T-BONE BURNETT
Tooth Of Crime
The album, completed fresh off Burnett's stunning work as producer and arranger of the Robert Plant/Allison Krauss collaboration Raising Sand featuring some of the same musicians, is a vibrant outgrowth of a long-running collaboration with playwright Sam Shepard that began with the 1996 musical staging in New York of his noted play of the same name. The songs are arresting distillations of modern conflicts and personal drama in a modern hyper-reality. The arrangements are imaginative and inventive. The performances are stunning, masterful, and unpredictable. Tooth of Crime is a prophetic play that Sam first wrote in 1972, and it takes place in a time very much like now, Burnett explains. It's a time when there are zones of fame that flare up and people can become incredibly famous in their own zone and nobody else can know it. And then the zone completely disappears, but the famous person doesn't realize it because you can t even find the zone anymore. You have to hook up a toaster to a television to a microwave to a piano very post-apocalyptic. That was the initial inspiration for the album. These songs came together like a broken mirror, and you get a bunch of shards and start putting them together and create a lot of different angles, he says. That's this group of songs, this process. Working with Marc Ribot and drummer Jim Keltner, Burnett crafted the sound of Tooth of Crime into a unique aesthetic. (Nonesuch)

Rolling Stone review

Uncut Magazine review

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INDIVIDUALS (DUE 04.29.08)
Fields / Aguamarine
Their debut EP, Aquamarine, was produced by the dB's Gene Holder. It was voted one of the best EPs of 1981 in the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop critics' poll. ([2]) The band's one album, Fields, was also produced by Holder and engineered by Mitch Easter. While Christgau criticized their lyrics as "lack[ing] that universal touch" ([3]}, critic Robert Palmer, writing in the New York Times in May 1982, called Fields "remarkably mature" and "the most impressive rock debut so far this year."
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FABULOUS COUNTS
Jan Jan
Formed in 1968 The Fabulous Counts were a scorching Detroit funk and R&B outfit that recorded singles on local labels Moira and Westbound before releasing this, their debut, on Cotillion in 1969. The title track is a funk classic that spent 5 weeks on the R&B charts in early '69 and the rest of the album is equally strong, matching instrumental covers of contemporary hits from James Brown, Sly & The Family Stone, The Beatles, and others with original material. The band later dropped the "Fabulous" and recorded several albums for Westbound. A funk classic back in print on CD.
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ARCHIE BELL & THE DRELLS
Tighten Up (Import)
The Quarrymen of Gainesville? In a nutshell, that's Mudcrutch, the band Tom Petty played in before forming the Heartbreakers. And while John Lennon and Paul McCartney never got around to resurrecting the Quarrymen, their first band, after the Beatles exploded, Petty and his long-ago mates -- guitarist Tom Leadon and drummer Randall Marsh along with future Heartbreakers keyboardist Benmont Tench and guitarist Mike Campbell -- have reunited to put out the debut album they never got to make originally. (more info). . .
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