new introductory bit here.

This is a reviews page based on my own collection, which just keeps growing despite itself. If it isn't listed here, it's because I don't own it yet, or I haven't gotten around to it yet.

Also, bother your local "new rock" radio station and make sure they are playing "new rock" and not "Rock the Casbah," which is not new.

note: entries in red text indicate my pick for the artist's best available album. A gold numeral indicates the POPocalypse winner of the year's best album; second- and third-place winners are in blue. Green lettering indicates an obviously exploitative record company compilation without apparent artist input.

Folk music isn't discovered by chance on the radio. People play the songs they like to friends on cassettes in their car. That's how I was introduced to Dar Williams, one of those New England coffeehouse folksters: sitting in a parking lot in Nashville and hearing a very silly song called "The Pointless, Yet Poignant, Crisis of a Co-Ed" which hooked me for life and ensured I'd go back to Atlanta with a copy of her second album, Mortal City.

Dar Williams isn't remarkably different from countless antecedents and contemporaries, but she does have the advantage of a fantastic voice and great lyrics. She specializes in amusing little tales of family and college life, notably her show-stopping standard "The Babysitter's Here" from her debut The Honesty Room and the song-most-likely-to-convert-newbies "The Christians and the Pagans." Most amazing of all her early material is Mortal City's title track, a truly stunning and incredibly lonely tale about a first date snowed in by a blizzard, told over a quiet piano and slowly added strings. The song's a work of utter genius, and demands solo listening at night.

Dar's subsequent work has gotten a reputation from some of her fans as being not as strong, with the third album End of the Summer singled out for its use of rock arrangements. In the album's defense, her attempt at using rock idioms to write proper pop songs with actual choruses is completely successful, and the upbeat guitar songs like "Are You Out There," "Party Generation" and a lovely piece about therapy, "What Do You Hear in These Sounds," are truly wonderful and sweet. The album is certainly not as successful overall as its predecessors, as the five slower songs don't balance the six pop numbers very successfully, with too abrupt a shift in tempo too often. Nevertheless, there are charms in the slower songs if listeners persevere, even though I personally tend to skip past them for the six I enjoy more.

While continuing to tour small clubs and campuses, friendships within the network of travelling folk singers frequently cropped up. Dar teamed up with Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell for the trio album Cry Cry Cry which features covers of songs written by ten of their contemporaries (most on teeny record labels), bookended by a version of REM's "Fall on Me" and by a new recording of Shindell's "Ballad of Mary Magdalen." The project rarely rises above the status of entertaining diversion, although Kaplansky's sweet and thoughtful performance of "Speaking with the Angel" is moving enough to silence a noisy party.

Out There Live, compiled from three dates in November 2000 to promote that year's Green World LP, shows her in good form with a traditional five-piece rock band, including Gail-Ann Dorsey on bass. Three of the songs are included with the lengthy storyteller-type intros which are standard to these types of shows. The roar the audience gives when she begins talking about her old babysitter is evidence of how strongly she has struck a chord in her audience. (7/02)