CD Reviews

Vernon Reid & Masque

Other True Self | Favored Nations

By TED DROZDOWSKI | April 24, 2006

3.0 Stars

BERSERKER: Reid has some filthy licks in him.

Guitar hero Vernon Reid is a multi-faceted player who’s lucky enough to have outlets for all his roles. His solo recordings sustain contemplative textural work. Living Coloür remain a forum for titanium-hard metal licks and his pop ’n’ soul inclinations. And then there’s Masque, Reid’s art-rock quartet, and a vehicle for the modal jazz excursions he occasionally hints at in Living Coloür. Masque’s last performance in Boston found him playing too subdued a role, but on their second album he establishes a comfortable balance between berserker and team player, and that leads to more-dynamic driven interplay. He roars through prickly unison lines with keyboardist Leon Gruenbaum, a Brookline native, on “Game Is Rigged.” He dives headlong into the greasy blues melody of the reggae-based “Flatbush and Church Revisited”; he turns his guitar into a sleek, clean kora to capture the peppery zeal of African highlife on “Prof. Bebey.” But he saves his filthiest tones for a version of Radiohead’s “National Anthem” that waves its freak flag to the breeze of his floating, sustained, quivering whammy-bar-colored chord work. It’s all hot and inventive.

Related: James Blood Ulmer, Logically speaking, Boston music news: July 28, 2006, More

Topics: CD Reviews , Radiohead, Vernon Reid

| More

ARTICLES BY TED DROZDOWSKI

TOM HAMBRIDGE | BOOM! | August 23, 2011
Roots rock is the new country and ex-Bostonian Tom Hambridge is the style's current MPV.

COUNTRY STRONG | SOUNDTRACK | January 11, 2011
This steaming pile of songs is emblematic of the state of mainstream country music — all artifice, no heart, calculated anthems written to formula and meant, like the film itself, to do no more than capitalize on the genre's current success and rob its undiscriminating fans.

MARC RIBOT | SILENT MOVIES | November 02, 2010
This exceptional, eccentric guitarist has traced a slow evolution from screamer to dreamer.

IN MEMORIAM: SOLOMON BURKE, 1940 — 2010 | October 11, 2010

REVIEW: RONNIE EARL AND THE BROADCASTERS | SPREAD THE LOVE | September 07, 2010
Boston-based blues-guitar virtuoso Ronnie Earl seems to be considering his past on his 23rd album as a leader.