Transcendental Blues

12/19/2000 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Jim Derogatis

Steve Earle turns toward the sounds of Revolver on this disc, the follow-up to his reviled-by-many bluegrass turn, The Mountain. Unlike every other critic I know, I've never been a huge fan of this singer-songwriter's overly earnest roots-rock, but I am a sucker for heavily reverbed tambourines and the droning, fuzz-driven guitar tone of "She Said She Said," and those sounds propel the finest moments on this album. Dig the positively lysergic "Everyone's In Love With You," which even ends with some backwards masking. At 15 tunes, this set could have been trimmed by a third, but that's a minor gripe. Judging by my own reaction, this may be the Steve Earle album for people who've never been Steve Earle fans before.
Earle also appears on the first and best tune on the soundtrack for Steal This Movie, dueting with Sheryl Crow on a cool cover of the Chambers Brothers' classic psychedelic nugget "Time Has Come Today." The rest of this disc is hit or miss--Joan Osborne and Jackson Browne collaborating on Dylan's "My Back Pages" and Mary Chapin Carpenter lending her pure soprano to Donovan's "Mellow Yellow" are kinda cool, but we don't really need to hear Bonnie Raitt croaking "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" or Ani DiFranco warbling "This Land Is Your Land." Look for it in the used bins.