★★★★★
Waits moved on to trashcan percussion, rusty growls, and Martian marches; Jones became a solid, if somewhat standard, singer/songwriter. By the late '80s, she was pretty much an adult-contemporary artist with a slight nasal twang to distinguish her from all of the other storytellers with guitars. Since then, she's recorded a pair of cover albums (featuring songs by Ira Gershwin and Jimi Hendrix), an unplugged CD, a trip-hop record, and a few forgettable studio sets...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
Zzzzz.... sorry, just fell asleep for a minute or 40 listening to Rickie Lee Jones' new set of cover songs. There's nothing wrong with the concept and Jones has previously excelled at interpreting other's work, from 1983's Girl at her Volcano EP to two earlier discs dedicated to her voicings of classic pop, jazz and soul...
- www.americansongwriter.com
2013-04-25
★★★★★
Fans of Rickie Lee's signature vocal drawl and jazzy minimalism will be in hog heaven listening to this album of covers - and it's a safe bet that countless others will be outraged by what she's done to some sacred cows. Jones doesn't do Xeroxes, you see, and has no interest in following the notes, nooks or crannies of what someone else has already given us...
- recordcollectormag.com
2013-04-03
★★★★★
To Rickie Lee Jones' most devoted fans - and I am clearly among them - she has been on a real roll lately. Stunning records like Balm in Gilead and The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard are some of her most interesting, knotty works, returning her to her avant-garde tendencies in ways that also sound just as organic as her beatnik jazz early days. So it was a little surprising that she was coming out with another covers album...
- www.popmatters.com
2012-09-24
★★★★★
Evaluating Rickie Lee Jones' new album, "Balm in Gilead," feels like an attempt to answer questions from a Taoist text. Is a journey complete when one returns home? If an adult connects with their youth, is a lesson finished or has it just begun? Jones has ventured on a linear journey over the last 30 years, not so much detouring as taking occasional off ramps, yet this latest stop is the first great reminder of where she started...
- www.soundspike.com
2010-12-07
★★★★★
Almost from the onset of her long career, Rickie Lee Jones has been both a musical chameleon and rogue champion of genre exploration. Not content to continue down the familiar female singer/songwriter path that she traveled on her first two releases, Jones, not unlike Joni Mitchell, began to explore jazz, free-form song structures and whatever else caught her ear...
- www.soundspike.com
2010-12-07
★★★★★
It might be a bit too early to make sweeping pronouncements, but this is the most intriguing new album I've heard in 2007. Boho songstress Rickie Lee Jones is in top form after a nearly four-year hiatus. What she offers here is an interesting lo-fi take on the teachings of Christ, which is also based on the book The Words, a contemporary interpretation by photographer and graphic artist Lee Cantelon, who functions as co-producer on half the tracks...
- www.hour.ca
2010-11-02
★★★★★
Rickie Lee Jones is a jackdaw and a rootless musical wanderer. Each new album finds her conceptually in a different place, usually on a different label with (a) different collaborator(s). On Balm in Gilead, however, it's as if she's come home to the American music forms that truly anchor her wayward talent - especially after the hit-and-miss improvisations of The Sermon on Exposition Boulevard (2007). Balm.....
- www.bbc.co.uk
2010-08-22
★★★★★
Soon after her wordy single "Chuck E's in Love" crashed the Top 5 in 1979, Rickie Lee Jones stretched her songs into mini-epics with a harrowing, cornered-cat intensity that scared away the pop world. Her 10 albums are ambitious and erratic, but sift through them carefully, as this three-CD retrospective does, and you'll find a songbook that will someday be celebrated as an American treasure...
- www.blender.com
2010-08-22
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