New Recording: Garth Brooks, Bryan Ferry, and Pink Floyd

Garth Brooks

Man Against Machine

(Sony Nashville **1/2)

nolead ends Considering that Garth Brooks has had 13 years to work on it - his last album, Scarecrow, came out in 2001 - his Man Against Machine contains some astonishing clunkers. Start that list with the overblown title track, which casts the 52-year-old mega-selling country pop star as a hammer-swinging John Henry of the digital age. Include the super- saccharine "Mom" and the unabashedly corny anthem "People Loving People," which, Brooks assures us, is the only solution for "everything that's evil." But is the entirety of the 14-track Man Against Machine as bad as all that? Hardly.

As far as the state of mainstream country music goes, the crossover-minded Oklahoman has a lot to answer for. His taste for booming drums, screaming guitars, and grand arena-rock gestures provided the blueprint for the current generation of broad-stroke bro-country acts. And when you hold Brooks up in comparison, he comes off as - not that bad. There's certainly a respect for songcraft that runs through Man Against Machine tracks like the traveling song "Tacoma," the smartly to-the-point "Wrong About You," and the punny, western-swing diversion "Rodeo and Juliet." And while Brooks' predilection for loading songs with heavy-handed Hallmark-card life lessons - see "Fish" - can still be overbearing, he comes across as an artist of substance next to the frivolous chart-toppers that have followed his example.

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nolead ends nolead begins Avonmore
nolead ends nolead begins (BMG ***)

nolead ends Bryan Ferry has worn many guises during his 40-year career, but Avonmore returns him to one of his central idioms: slow, sexy songs of restrained abandon, cloaked in gently pulsing rhythms. It's a style on which he has worked variations since early-'80s albums such as Boys and Girls and Roxy Music's Avalon. On Avonmore, Ferry drafts players such as rock guitarists Johnny Marr and Mark Knopfler, funkmaster Nile Rodgers on bass and guitar, and jazz bassist Marcus Miller to craft a lush, dense atmosphere that is comforting and familiar.

Ferry's voice is deeper and raspier than in his youth (he's now 69), and that adds a vulnerable melancholy to "Lost," "Soldier of Fortune," and other ballads. A few songs risk self-parody: a sleazy "One Night Stand"; a melodramatic cover of Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns." But Ferry can still surprise: With the help of DJ Todd Terje, he turns Robert Palmer's perky "Johnny and Mary" into a song of eerie heartbreak.

- Steve Klinge

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nolead ends nolead begins The Endless River
nolead ends nolead begins (Columbia ***1/2)

nolead ends Based on outtakes from Pink Floyd's post-Roger Waters album The Division Bell, this new album, all instrumental except for one sung tune, started life as an elegiac tribute to founding keyboardist Richard Wright, who died in 2008. His brooding ambient washes and rolling pipe organ were crucial layers in an epic sound legendary for its mix of mournful and euphoric. David Gilmour and Nick Mason (with coproducers Phil Manzanera and Youth) relive elements of Pink's past, with the gentle piano of "Anisina" and the drum-thunder of "Sum," plus incendiary guitar solos reminiscent of Floyd at its tense, morose finest.

A frail fragment like "Skins" even recalls the band's earliest avant-psychedelic experiments. The Endless River is more than just echoes of Floyd's aggressive haunting. Gilmour is a searing, inventive guitarist, and tracks such as "It's What We Do" show off cool passion with grace and guts. And on the album's lone vocal outing, "Louder Than Words," Gilmour sums up the universality of in-band fighting and relationship squabbles ("With world-weary grace/ We've taken our places") with penetrating calm. If this is Pink Floyd's swan song, it's a goodbye that's both eerie and tender.

- A.D. Amorosi

This Week Last Week

Locally   Nationally   Locally

1   1    Taylor Swift 1989   1

2   2    Various Artists        Now That's What I Call Music, Vol. 52       3

3   3    Bette Midler It's the Girls   -

4   7    Barbra Streisand Partners   6

5   5    Calvin Harris Motion   -

6   8    Sam Smith In the Lonely Hour   9

7   19    Teyana Taylor VII    -

8   22    Neil Diamond Melody Road   4

9   6    Florida Georgia Line Anything Goes   11

10   18    Tony Bennet & Lady Gaga    Cheek to Cheek    10

SOURCE: SoundScan (based on purchase data from Philadelphia and Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, Chester, Camden, Burlington and Gloucester Counties). Billboard Magazine 9/22/14 © 2014

Various Artists, The Art of McCartney;

Kristin Chenoweth, Coming Home;  

Ariel Pink, pom pom;  

Trisha Yearwood, Prizefighter: Hit After Hit