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Date Posted: 09:13:06 10/24/01 Wed
Author: dwight-yoakam-usa
Subject: REVIEWS

Some are old,but some people may not have seen the reviews.

MUSIC REVIEWS OF A FEW OF DWIGHT'S CD'S:

dwightyoakamacoustic.net (Reprise)


dwightyoakamacoustic.net
At first listen, this collection of 25 songs from Yoakam's 15-year career as a country recording artist sounds like a modest effort, a memento aimed at hardcore Yoakam-ites to tide them over until the next studio blast.

But Yoakam pours considerable soul into the project. Accompanied only by his own guitar, with an occasional second from producer/guitarist Pete Anderson, Yoakam's voice carries the outing. With his trademark vocal breaks, pinch-offs, yodels and vibrato, he sings convincingly about coal miners, whiskey, Cadillacs and Kentucky, proving once again that although he makes his home in Southern California and appears frequently in the movies, he's no drugstore cowboy.

Near the end of the collection Yoakam reworks "Fast as You," from his 1993 album, This Time. He slows down the song a little and turns it into a hiccuping rockabilly tune, demonstrating that he owes a great debt to Elvis Presley and other early rock 'n' rollers. He ends the album with an a cappella version of one of his earliest songs, "Guitars, Cadillacs," sounding like an old-time mountain balladeer, timeless and heartfelt. -- Jay Orr


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Tomorrow's Sounds Today (Reprise) by: Amy Linden



It might have a catchy kitsch, swinging modern feel to it, but in calling his latest album Tomorrow's Sounds Today, Dwight Yoakam is just flat-out wrong. If anything, Yoakam's latest takes listeners back to the past rather than forward to the future, no matter what the space-age bachelor-pad title might imply. Better title? Yesterday's Sounds Right Now, because on this dandy collection the always-solid Yoakam's approach is closer to the Bakersfield blues and early western-swing grooves he first cooked up when he came on the scene back in 1986. Set your ears for fiddles, quasi-rockabilly and a laid-back, ungimmicky feel that reminds you why Yoakam is the most satisfying and consistent artist in country and why the neo-traditional movement he helped usher in (Rodney Crowell, white courtesy phone) still ranks as the high point of the contemporary country-music era.

Yes, our boy Dwight has got his pointy-toed boots firmly in cowpoke territory as he turns even a cover of Cheap Trick's "I Want You To Want Me" (RealAudio excerpt) into a rodeo-worthy roundup with everything but the "yee-hah"s. As he did with his rendition of Queen's Gap-ad-appropriate "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," Yoakam plays it tongue-in-cheek but also shows that "I Want You To Want Me" is, at its heart, a killer pop song, one that can withstand any form of musical interpretation. And, of course, Yoakam shows he can still let it rock.

Twangy guitars, melancholy pedal steel and mournful, high country fiddles abound on this collection, the former providing a characteristically Yoakam-ish bite and snap to the opening track, "Love Caught Up to Me" (RealAudio excerpt) — "Baby I couldn't hide, no matter how hard I tried .../ By the time I got free, love caught up with me." As for the fiddles, listen to the beautiful Celtic-meets-Appalachia strains of "For Love's Sake" (RealAudio excerpt), with its waltz-time rhythms and its time-honored tale of a good man caught up in the web of a hopefully evolving love. Romance, as usual, is the main theme, not only the good true love of "For Love's Sake," but also love gone wrong (the piquant raver "What Do You Know About Love," which declares "What do you know 'bout how it feels/ What do you know! 'bout if it's real...") and love that often ends in heartache (e.g. the last-call-for-alcohol two-step blues of "A Promise You Can't Keep").

Produced as always by Yoakam's guitarist Pete Anderson, the man behind those ripping rodeo chords and the surfing-in-the-Mississippi flair that has made Yoakam's sound palatable to retro-rockers and Nashville cats alike, Tomorrow's Sounds Today forgoes the livelier and more genre-bending studio tricks that pushed mid-'90s albums such as Gone and This Time into brave new sonic realms. This time around, as it was in the beginning, the mood is modest, the sound is sparse and sans embellishments. Dwight and band create country music that does the art form proud by refusing to play by Nashville's current set of stifling rules.


TOMORROW'S SOUNDS TODAY
by: Daniel Durchholz



Dwight Yoakam has been making records for a long time now, so the fact that he sometimes repeats himself or puts forth an effort that is less than his best is hardly worthy of a news bulletin. Still, it can be galling to fans when they sense a favorite artist is beginning to mail his performances in, and Yoakam followers couldn't have been encouraged by dwightyoakamacoustic.net, his "unplugged" album from earlier this year that was no fun at all.
Tomorrow's Sounds Today belies its promising title by breaking no new ground, and, in fact, retracing some pretty well-known boot-scootin' steps. Yoakam raised a few eyebrows a while back with his rockabilly take on Queen's "Crazy Little Thing Called Love," which also served as the soundtrack for a Gap commercial. That was fine, but here, Cheap Trick's "I Want You to Want Me" gets a similar treatment, and while the track is pleasant enough, it does leave a been-there-done-that aftertaste.

Similarly, the CD's bonus tracks feature Yoakam dueting with his friend and inspiration Buck Owens. It's great to hear the old Buckaroo coming out of retirement to share the vocals on the Tex-Mex "Alright, I'm Wrong" and the gospel-based "I Was There," but of course, these two have shared a microphone before, on 1988's "Streets of Bakersfield." So again, it's the past, not the future that is being dealt with here.

Elsewhere, tracks like "What Do You Know About Love" (the album's first single), "Dreams of Clay," and "Love Caught Up to Me" have a lot of energy but don't really stand out from Yoakam's previous up-tempo hits. Even the torrid "A Promise You Can't Keep" fails to leave much of a lasting impression. Somewhat better are some of the slow songs, such as "Time Spent Missing You" and "A Place to Cry," that let country-as-it-oughta-be instrumentation — fiddle, mandolin, steel guitar, and hard-twanging six-string — shine through. If nothing else, it's still a pleasure to hear on Tomorrow's Sounds Today what producer and guitarist extraordinaire Pete Anderson can do with material that is only average.

Yoakam has been cruising along in the same comfortable groove for some time now. Hopefully he can jump out of it before even his most ardent fans decide he's stuck in a rut.



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