Frank Smith

Jill Sobule Happy Town (Lava/Atlantic) Singer-songwriters usually make my skin crawl--tell me one more time how great Jewel is, and you risk serious dental work--but Colorado native Jill Sobule not only soars over that hurdle with Happy Town, she tops her surprisingly fresh 1995 hit "I Kissed a Girl." Sobule...

David Bowie Earthling (Virgin) One of several striking, almost iconic images that adorn the self-designed cover of David Bowie's new album, Earthling, is a "Kirlian photo" of a crucifix taken by Bowie in 1974. The Kirlian Camera is the infamous "aura camera" (featured recently on--where else--an X-Files episode) which purportedly...

Up from the ceaselessly rumbling, garbage-truck-choked avenues of Brooklyn, New York; spawned in the midnight blackness of iron-latticed parkscapes in the ultimate gothic city; falling sonically somewhere between Sisters of Mercy, Black Sabbath and the Cocteau Twins, comes Type O Negative. Garbage trucks? Hold that thought. Over its four-album career,...

Wilco Being There (Reprise Records) The cynics who would dismiss rock 'n' roll--the formula kind, the guitar-vocals-bass-drum kind, the kind Chuck Berry created and the Beatles and Brian Wilson made perfect--look instead toward a rave new world; they write off rock as a dead form to be discarded like a...

1. Warrant, Belly to Belly (CMC/BMG) Duh. 2. Great White, Let It Rock (Imago) Long since abandoned by fans and glory, these bloated, balding bozos are still searching for that lost Mott/Bad Company riff and any stripper who still cares. 3. KISS, Unplugged (Mercury) Weren't the lunchboxes, TV shows, comic...