THE VON BONDIES

Pawn Shoppe Heart

Sire Records

At a recent performance at San Francisco’s Great American Music Hall, The Von Bondies provided ample evidence supporting recent media claims about their outstanding live shows. Unfortunately, like a lot of great live bands, only a handful of songs from their major label debut, Pawn Shoppe Heart, adequately convey the energy of their live performances.

After a few seconds of feedback, the release careens to a promising start on “No Regrets,” a stomping rocker propelled along by Don Blum’s drumming and made interesting by backing vocals from bassist Carrie Smith and guitarist Marcie Bolen. “C’mon C’mon” distills the energy of their live show into a catchy, two-minute single. Only on “Mairead” does singer/guitarist Jason Stollsteimer properly evoke the Doorsy darkness of their previous CD, 2001’s Lack of Communication. Other songs like “Right of Way,” which sounds like an outtake from the Nuggets compilation, and “Not That Social” definitely rock, but these tunes will probably not linger too long in the listener’s mind unless the individual’s ears are still ringing from one of The Von Bondies’ raucous live shows.

—Stuart Thornton

IRON AND WINE

Our Endless Numbered Days

Subpop Records

Until recently, Iron and Wine was Sam Beam, a Florida college professor who, in his spare time, made low-fi bedroom recordings of his whispery neo-folk music. But last year’s The Sea and The Rhythm was successful enough that it allowed Beam to take a semester off to put out a full-length album.

Having sprung from such humble roots (in terms of production), it makes sense that Beam, using economists’ grow-or-die logic, would want to take things to the next level.

If it was such anxious doubt that led him into what sounds like a big studio for Our Endless Numbered Days, then he was unprepared to deal with the consequences, because the conventional commercial recording magnifies the flaws in Beam’s arrangement and what was minimalist becomes incomplete. The listener realizes that in nearly every song the slide-guitar plays the same line over and over again without variation and that Beam uses the same picking-pattern on seven of the album’s 12 tracks.

His composition and arrangement should have made the same quantum leap that his production did, not only because his audience expected artistic growth from Iron and Wine, but because Our Endless Numbered Days feels inordinately polished for what it is.

—Matthew Baldwin

NAS

Illmatic: 10th Anniversary Platinum Edition

Columbia

Has it really been ten years? A decade is a pretty long time; in hip-hop, it’s an eternity. That Illmatic sounds as fresh today as it ever did, secures its place among the greatest hip-hop albums.

There are plenty of reasons why Illmatic is so enjoyable including that each of its 10 songs is unique and classic in its own way. With a little help from a few heavies at their peak (Large Professor, DJ Premier and Q-Tip), Nas came out of nowhere, a 20-year-old youth with raw rhyming skills and a new hip-hop mentality immortalizing life on the New York streets. From the pain of seeing friends go off to jail (“One Love”) to the pleasures of kicking back with friends (“Memory Lane”), Illmatic was a reflection of a life in the projects, a coming of age as much about the man as it was about the environment that produced him. Portraits of street life have since come and gone, but Nas’ masterpiece remains the blueprint: authentic, reflective, and undiluted.

—Berwin Song