Editorial Reviews
Snakebite:Blacktop Ballads and Fugitive Songs
Music Review:
Music Review
Great Verdi & Puccini Arias [Import]
Gershwin & Kern: Together Again
Music: Straight from the Fridge
Harder Pt.1 [CD-single] [Import]
From the Cradle [Import] [Limited Edition]
Amazon.com
Like that of many artists who came of age in the '80s, Stan Ridgway's career has often been unfairly haunted by an endless groove of MTV overexposure that's turned perceptions of his music into something akin to a skipping record. Indeed, the veteran L.A. singer-songwriter once groused he'd likely spend his twilight years onstage in a newly liberated Havana casino lounge, crooning "Mexican Radio" to blue-haired former new wavettes. But this savory trove of songs ranks with Black Diamond as one of the best albums Ridgway has recorded since his muscular reemergence as an indie artist in the mid-'90s. Mining the same electro-acoustic vein as Anatomy, Ridgway has refined his nervous balance of traditional folk-blues and ironic-modernist instincts even further here, shrewdly casting the material in a three-act dramatic structure that sharpens its dramatic focus. The usual suspects of Stan's compelling musique noir herein feature seedy, if oddly sympathetic miscreants (the wry toe-tapper "Wake Up Sally [The Cops Are Here]," "Running with the Carnival"), a familiar musician all too wise to both his past and future ("That Big 5-O," "Talkin' Wall of Voodoo Blues"), and a blue-collar warehouse worker moving mysterious cargo Middle Eastward (the dour "Afghan Forklift"). His balladeer instincts may draw him to personal interludes both bittersweet ("Our Manhattan Moment") and elegiac ("Into the Sun," "My Rose Marie"), but it's when Ridgway fuses his Johnny Cash/Ernie Ford/Mose Allison fetishes with his own compelling personal ethos (the haunting, harmonica-seasoned "God Sleeps in a Caboose," a headline-timely, appropriately creeped-out cover of Allison's "Monsters of the Id") that Ridgway again confirms his status as one of America's most consistently original songwriters and performers. --Jerry McCulley
About the Artist
Stan Ridgway’s musical career began in the late seventies as part of a soundtrack company to create music for low-budget horror films. From the ashes, Wall Of Voodoo was born, and with Ridgway as lead voice, released an EP, two albums, and the 1983 hit single "Mexican Radio". Upon leaving, he embarked on a solo career that has included collaborations with drummer Stewart Copeland of The Police on the film "Rumblefish" dir. by Francis Ford Coppola, other independent film soundtracks, as... read more
Album Description
Echoing southern swamps and talking beercans. Lonely soldiers and voodoo chain gang ghosts. Midnight mystery trains and singing tumbleweeds. Sixteen new two fisted tales from the Wall Of Voodoo mastermind. Produced by Stan Ridgway Engineered by Baboo God