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Paul Simon - Paul Simon's Concert In The Park

Paul Simon
Paul Simon's Concert In The Park

Paul Simon You're the One (Warner Bros.) On his new album, You're the One, Paul Simon lowers the conceptual heat that typically surrounds his projects. After the South African and Brazilian journeys of, respectively, Graceland (1986) and The Rhythm of the Saints (1990) -- and the foray into musical theater on Songs From the Capeman (1997) -- it must have seemed like the right time for a more straightforward collection of songs. "Somewhere in a burst of glory/Sound becomes a song/I'm bound to tell a story/That's where I belong," Simon sings on the new album's opening track, and the comfort and command he displays throughout You're
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the One demonstrate that he's right.

Of course, "straightforward" is a relative term. Musically, the eleven songs here center on guitar-bass-percussion arrangements, with occasional keyboards, strings and wind instruments providing additional texture. In Simon's way, the melodies are lucid, simple in the best sense of the term. The album's overall impression is of quietness and introspection.(CONTINUED)

Radiohead Kid A (Capitol)

The first track on Radiohead's fourth album is called "Everything in Its Right Place." Actually, nothing in the song sounds like it is in its proper place. An electric piano marches in arrhythmic circles, crisscrossed by the wheeze of an asthmatic synthesizer and intrusive bursts of machine babble. The watery croon of singer Thom Yorke seeps in and out of earshot like whale song. And the words, such as they are, just hang in the air like comic-strip thought balloons: "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon. . . . There are two colors in my head. . . . What is that she'd tried to say?"

This is pop? Radiohead are a rock band: guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, bassist Colin Greenwood, drummer Phil Selway and Yorke on voice and lyrics. The British group's first three albums -- Pablo Honey (1993), The Bends (1995) and OK Computer (1997) -- are all classic-rock thrillers, sparkling adventures in the radical-populist tradition of the Beatles in the late 1960s; the early, galactic-rock Pink Floyd; and R.E.M. (pick any era). But Kid A is all blur. It is a kind of virtual rock in which the roots have been cut away, and the formal language -- hook, riff, bridge -- has been warped, liquefied and, in some songs, thrown out altogether. If you're looking for instant joy and easy definition, you are swimming in the wrong soup.(CONTINUED)

Green Day Warning (Reprise)

Used to be you could count on Green Day to report from t

Any LP that opens with "Kodachrome" and closes with "Loves Me Like a Rock" (two of the best hits of the '70s) is aces with us. Laidback and confidant, Paul Simon isn't in any rush as he happily gets low-key assistance from the Dixie Hummingbirds and Quincy Jones (who pens charts for the army of jazz and R&B guest stars). A personal triumph on a blockbuster budget.

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Paul Simon - Paul Simon's Concert In The Park