Best Album Cuts This Week

This week, we're taking a listen to slices of a bigger piece of meat, meaning tracks from whole albums that are worth checking out. As we've stated, too often a whole album only facilitates the hit single of the band who puts it out. The rest of the cd ends up being a waste. This puts people off from wanting to invest in buying a full project. However, there are still a lot of great complete albums out there that are worth checking out. Here's what we're hearing this week:

Johnny Cash
In the last few months of his life, Johnny Cash sat down one last time to record possibly his greatest album yet. A Hundred Highways completes his recording career with excellence, beauty, and poise. Great covers including Springsteen's "Further On Up The Road" along with originals that tell stories of love and lost strike heartstrings like few others have the ability to do.


Sandi Thom
Hailing from the UK, Sandi went from club singer to national prominence in 2005 with "I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker," which topped the charts in England, Ireland, Australia and Germany. Despite the title, the track has more of a upbeat folk feel, and the album carries much of that sense all the way through.


Brandi Carlile
When "The Story" made the i-Tunes free single of the week, Brandi was just breaking into the mainstream after her start in 2000 with "Room For Me." The success of the single has not only put Brandi Carlile, a Seattle native, on the map, but established her as a young rock celeb. Her 2007 release was produced by T Bone Burnett and includes a collaboration with the Indigo Girls on "Cannonball." Carlile was exposed to a wider audience when ABC's Grey's Anatomy showcased three of her songs: "Tragedy," "What Can I Say," and "Throw It All Away."

Carla Werner
The New Zealander was featured on the very first Appetizer program back in 2003. Departure is more than a rock album, or a folk rock album. It draws its strength from the passionate storytelling and ability of Carla to reach inside the listener's soul and capture something new. It's an album about searching, longing, wishing, dreaming, and finding. Every track accomplishes this goal, in some form or another.


The Killers
The album that not only put the band on the map, it created a chain-reaction in the music community in response to this hit. With commercial stations and MTV featuring four tracks on this album on regular rotation, that facet should speak enough to the credibility of the production. But there's more.......and we'll hear those tracks on Saturday night.

Join us, Saturday at 8PM on 89.7 FM KACU or online at www.kacu.org