Romeo at Juilliard
Artist: Don Dixon

Dixon's domestic debut featured more of his skewed songs, and here he was aided and abetted by such compatriots as Mitch Easter and Marti Jones (who is his wife). ~ William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide Read More

Ani DiFranco
Artist: Ani DiFranco
Community Score: 9.66

"I am a work in progress," appropriately announces Ani DiFranco on her debut album. Though her lyrics have the rambling style of free-form poetry and she sounds like she learned her spare, percussive style of guitar playing by listening to Suzanne Vega albums, she defines a distinct persona, that of a self-possessed, assertive woman in a tough,... Read More

Hats
Artist: The Blue Nile
Community Score: 10.00

Five long years in the making, the Blue Nile's stellar Hats was well worth the wait; sweeping and majestic, it's a triumph of personal vision over the cold, remote calculations of technology. While created almost solely without benefit of live instruments, it is nevertheless an immensely warm and human album; Paul Buchanan's plaintive vocals and... Read More

If I'm a Ham, Well You're a Sausage
Artist: Don Dixon

If you grew up in a certain part of the South, you knew Don Dixon as one of the leading members of Arrogance, a near-legendary North Carolina pop band who were regional heroes but never broke through to national recognition. If you're the kind of hipster who reads the credits on your CDs, you know Dixon as a producer who was behind the controls... Read More

The Joshua Tree
Artist: U2
Community Score: 8.74

Using the textured sonics of The Unforgettable Fire as a basis, U2 expanded those innovations by scaling back the songs to a personal setting and adding a grittier attack for its follow-up, The Joshua Tree. It's a move that returns them to the sweeping, anthemic rock of War, but if War was an exploding political bomb, The Joshua Tree is a... Read More

Stress
Artist: Stress

Looking at the back cover, one might expect this to be in the vein of Prince, but it's not. Instead, it's well done flower-rock with a lot of musical strengths. It's laden with sitars, tablas, odd sounds and melodies, though it doesn't resort to the tricks of nuevo-psychedelic music to get by. ~ Steven McDonald, All Music Guide Read More

The Walking
Artist: Jane Siberry

Although Jane Siberry's big hit singles were a bit too pop-oriented to truly represent her work as a whole, even those who loved her more off-kilter side would have been hard-pressed to have foreseen the direction of The Walking. For most of the tracks, Siberry dispenses with standard pop construction, instead opting more for a sometimes-surreal... Read More

Katydids
Artist: The Katydids

The Katydids are another recent English development, and manage, without trying too hard, to be a mixture of a '60s songbird band, heavy on the not-quite-finished pop-type numbers about love and life, and the Pretenders. The latter is suggested initially by the fact that vocalist Susie Hug is an expatriate American. The Katydids lean less on the... Read More

It Happened One Night
Artist: John Wesley Harding

This solo acoustic outing, recorded live in England in 1988, seems like an odd choice for a debut, but it comes off very well. Capturing both John Wesley Harding's folk roots and a wonderful sense of humor, It Happened One Night gives a very representative picture of the singer/songwriter. Included are early versions of songs appearing on the... Read More

Romantic Depressive
Artist: Don Dixon

Don Dixon is known primarily as a producer, but this rock-solid collection of original songs will make you wish he'd step out from behind the board more often. Nothing on this album is especially groundbreaking -- not his gravelly baritone, not his Memphis soul beats or his late-'50s chord progressions -- but everything here sheds new light on... Read More