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Your support makes all the difference.GLORIA ESTEFAN
Mi Tierra
(Epic 473799 2)
THIS is hardly the most unexpected of releases: Gloria Estefan has always kept at least a token Spanish presence on her albums, though it's debatable whether the goodwill acceptance of those one or two tracks per LP will transfer to an entire album of interlocking percussion, staccato piano, spicy horns and foreign lyrics.
After all, the anticipated populist groundswell for the Mambo Kings film, upon which this release was surely posited, failed to materialise even in America, suggesting that Hispanic culture still has only limited penetrative power into the Anglo-American consciousness.
Of its type, though, Mi Tierra is undoubtedly a classy exercise, with no expense spared as regards personnel, which includes the cream of Afro-Cuban rhythm players, a wind section featuring Arturo Sandoval, Paquito D'Rivera and Nestor Torres, and a percussion platoon to die for, comprising Tito Puente, Sheila E and Luis Enrique. But apart from Estefan's presence, there's little reason why you should buy this album, rather than any other Latin American release by the above- mentioned. As regards her performance, the album demonstrates, retrospectively, the degree to which she has adapted her native phrasing, full of fun, dramatically-rolled R's and epic displays of emotion, to a more stylised restraint on her English- language recordings: compared to the direct address we're used to on Gloria's hits, this is a more fluttered-eyelash style of vocalising, with a completely different set of cultural assumptions. What it isn't is the follow-up to Into the Light.
RAINER AND DAS COMBO
The Texas Tapes
(Demon FIENDCD 734)
THE profile of Czech-American slide guitarist Rainer Ptacek has been rising recently, with his guest appearances on Robert Plant's bluesier recordings and a series of stunning solo gigs which utilise a live-overdub sampling method. The Texas Tapes concludes with a trio of these live tracks, the most spectacular of which is 'Another Man', an absurdly complex blend of chording, picking and slide work that defies belief.
The bulk of the album, though, finds Rainer in heavier mode than on last year's Worried Spirit solo outing; and if the implacable trudge of the boogie backing on tracks like 'Power of Delight' and the single 'Powder Keg' sounds familiar, that's probably because it's an uncredited ZZ Top, appearing (due to the usual contractual complications) in mufti - which for them presumably means clean- shaven, without hats and shades. It's a perfect combination, the Top's big, fat, loping strides slashed across by Rainer's squealing slide guitar. The lyrics of tracks like 'Trains' and 'Drive' focusing on the restless movement that's always been a crucial element of the blues. Elsewhere, the slower 'Mush Mind Blues' deals with alcoholism, and 'Merciful God' hopes vainly for forgiveness: in this more introspective mode, Rainer's style is drier, spikier, more barren than when whooping it up with the Top, still the troubled spirit tied up with six strings.
JUNGLE BROTHERS
J Beez Wit the Remedy
(Warner Bros. 7599-26679-2)
IT'S been four years since the last Jungle Brothers LP Done by the Forces of Nature, an unusually long gap for a rap act, and it shows: the Afrocentric concerns of that album are largely absent here, replaced by a profusion of romantic rhyming on tracks such as 'I'm in Love with Indica' and 'All I Think about Is You'. Thankfully, the grooves still pump with an engaging elasticity, while the JB's sample-collages hit new heights of complexity on tracks like 'For the Headz at Company Z' and 'Blahbludify', where horns and jazz piano loops collide almost randomly.
The album front-loads its more commercial tracks, particularly the infectious opener '40 Below Trooper' and 'My Jimmy Weighs a Ton', the latter demonstrating a cannibalistic approach to sampling reminiscent of one of those Escher reptiles eating its own tail: the ever- decreasing circles of sample sources range, on this one track alone, from Seventies soul crooners The Moments, through rap colleagues like Slick Rick, KRS-1 and Public Enemy, to the Jungle Brothers themselves. How's that for recycling?
GREEN JELLY
Cereal Killer Soundtrack
(Zoo 72445 11038 2)
THE rear-sleeve disclaimer explains, 'Green Jelly was the world's first video-only band until we released this 11-song soundtrack from the video album, Cereal Killer. Now we're liars as well as jerks who have no talent.' Well, you can't say you haven't been warned.
This sorry affair features the kind of feeble hard-rock and heavy metal parodies that come with big quotation marks around them. Besides 'Three Little Piggies' that's been clogging up MTV for the past month, Cereal Killer features similar one-joke 'songs' whose titles -'Obey the Cowgod', 'Electric Harley House (Of Love)' and 'Misadventures of Shitman' - tell us all we could conceivably want to know about them. The latter, a Frank Zappa spoof worthy of the Barron Knights, features a level of infantile toilet humour to which even Frank wouldn't stoop. Green Jelly's idea of thigh-slapping comedy is to do a version of 'Anarchy in the UK' whose chorus - no, you'll die laughing, really - is 'I wanna be . . . Fred Flintstone'. No more than a cartoon-video version of pantomime-rockers Gwar, with luck they can be persuaded never to spoil their conceptual solidity by performing live. Not near me, anyway.
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