Anyone who believes that the String Cheese Incident is a typical bluegrass band will be disabused of that notion by 'Round the Wheel. There are a handful of bluegrass moments here and a couple of decent songs as well (I didn't mind "Restless Wind" and "Got What He Wanted"), but the album is dominated by jam-band notions that get mighty tedious after a while. "Galactic" vamps aimlessly for nearly four minutes before getting around to its artlessly liberal lyrics ("Our government continues to tell us lies/About who are closest neighbors are/They cover up, smother up, distort and distract"); the title track attempts to reel in Phish without getting a bite; and instrumentals such as "Road Home" and "MLT" constitute faux jazz that skirts the surface of the melodies without truly digging into them. Guest saxophonist Paul McCandless and banjoist Tony Furtado are undeniably talented, but they get swept up in the superficiality of the entire enterprise. Incident-al stuff (available in area record stores). H2Over, by Melange, represents the intersection of smooth jazz and new-age--and from my perspective, it's not a very thrilling place to hang. The copy of the disc I received doesn't include a list of song titles, but the tracks as a whole are built around the huff-and-puff flute playing of Melinda Josefina Sena and the keyboards of Jeff Tarnoff, which swaddle everything in an aural gauze that prevents much spontaneity from leaking out. It's not horrible, just bland--which I suppose a lot of you might consider horrible, now that I think of it (Melange, 5387 South Prescott Street, Littleton, CO 80120).
Andy and Cheryl Winston, the duo imaginatively dubbed the Winstons, check in with Vignettes, a tasteful folk-pop excursion. Cheryl has a hearty, full-bodied voice that Andy's singing caresses on "Anything at All," "Heart of Stone" and "Bad News Night," a trio of efforts that display the tidy production and sincerity that are the hallmarks of the album as a whole. Listeners with an allergy to earnestness will not be converted by Vignettes, but others will discover a recording that fulfills the requirements of the adult-contemporary genre without duplicating its worst characteristics (The Winstons, P.O. Box 4687, Boulder, CO 80306). Geoff Workman, who helmed multi-platinum albums by Journey and other corporate metallers prior to moving to Denver in 1985, stood behind the boards during the making of Remember Rome, by House of Stone, and it shows: The recording has the big, echoey drums and sieg-heil guitars associated with his golden era. The band, fronted by singer/flutist Dave Logan (who does not do Broncos games with Scott Hastings in his free time), is cut from the same cloth. In reviewing a demo by the group in 1994, I described the music as "more hard rock from the way-back machine," and I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more accurate phrase: "No Fear," for instance, sports a barrage of riffs that probably have been used no fewer than five million times since the Seventies, "Run to the Mountain" does the power-ballad thing with a straight face, and "House of Stone" practically begins with a drum solo. Hello, Cleveland (House of Stone, 282 West Ellsworth Avenue, Denver, CO 80223).
The members of the 8-Bucks Experiment perform three songs in SLC Punk, aka Salt Lake City Punk, a flick that received plenty of acclaim at this year's Sundance Film Festival. But although their new version of "Hey Joe," a tune covered most prominently by Jimi Hendrix, is included on the SLC soundtrack being marketed in Germany, neither that tune nor the ones the band plays on screen will appear in the domestic edition of the CD that Hollywood Records will release in conjunction with the picture's April 2 debut. Why not? According to Experimenter Evan O'Meara, whose association with the project was first reported in this space early last year, "The head of soundtracks for Hollywood told us they kicked it off because it's about killing your girlfriend."
In all likelihood, this is merely an excuse for screwing an unknown group: After all, the Exploited's "Sex and Violence" and the Dead Kennedys' "Kill the Poor" will be featured on the disc. But O'Meara is still dumbstruck by the move. "They flew us out to California to record the thing, and then they paid for a video for the German release that's been running on their equivalent of MTV. On top of that, there are around twenty songs in the movie, and we do three of them--but we're not on the soundtrack. The whole thing is just bizarre."
No, Evan--it's the movie business.
George Onassas relates an amusing anecdote overheard just prior to a Firefall show at the Little Bear on February 21. As Onassas tells it, a man came up to one of the Firefallers and told him that he loved the band so much he'd named his daughter after one of its songs. When the musician asked the moniker of the patron's pride and joy, the guy replied, "Amie"--which, in case you didn't know, was a Top 40 single in 1975 for Pure Prairie League.
Actually, it's just as well that the bar-goer's kid wasn't named in honor of a Firefall smash: After all, the only woman's handle that turns up in the title of such a tune is "Cinderella"--meaning that his daughter would have been doomed to a life of getting home by midnight.
--Michael Roberts
Backbeat's e-mail address is: Michael_Roberts@westword.com. While you're online, visit Michael Roberts's Jukebox at www.westword.com.
