to make Crossing Dragon Bridge and performed the majority of it himself. Album bookends “Slovenian Rhapsody I” and “II” capture his locale, while standout tracks like “Love Me Anyway” and “Wait Until You Get to Know Me” employ a spare groove, allowing Wynn’s dark and self-deprecating wit to shine. The lovely “Manhattan Fault Line”, meanwhile, uses a more traditional singer-songwriter structure, accented by graceful strings. As strongly assured as Crossing Dragon Bridge is, you’d think Wynn had been recording albums like this all along.
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2. Martha Wainwright
I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too
(Zoe/Rounder; US: 10 Jun 2008; UK: 12 May 2008)On her superbly titled sophomore release, Martha Wainwright (yes, daughter of Loudon and sister of Rufus) shrugs free of the conventions of her 2005 eponymous debut. It’s not that she was overly hemmed in before. That first album is a beauty, and her soaringly pretty-yet-creaky voice gave it great character. On her latest, though, she ventures further outside. Her singing here lays waste to standard notions of placement and rhythm, as her words take flight and touch down in marvelous and unexpected ways. Likewise, Wainwright loosens up the music on I Know You’re Married. From her picking patterns to the string sounds, the arrangements feel organic and open. Wainwright’s lyrics are devastatingly good, as well. She picks at her foolish heart until it’s raw and then describes the mess with candor, humor, and sharp imagery. On top of it all, she turns in excellent covers of Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd and early Eurythmics, and works them in seamlessly with her excellent batch of original tunes.
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Review: Martha Wainwright: I Know You're Married But I've Got Feelings Too (11.Jun.08)
In Ron Hart’s review, he wrote that Lindsey Buckingham’s Gift of Screws sounds like “Fleetwood Mac without the chicks”, explaining that bassist John McVie and drummer Mick Fleetwood join Buckingham on three of the album’s tracks. “The best of these,” wrote Hart, “is the album’s title cut, a propulsive rocker in the vein of the more kinetic moments of Fleetwood Mac’s 1972 masterpiece Bare Trees and the bluesy ‘Wait for Me’, both of which exhibit the musical synergy of McVie, Buckingham, and Fleetwood better than anything they have ever recorded together. Elsewhere, tracks like ‘The Right Place to Fade’ and ‘Did You Miss Me?’ will remind fans of material from Fleetwood Mac’s surprise 2003 comeback album Say You Will. Other songs here will remind you of Buckingham’s previous solo effort, 2006’s magnificent Under the Skin.” He revives the intricate guitar picking of that album on Gift of Screws tracks like “Time Precious Time” and “Bel Air Rain”. Hart concludes: “There might not be a more poignant protest anthem in these times of bogus bailouts than ‘Treason’, a shimmering acoustic lament that stands out as one of the finest moments of Buckingham’s already-storied career.”
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See the whole list.
PopMatters Picks: The Best Music of 2008
- Introduction
- The Best Indie Pop of 2008
- The Best Singer-Songwriter Albums of 2008
- The Best of Britain 2008
- In Praise of Older Women: The Best Records of 2008 by Women 45 Years Old and Over
- The Best Singles of 2008
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